THE RUINS of Sta. Monica Church in Sarrat, Ilocos Norte, include a torture room where two huge brick-encrusted pillars dominate.

Self-appointed historian Melvin dela Cuesta said these pillars were used during the Spanish regime to hang Filipinos accused of treason and other high crimes. It was unlikely that an executioner would scale the five-meter pillars to strangle an indio. A garrote would do a neater job.

It would be easier to imagine these pillars as picotas or whipping posts, which were ordinary fixtures in most town plazas in the 1700s and 1800s.

The late historian William Henry Scott, in his article ''The Colonial Whip,'' said flogging was not even introduced by the Spaniards. Citing a Spanish priest's account of a town in Isabela in 1765, Scott said flogging was already practiced by Filipinos in dispensing justice. The Spaniards merely turned it into a spectator sport.

The Spanish friars can be very ruthless, judging from Scott's translation of the confessions of the martyrdom of nine Filipino priests in Nueva Segovia (now Vigan) implicated in what they called the Tagalog Insurrection of August 1896.

The martyrdoms were not really deaths but death-like torments experienced by these hapless Filipinos. One was called a ''bamboo-foot'' where the victim was made to squat and a bamboo pole was passed beneath both knees and his wrists held together in front by rope with his arms under the bamboo on each side.

The priests were whipped at the picotas with as much as 300 lashes. Sand or alcohol was later rubbed on the wounds to intensify the pain.

The confessions were an ordeal in itself to read, Scott wrote. We recalled these while touring the Sta. Monica ruins.

Dela Cuesta pointed to us an old well. He said nonchalantly that uncooperative Filipinos were simply thrown in there by the Spanish friars.

Not that Filipinos were not as harsh in punishing their ilk. Scott's book, ''Barangay,'' cited 16th-century crime and punishment among Capampangans in a short article written by missionary Juan de Plasencia titled ''Information on the Customs which the Natives of Pampanga Anciently Held.''

According to Plasencia, if a chief was killed by a timawa or a commoner, no wergeld or ''man-price'' was acceptable. Not only was the timawa put to death but also his wife and children were killed and his properties seized.

If a timawa was murdered, his wergeld was 10 to 20 taels. If the murderer was too poor to pay, he was speared to death.

Witchcraft was another unpardonable crime, and usually it was the chief who had the privilege to ''make tusuk-tusok the human fishball.''

E. Adamson Hoebel, in his study of Ifugao law included in ''The Law of Primitive Man,'' also noted that spearing to death was the punishment for Ifugao sorcerers.

Ifugaos classified the types of sorcery as evil eye, cursing and soul capture. The first two, like those among Capampangans, were pardonable, except for repeated cursing which ultimately called for death.

Soul capture involves luring the victim's spirit by elaborate invocations and capturing the victim's soul in the form of a bee or fly. There can only be malice in this crime, Hoebel noted, and so death was advocated.

Hoebel also noted that the Ifugaos are property-minded people and violations of contracts and commission of torts ''were almost always sanctioned by property assessments.'' But like the Capampangans, those who failed to pay were speared to death.

Of course like Gandhi, the Ifugaos would have realized even then that an eye for an eye will leave half of them half-blind.

The Ifugaos, as other Cordillerans, developed a law of mediation which in their case means the mediation of a monkalun. For a non-paying Ifugao, the monkalun is a life-saver.

''So long as the case is in the hands of a monkalun the spear could not be raised. To do so would line up the monkalun and his family against the killer along with the kin of the victim,'' Hoebel said.

''If a family conducts its case faultlessly, even though the issue be only a debt, and especially if the monkalun be sent, they may, at the termination of the truce, slay the culprit. Public opinion will uphold, and the kin of the slain are not likely to retaliate,'' R.F. Barton said in ''Half Way Sun.''

''Are not likely to retaliate--but frequently they do, and it is here that the Ifugao law breaks down,'' Hoebel said. Other than that, Hoebel noted that Ifugao mediation ''has risen beyond the level of mediation attained in international affairs.''

Dr. June Prill-Brett of the University of the Philippines College Baguio, in her study of ''Pechen: The Bontok Peace-Pact Tradition,'' said the practice of forging peace pacts is a pre-Hispanic pan-Philippine institution ''with the general functions of the treatise being to allow safe passage (for social and economic purposes) and to put a stop to warfare or killing between the two parties to the contract and reinforcing boundaries.''

She said the pechen of Bontoc spread to Kalinga and other regions during the Spanish period and extended further during the American regime. The Kalingas still practice the pagta or the revenge system which sometimes involves taking life for the death of another.

There usually is a three-day period for retribution but at the end of that period, everything must go through a mediation.

Of course, we were taught by our elementary history teachers that Cordillerans and pre-Hispanic Filipinos were wild and fatalistic people who would have chopped each other's heads if not for the Divine intercession of the Spaniards.

We were also taught the Code of Kalantiaw. How I relished reading about the imaginative ways our ancestors tortured each other to death, like dipping somebody with honey and burying him under an anthill. All for such weird crimes as killing a sacred bird or singing while the chief was asleep.

Of course, Scott later pointed out that the Code of Kalantiaw was a hoax made by an Ilonggo haciendero (landlord). He could have done that to revise history and give us false pride for having such an imaginative penal code. Who would have enjoyed killing people to induce fear in others?

Quijano de Manila, in his 1967 article, ''When a Man Burns,'' quoted Death Row convicts as saying when the government decided to put a bunch of them in the electric chair: ''Why kill us to strike fear in others.''

But Quijano even then warned of getting too emotional over the death penalty.

''One came away from these executions . . . not so much aghast as uneasy, vaguely uneasy, despite the great care not to succumb to what Bishop Fulton Sheen decries as false compassion. One carefully kept in mind the dreadful crimes those men were convicted of,'' he said.

Quijano, the nom de plume of Nick Joaquin, later quoted then Ilocos Sur Rep. Floro Crisologo, who was then filing a House bill to abolish the death penalty.

Crisologo was quoted as saying retribution was no longer the rule and exemplarity had never worked.

''The theory of death penalty is based on the lex talionis: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But the law of the talion is dead,'' Crisologo said.

''In our country, we have yet to see a rich or influential man burn in the electric chair. Contemporary experience has added another argument in favor of the abolition of death penalty: discrimination. The chair is partial to the poor and wretched,'' he added.

Five years after the article was published, death penalty was abolished in the country. But as an ironic footnote to Crisologo, the Ilocos Sur congressman was gunned down while he knelt on a pew in St. Paul's Cathedral in Vigan in 1970.