Flame Pillar of Rizal

Spirit of "Touch Me Not"

The meaning of his mighty and bold book have a lot of meaning when you read it but the only thing he must obliged for was to stir the divine love of one's native land of every Filipino in those times.

Rizal began his working for his first novel in 1884, while he was studying in Europe. In fact, it was his first novel masterpiece that made him patriotic and transformed into a new outlook of his life as well as the mission of struggle for the Filipino masses at that time.

It was untitled at first. Later on, Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) was born for burning desire from the tip of Rizal's pen ink.

Rizal wondered the empty of his mind until came up the title which gleaned from the Bible. "Touch Me Not" were the words uttered by Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead of Easter Sunday, to Mary Magdalene when the latter visited the tomb before sunrise after three days. He wanted the Spaniards to be his main audience in spreading his reform ideas to show that the Filipinos was not worth to touch the forbidding cancer they longing for -- the Spanish tyrants. He exposed the hidden evils and faults of the Spanish Regime, the State and the Church, that should be condemned to touch. That was a social cancer of evil in the society of the Filipino spreaded and no one could heal, intact as short for this. A cancer so malignant and hazardous to touch, as Rizal said himself.