Burmese nat spirits

At a Glance

Central figures: Maung Tint De and his sister Shwe Myethna, the two siblings who became the Mahagiri Brothers - the greatest of Burma’s nat spirits; and King Thinlikyaung of Tagaung, who ordered their deaths.
Setting: The ancient kingdom of Tagaung in Upper Burma, in the Burmese nat tradition, which recognizes thirty-seven Great Nats - spirits of people who died violent, unjust deaths and were elevated to objects of official veneration.
The turn: King Thinlikyaung, fearing Maung Tint De’s strength, had him seized and bound to a champak tree, which was set alight; Shwe Myethna threw herself into the fire rather than abandon her brother.
The outcome: Both siblings became nat spirits bound to the burned tree; the trunk was pulled from the river and enshrined on Mount Popa, where they became the guardian nats of the mountain and, eventually, of the Burmese kingdom itself.
The legacy: Mount Popa remains the central pilgrimage site for nat worship in Myanmar; the Mahagiri Brothers are propitiated at the Taungbyon Festival and in household shrines across the country, where a coconut hung in a corner of the house serves as their dwelling place.

Maung Tint De was a blacksmith in the kingdom of Tagaung, and he was so strong that people talked about him in the kind of voice that reaches kings. He could bend iron bars across his knee. He could hammer a plowshare flat in fewer strokes than any man in the Irrawaddy valley. The king of Tagaung, Thinlikyaung, heard the talk and did not like it.

A strong man who is loved is more dangerous than an army. The king sent his soldiers to find the blacksmith. Maung Tint De fled into the forest. He lived there for years, and the king could not catch him, and this made the king angrier, because a king who cannot catch one blacksmith looks weak.

The King’s Trap

Thinlikyaung tried a different method. He offered Maung Tint De’s sister, Shwe Myethna - whose name means Golden Face - a position as one of his queens. The offer came with an implicit promise: her brother would be safe. Shwe Myethna was beautiful, and the king may have wanted her for that reason too, but the political logic was plain. If she came to the palace, her brother would eventually follow.

She accepted. She went to Tagaung and became one of the king’s wives, and word reached Maung Tint De in the forest. His sister was in the palace. She was safe. The king had made peace. After a time, the blacksmith came out of the trees and returned to the city.

The soldiers took him immediately.

They bound him to a champak tree - a tall flowering tree near the river - and they piled fuel around the base. The king gave the order and the tree was set on fire with the blacksmith still tied to it. Maung Tint De burned alive. He was strong enough to bend iron, but ropes and fire do not care about strength.

Shwe Myethna at the Tree

Shwe Myethna heard what was happening. She ran from the palace to the burning tree. The fire was already high, the bark splitting, the air white with heat. She did not stop. She walked into the fire and put her arms around the trunk where her brother was bound, and she burned with him.

The court watched. The king watched. No one moved to pull her out. The champak tree burned to a blackened pole, and both siblings died against it.

What the king had now was not peace. It was something worse. Two people had died unjust, violent deaths - a brother betrayed after a promise of safety, a sister who chose fire over separation. In the Burmese understanding, this is exactly how a nat is made. The spirit does not rest. It does not leave. It attaches to the place and manner of its death, and it has power, and it has fury.

The Trunk in the River

The burned trunk of the champak tree was pushed into the Irrawaddy. It floated downstream. Wherever it washed ashore, strange things happened - livestock sickened, people heard sounds at night, fires started without cause. No village would keep it. They pushed it back into the current and let someone else deal with it.

The trunk eventually came to rest near Mount Popa, the volcanic peak that rises from the dry plain south of Bagan. King Thinlikyaung - or, in some tellings, a later king named Anawrahta - ordered the trunk pulled from the water and carried up the mountain. Images of the two siblings were carved, and they were installed at the summit. The Mahagiri Brothers had a home.

Mount Popa is an extinct volcano. Its slopes are green in a landscape that is otherwise brown and flat. It looks like something placed there deliberately, and for the Burmese, it was. It became the seat of the most powerful nat spirits in the country - two people who had been murdered and who now required acknowledgment.

The Thirty-Seven

The Mahagiri Brothers are not the only nat in Burma, but they are the most important of the thirty-seven Great Nats, the officially recognized pantheon. The thirty-seven were codified - tradition credits King Anawrahta of Bagan, who unified Burma in the eleventh century and made Theravada Buddhism the state religion. Anawrahta could not abolish nat worship. It was too deep. So he organized it. He established a list of thirty-seven, gave them ranks and positions, and placed them under the authority of Thagyamin, the king of the celestial spirits, who corresponds roughly to the Indian Indra.

The result is a system that sits alongside Buddhism without contradiction - or at least without open conflict. A Burmese household may have a Buddhist shrine in one room and a coconut hung in a corner for the Mahagiri nat in another. The coconut is the offering place. It represents the dwelling. It is not worship in the way a Westerner might understand the word. It is acknowledgment. The nat is there. The nat died badly. The nat is powerful and must be fed.

The Festival at Taungbyon

Every August, the Taungbyon Festival draws hundreds of thousands of people to a village north of Mandalay. The festival is the largest nat celebration in Myanmar, and it centers on nat kadaw - spirit mediums, often transgender women, who dance and channel specific nat spirits during days of music, feasting, and possession rituals. The atmosphere is raucous, generous, loud. It is not solemn. The nats like celebration. They like liquor and good food and dancing. The nat kadaw dress in the colors and styles associated with their particular spirit and move through the crowd in states ranging from mild ecstasy to full trance.

The Mahagiri Brothers preside. Their images are carried in procession. Their story - the blacksmith, the sister, the burning tree, the trunk in the river - is known to everyone present. The point is not to mourn them. The point is to keep them appeased, entertained, present. A nat that is honored stays in its place. A nat that is neglected wanders, and a wandering nat is an angry nat, and an angry nat brings illness, madness, fire, and ruin.

The coconut hangs in the corner of the house. The fire still burns in the story. Shwe Myethna still walks toward the tree.