A Nat for Every Occasion: the Magnificent Thirty-Seven Rule

Tibor Krausz

The nats are everywhere and people are in thrall to them.

In a village outside Mandalay, I come across a large pageant of finely clad men and women, alternately merry and solemn, staging a nat pwe, or spirit festival, in honor of the nats. The local monastery is just about to admit a new round of novice monks into its exalted brotherhood and the locals are now propitiating the spirits for their blessings on their sons' forthcoming novitiate. Flat-board military trucks are bussing in armies of senior bonzes from nearby monasteries for the occasion.

Adorned in their holiday best, fetching young women balance silver platters of exquisitely garnished delicacies on their heads and cherubic schoolgirls carry golden bowls of flowers in their hands by way of offerings to the settlement's guardian spirits. On a stage behind, matinee actors are performing classical scenes from the Ramayana for the amusement of the nats.

A week later near Inle Lake, I alight on another nat pwe, this time performed during the dedication of a new pagoda. Boing! Boing! Bang! Bang! Boing! Boing! Bang! A percussionist orchestra in cobalt-blue longyis and jade-green turbans are beating gongs and drums at an ear-splitting volume in invitation to the musically inclined spirits. Leading them is their drum mayor. He is a haunted man in a tartan kilt wearing a large pineapple-shape golden crown with magic charms crayoned across his naked torso: brandishing a shaft, he pivots and quivers to the ecstatic rhythms of his shamanistic body-bop. They are on their way to the nat wife, a sumptuously dolled-up transvestite who will officiate as spirit medium during the festivities.

In Kalaw, Bagan and Yangon too, I encounter similar nat pwes. The nats, yes, are everywhere.

Just as the Thais use phii (ghost) as an all-purpose word for their whole pantheon of spectral manifestations, so the Burmese use the word nat (spirit) in an equally broad fashion to designate everything from forest pixies to ghouls, from tutelary spirits to banshees. Yet despite their generic classification, nats inhabit an elaborate spiritual hierarchy of their own in the Burmese Buddhist cosmogony. Thirty-seven indigenous nats occupy the zenith of esteem, and it is mostly these that pious Burmese propitiate daily throughout Myanmar with tutelary offerings of foods, fruits, beverages and fragrances of incense.

These Magnificent Thirty-Seven are a spectacularly flamboyant bunch. They were all real historical personages once (ranging in stature from chamber maids to kings), but a definitive account of why these particular 37 souls have been canonized in perpetuity seems to have been lost in the unstipulated mysteries of the occult -- even the nats' biographies vary considerably from one region to the next.

What most of them have in common, though, is this: in ages past they met their mortal end in some peculiarly violent fashion. Saw Me Yar, the queen of Tagaung, for instance deserved the honor of becoming the Golden Face Nat by throwing herself into the consuming flames of a pyre on which her brother was being burnt alive. Shew Na Tray, a beautiful but jilted wife, died in turn of a broken heart -- as befell several other female nats. Others joined the ranks of these venerated spirits after wasting away with leprosy, being mauled to death by a man-eating tiger, falling from a swing, or puffing themselves into opium-induced oblivion.

Tabin Shwe Hta, king of Tounggoo, was a warrior king who conquered and united the various provinces of what is now Myanmar. Yet like all great conquerors, he made plenty of enemies in the process. A drunkard, he was assassinated by a booze buddy, his own vizier, while (a line of tradition has it) he was seeking respite on his golden chamber pot from a particularly violent attack of diarrhea. This seems a rather ungainly end to a great king and to Tabin Shwe Hta's credit, perhaps word-of-mouth traditions have simply mixed him up with another king nat by the name of Mai Ku Si who died of diarrhea. Whatever the case, Tabin Shwe Hta became the guardian spirit of dysentery sufferers in several regions of Burma; so much so that his effigies, neatly dressed in regal finery with a sword clutched warrior-like in one hand, have been known to be displayed seated not on his habitual stool throne but on a chamber pot.

Then there are the brothers Shwe Phyin Gyi and Galay, sons of a flower-eating ogress and generals to the sanctimonious King Anawrahta of Bagan, an 11th century potentate who was determined to eradicate time-honored nat-worship in Burma in favor of Theravada Buddhism. To this end, he decided to procure several legendary Buddhist relics, with whose powers to vanquish the ruling nats. The Shwe Phyin brothers conducted successful military campaigns for Anawrahta against the Chinese, yet incurred their sovereign's wrath by failing to acquire a coveted tooth of the Buddha from Yunnan and returned home with a far less illustrious jade replica of the Blessed Molar. They may have been closet nat-worshippers into the bargain.

For this and the other blasphemous crime of blatantly neglecting to provide their votive bricks to Taungbyone Pagoda being erected by Anawrahta, they were made to bleed to death by castration. Later Anawrahta had a change of heart and allowed nat effigies to reenter Buddhist pagodas, earning himself an exalted place in Burmese history. The Shwe Phyin twins, meanwhile, gained their own measure of immortality by becoming guardian spirits of virility and fertility.

Yet perhaps the most memorable end was met by Shwe Naw Yahta, a minister of royal blood who was accused of plotting assassination against his king and was in turn assassinated astride a marble elephant he had straddled with intent to riding this lapidary pachyderm into escape -- if only he had not failed to breathe life into his getaway mount with the necessary magical formulae. Curiously, he is now represented in effigy form in the posture of a king sitting on his throne with a golf club in one hand and a golf ball in the other by way of his emblems of regalia.

As they once were in life as humans, so these nats are in death: whimsical, fallible and susceptible. Hence Burmese worshippers go to great lengths to win these guardian spirits' favor and avoid incurring their wrath. Propitiating an appropriate nat will help students to pass difficult exams, newlywed wives to conceive healthy babies, farmers to reap ample harvests, the gravely ill to experience miraculous recoveries. Failing to please the spirits may wreck your life. In fact, there is practically no service and no harm that a contented or discontented nat can or will not render the propitiator or the negligent. Hanging from a pillar at pride of place in most homes is a perfumed unhusked coconut sporting a red turban. Meet Eindwin Min Mahagiri, the Lord of the Mountain Who Resides in Our House. In return for daily offerings, this nat protects the particular home he claims as his own. Unpropitiated properly, he may burn your house down.

Certain mischief-prone nats are known to revel in entering human targets and, thus possessing them, force these hapless individuals to make a laughing stock of themselves by performing humiliating acts in public. Only luxurious offerings and elaborate rituals of exorcism by a practiced monk will free a man or woman from such possession. Superior nats, inhabiting the border realm between this world and the next, can in turn adopt human forms at will and appear so to people, for better or worse.

Sadly for the foreign visitor, such physical manifestations of nats are far too rare to become scheduled spectacles on a sight-seeing itinerary. There is no need to despair, though -- their haunts aren't. Many a street and temple ground has its sacred Bo tree (Ficus religiosa), a fig tree with a knotted bole and heart-shaped leaves, under which the Buddha is believed to have reached Enlightenment. Girded with bright ribbons and jasmine garlands, it stands guard over a locality by providing shelter to its tutelary nat, whom locals will constantly pamper with aromatic incense and choice yummies.

You may find it prudent to present your own offerings in hopes of being rewarded with prayed-for services. But do be careful: you upset an arboreal spirit at your own peril. I have been told of a tourist who, dressed disrespectfully in shorts and a flimsy T-shirt, turned up inebriated beside a sacred tree one evening and added insult to injury by deciding to relieve his bladder right then and there. Now you would definitely not want to do that! Swift and just was the revenge of the outraged spirit: poleaxed, the transgressor fell down with uncontrollable convulsions.

Such stories are common currency in Burma, and there is no telling how many of them are genuine or apocryphal. Assuming this story has a base in fact, though, a Westerner will no doubt wave off the incontinent chap's ordeal as merely an anecdotal account of an epileptic seizure. I did too. But then, we in the West chased our ghosts into undignified exile long ago. In Myanmar, the nats still rule. And more power to them!