Min Mahagiri

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In the southeast corner of a Burmese house, or bound to the main post that carries the roof, hangs a green coconut. It is dressed in a small turban, a gaungbaung wound as a man would wind it; a length of red cloth is tied about it, and now and then it is dabbed with perfume. To a visitor it can look like an ornament, or a stray piece of the kitchen left in the wrong room. It is neither. The coconut is at once the offering, the image, and the dwelling of a blacksmith who was seized at a king’s court, tied to a flowering tree, and burned alive. He is Min Mahagiri, the Lord of the Great Mountain, and among the Thirty-Seven Nats — the great spirits the Burmese keep alongside the Buddha — he is the one who lives closest to the family, in the corner, within reach of the hand that feeds him.

The blacksmith of Tagaung

The name that reaches the record last is the grandest. Min Mahagiri (မင်းမဟာဂီရိ) means Lord of the Great Mountain, and the mountain is Mount Popa, the extinct volcano that lifts out of the dry central plain some fifty kilometers southeast of Bagan. But the older name, the one the legends turn on, is a man’s. In the telling carried by the Burmese chronicles and repeated in every marketplace retelling, he was Maung Tint De (မောင်တင့်တယ်), which the Burmese hear as something like Mr. Handsome — a blacksmith of Tagaung, the ancient city on the Irrawaddy that the chronicle tradition remembers as a cradle of Burmese kingship.

He was a smith of impossible strength. In one telling he could swing a hammer of enormous weight at the anvil without pause; in another, blunter version he could snap an elephant’s tusk in his bare hands. Strength like that unsettled a throne. The King of Tagaung, the story goes, came to fear that so mighty a commoner would one day take the crown, and, finding he could not lay hold of the smith by force, he took him by cunning instead. He married the blacksmith’s beautiful sister and made her a queen; and then, through her, he sent word that her brother was wanted at court to be given office and honor. On that promise Maung Tint De came in. He was seized at the court, tied to a saga tree — the champac, with its heavy fragrant flowers — and set alight. When his sister saw the fire she ran into it, and the two of them died together in the one blaze. They did not simply die. Brother and sister passed into the tree as fire-spirits, bound to the scorched wood, and no one who came near the tree after that was safe from them.

The chronicle does not stop at the pyre. The king, unable to keep so dangerous a tree in his city, had it cut down and thrown into the Irrawaddy, and the river carried it south. It came to rest at the future site of Bagan, where — in the chronicle’s reckoning, generations before the great kingdom rose there — King Thinlikyaung of Pagan drew it from the water. Warned that the two spirits could not be turned loose among living people, he had their images carved and set them up on Mount Popa, the great mountain that thereafter gave the brother his title. The smith became Min Mahagiri, Lord of the Great Mountain; his sister became Hnamadawgyi (နှမတော်ကြီး), the Great Royal Sister, worshiped beside him and, in her own right, the subject of a separate cult.

The sister moves through the tellings under several names, and the drift is worth noticing rather than smoothing over. She is Ma Myat Hla in one common version; she is Shwe Myet-hna, Golden Face, in another, the epithet catching the beauty that made her useful to the king; she is Saw Me Va in Temple’s; and once deified she is Hnamadawgyi, the Great Royal Sister, the title under which she is venerated at Bagan and on Popa. A tradition that could not agree on her name never wavered on her act. In every version she chooses the fire — steps into the blaze that is killing her brother rather than watch it from the safe side of the court — and it is that choosing, not any settled biography, that makes her a nat. The pair are fire-nats in the exact sense: spirits born of a burning, bound at first to the burned tree, dangerous to whoever came near it, and only later housed and honored into guardianship. The Burmese understand the great nats generally as the dead of hard, unjust deaths, whose ungentled power has to be lodged somewhere and given its due; the smith and his sister are, in a sense, the pattern case.

Almost every fixed detail of that story loosens the moment one looks at a second source. When the colonial officer Sir Richard Carnac Temple set the whole pantheon down in The Thirty-Seven Nats in 1906 — the first systematic British catalog of the cult, built on fieldwork from the 1890s — he listed Mahágirí as No. 2, immediately behind Thagyá at No. 1, and then recorded a local telling that agrees with the chronicle on almost nothing but the fire. In Temple’s version the smith is Nga Tin Dè of Yetaung, a village near Prome far down the river, the son of a blacksmith; his strength is measured in his hammer, said to weigh sixty viss, about two hundred and ten pounds; and his sister, whom the king marries, is called Saw Me Va. The name shifts, the town shifts, the sister’s name shifts, and in some versions even the species of tree shifts. What holds firm across all of them is the shape of the thing: a matchless smith, a frightened king, a sister married to bait the trap, and a brother and sister burned together into a pair of fire-nats. That the surface keeps changing while the core stays fixed is not a flaw in the record. It is the sign that the cult is older than any one text that tried to pin it down — that it lived in memory and telling long before a chronicler or a British baronet came to write it out. Whether a historical Maung Tint De ever stood at a Tagaung forge is a question the sources cannot settle, and scholars treat the individual nat-legends as tradition-history rather than documented biography.

Lord of the mountain, guardian of the house

He is, for most Burmese, the first nat one ever meets — not because he is the highest, but because he is the nearest. The Thirty-Seven Nats are, in the main, spirits of the open air and the shrine: great dead who died hard deaths and whose power now hangs over a village, a hill, a festival ground. Min Mahagiri is those things too, enthroned on his volcano among the others. But his signal office is domestic. He is the ein saung, the house-guardian, also called the ein dwin (အိမ်တွင်းနတ်), the nat within the house — the spirit charged with the walls a family actually lives inside.

His presence there is the coconut. In Burmese homes a green, unhusked coconut is hung on the principal house-post or in the southeast corner, wrapped and turbaned and scented, and it stands for him completely: it is where he lives, what he looks like, and the gift given to him, all in the one object. The economy of the thing is part of its meaning. A nat of the volcano might ask a shrine, a festival, a medium; the nat of the house asks only a fruit renewed when it dries, a fresh turban, a little scent — a devotion sized to the walls it guards, so ordinary that a family may keep it for generations without ever thinking of it as a shrine at all. The southeast corner is his by long custom, the post that bears the roof his by right, and a new house is not fully a home until he has been settled into it. He is attended at the turning-points of a household’s life — most of all at the housewarming, when a family first takes possession of a new roof and asks the fire-lord to keep it. There is a grim fitness in the assignment. A man who was burned to death by a king’s treachery, wrongfully and by fire, is set to watch over the hearth-fire of ordinary people; the danger that consumed him becomes the danger he guards against. To describe the coconut and its offerings is to describe a thing done in public view across the country, not a rite with hidden mechanics — the household observance is open, everyday, and worn as lightly as any domestic habit.

Taung Kalat, the sheer volcanic plug beneath Mount Popa, crowned by a monastery and shrines to the nats; the extinct volcano rises from the central plain some fifty kilometers southeast of Bagan. Go-Myanmar.com, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Within the ordered pantheon his rank fixes his meaning. He stands at No. 2, at the head of the properly Burmese nats — the chief of the household nats, the one from whom the domestic cult takes its measure — with his sister Hnamadawgyi at No. 3 beside him. That places him a long way from the festival nats whose worship is loud and periodic: the Shwepyin brothers, whose great August fair fills Taungbyon; Ko Gyi Kyaw, the drinker’s patron whom the raffish court with rum and cheroots. Min Mahagiri’s cult is not periodic at all. It is continuous and quiet, the coconut in the corner that is simply always there. He is distinct, too, from the other spirits of his own mountain — from Popa Medaw, the flower-eating mother of Popa, a wholly separate figure, and from his own sister, whose leap into the pyre gives her a devotion of her own. All of this belongs to the living tradition and is held as such: a spirit religion carried by the Burmese not beneath their Buddhism but beside it, the two devotions running together through a single life.

The god folded into the Buddha’s house

The largest event in Min Mahagiri’s long afterlife is the one the documentary record dates most confidently, and it happened not to him alone but to the whole company of nats. King Anawrahta of Bagan, who reigned from 1044 to 1077 and who made Theravada Buddhism the religion of his kingdom under teachers from the Mon, tried to end nat-worship among his people and could not. So he did the more lasting thing. He took the spirits into the Buddhist order rather than against it — gathering the images of the Thirty-Seven at his Shwezigon Pagoda and setting them there bowing toward the Buddha, and placing at their head Thagyamin, the Burmese form of the Buddhicized Sakka, the deva-king who in Buddhist cosmology bows to the Buddha himself. It is from that act of arrangement that the older pair take the ranks they still hold: Thagyamin at No. 1, and the chronicle-era first nats, Min Mahagiri and his sister, moved to Nos. 2 and 3 behind him. The move is not the muddle it can look like from outside. It is a deliberate theology, and a durable one — the spirit religion set inside the Buddhist frame and served with it, so that the woman who feeds the coconut in her corner and offers flowers at the pagoda on the same morning is doing one devout thing, not two contradictory ones. The full account of that synthesis belongs to the Shwezigon and to the story of the Burmese themselves; here it is enough to see where it left the fire-lord: near the top, just below the king of the nats, first among the spirits that are Burmese to the bone.

His images stood, and stand, at the threshold of Bagan as well as on its mountain. At the Tharabha Gate — the single surviving gate of the old walled city, on its eastern side — two brick shrines face each other across the road, and in them the guardian pair keep watch: Min Mahagiri on the right hand, Hnamadawgyi on the left. Travelers passing in and out have touched and fed them for centuries, and do still.

The scholarly reception begins in earnest with Temple’s catalog of 1906, which for all its colonial vantage remains the first attempt to write the whole pantheon down from life; it is also, in its careful recording of a variant smith and a variant sister, the earliest printed proof that the legends were never singular. The twentieth century read the cult more sympathetically. Maung Htin Aung, in Folk Elements in Burmese Buddhism (1962), and Melford Spiro, in Burmese Supernaturalism (1967), and later Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière — whose work traces even a Mon prototype behind the group of thirty-seven — treat the nats not as a pagan residue clinging to a Buddhist country but as a coherent living system with its own logic, its own mediums, its own theology of the wronged dead. All of them note the same thing Temple stumbled on: that the canon of the Thirty-Seven and the details of any one nat’s story vary from teller to teller, and that fixing a single official version does violence to how the cult actually lives. The membership of the list, the names in a legend, the towns and the trees — these are genuinely unsettled, and honest description leaves them so.

The Thirty-Seven Nats ranged along the stairway at Popa Taung Kalat; Min Mahagiri stands at the head of the properly Burmese spirits, second only to the king of the nats. ReflectedSerendipity, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

On the mountain itself the cult has never lapsed. Later Burmese kings had golden heads of the two nats made and mounted on pillars at Mount Popa, and the pair whose heads date to 1812 are reported still in worship there today, on the volcanic crag that gives the Lord of the Great Mountain his name. The Popa festivals still draw pilgrims by the thousand, and the spirit-mediums — the nat kadaw, who give their bodies to the nats in the dancing of the pwe, and who are often women or among the acault — still call the great spirits down. Yet the truest measure of Min Mahagiri is not on the volcano at all. It is the plain green coconut that hangs, unremarked, in a hundred thousand corners: the whole of a burned man’s godhead compressed into a fruit on a post, tended between the cooking and the sweeping. The mountain is fifty kilometers off and the pantheon is arranged around the king of the nats; the coconut is here, in this room, within arm’s length — and a Burmese household keeps the far mountain and the near corner as a single act of care.

→ Related: Thagyamin · Popa Medaw · Shwepyin Brothers · Ko Gyi Kyaw · Mount Popa · Taungbyon · Shwezigon Pagoda · Bagan · The Burmese · The Mon · The Pyu