Mount Popa

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From the flat, sun-hammered plain south of Bagan, the thing that catches the eye is not the mountain but the finger of rock in front of it. The mountain — a dark, forested massif some fifty kilometers off — spreads and settles into the haze. In front of it, standing free of the plain, is a sheer-sided neck of old lava about two hundred twenty-five meters high, and on its very crown, small with distance and bright gold, a cluster of spires. This is Taung Kalat, “Pedestal Hill,” and the gold on its summit is a monastery reached by seven hundred seventy-seven covered steps. The steps climb barefoot past troops of macaques that will take an unguarded pair of eyeglasses. The pilgrim who climbs them is climbing, in the reckoning of the tradition, to the household capital of the Thirty-Seven Nats — the seat from which the great spirits of the Burmese sacred world are imagined to keep their court.

Taung Kalat, the sheer volcanic plug crowned by its monastery, rising beyond the village pagoda at the foot of Mount Popa. Jakub Hałun, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The flowering mountain and its two summits

Two features carry the name, and they are not the same rock. The mountain proper is Taung Ma-gyi — the great or mother mountain — a long-dormant stratovolcano rising to 1,518 meters (4,981 feet) above sea level, roughly fifty kilometers (thirty-one miles) southeast of Bagan in what is today the Mandalay Region. It is a solitary dark mass on an otherwise level plain, visible on a clear day from the Ayeyarwady River sixty kilometers away. The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program records it as a steep-sided composite cone built of overlapping basaltic and basaltic-andesite lava flows and scoriaceous deposits, standing above a surrounding lava plateau, its summit opened by a crater about 1.6 kilometers wide and 850 meters deep that a slope failure breached to the northwest. Radiocarbon work on the debris beneath that collapse places the last eruption at roughly eight thousand years ago; the fire has been out a long time.

The pilgrimage does not go to that summit. It goes to Taung Kalat, a separate feature to the southwest — a sheer, isolated volcanic plug, a neck of solidified magma left standing when softer rock around it wore away. It rises to about 657 meters above sea level, some 225 meters (737 feet) above the plain at its foot: a pedestal, exactly as its name says, and a natural altar. The plug is an accident of geology — the throat of an old vent, harder than the ash and softer rock that once buried it, exposed by the slow work of weather — and it is also, seen from below on the road up from Bagan, one of the most improbable holy sites in Asia: a vertical column of rock with a monastery balanced on its head, so unlikely a perch that a first-time visitor tends to assume the summit is unreachable until the covered stairway resolves out of the trees. Where the greater massif is arid on its lower flanks, the mountain as a whole is remembered as a place of water and green in a dry land — of springs and, in the old descriptions, of flowers. The name itself is traced by scholars and by the tradition alike to the Pali and Sanskrit puppha, “flower.” Popa is the flower-mountain, and in the sacred geography that flowering is not incidental. It is the sign of a place where the spirits keep house.

For within the Burmese frame this hill is not merely high ground. It is the abode of the Mahagiri nats — the “great mountain” spirits — and above all the seat of the flower-eating mother of the mountain, Popa Medaw, the Royal Mother of Popa. The chronicles that the Burmese court kept, the Glass Palace Chronicle among them, relate that the Mahagiri pair came out of the old northern kingdom of Tagaung and were established here on Popa: Min Mahagiri, also called Maung Tint De, the Lord of the Great Mountain, and his sister Hnamadawgyi. The date the chronicles attach to this — a reign in the fourth century, that of a king remembered as Thinlikyaung — belongs to the legendary reach of the record and is not to be read as history in the modern sense; the scholars treat it as tradition, and so should the reader. What is firm is the shape of the story the tradition tells about itself: that the greatest of the indigenous spirits took up residence on this volcanic hill, and that people have come here to serve them for as long as anyone can name.

The household capital of the Thirty-Seven

The Burmese sacred world holds two devotions in one life. A Burmese Buddhist keeps the Buddha and keeps the nats — the powerful, often dangerous spirits, many of them human beings who died hard and violent deaths and were raised, by that death, into potency. The official pantheon of these is the Thirty-Seven, a canon fixed in tradition to King Anawrahta of Bagan. Its exact membership genuinely varies from list to list and from teller to teller; the number thirty-seven is stable, but the names in it are not, and any honest account has to say so. What Mount Popa is, within that world, is the pantheon’s mythic capital — the ground from which the nat-host is imagined to rule, the household seat of the spirits.

Not all thirty-seven live here. Images of the full pantheon stand at the shrines clustered around the foot of Taung Kalat, but the tradition holds that only four truly have their abode on the mountain: the two Mahagiri nats, the brother-sister pair; Byatta, the flower-gatherer; and his consort Me Wunna, who is Popa Medaw. These four are the resident household. The rest are guests at their own images.

The eldest of them, Min Mahagiri, gives the mountain a reach into every Burmese home. He is the fire-lord of the great mountain — in the legend a blacksmith of surpassing strength, burned to death against a tree — and he is at the same time the guardian of the house, the ein dwin nat, honored at a corner house-post where, by custom, a hung coconut stands for his presence. So the mountain is at once the cosmic seat of the pantheon and the source of the most intimate of all the nats, the one who watches the threshold of an ordinary dwelling. To feed the coconut in the corner is to be in contact with Popa. The full account of that fire-lord belongs to his own telling; here it is enough that his home address is this hill.

The mountain’s presiding figure, though, is the mother. Popa Medaw is Me Wunna, a flower-eating spirit-woman of the mountain who loved Byatta, a flower-gatherer in the service of King Anawrahta of Bagan. When Byatta was executed — the tradition holds it against a king’s command he had failed — she died of grief and became a nat, and she is served as a compassionate maternal spirit, the Royal Mother to whom the anxious and the bereft bring their petitions. From her union with Byatta, the tradition names two sons, the Shwepyin brothers of Taungbyon; but their great festival and their shrine lie far to the north, near Mandalay, and the mountain does not claim them as residents. Popa keeps the mother, not the sons. Her offerings are of the mountain’s own kind — flowers above all, and the sweet things a mother is thought to favor — and her worship keeps the register of tenderness rather than fear. Where Min Mahagiri is served with the wary respect due a fire-lord who can burn a house that neglects him, Popa Medaw is approached as one approaches a mother: for shelter, for a child’s safety, for the small mercies. The drunkard-lord Ko Gyi Kyaw and the other raffish spirits of the wider pantheon belong to other shrines and other appetites; the mountain’s own household is the fire-lord, his sister, the flower-gatherer, and the flower-eating mother, and its temper is domestic before it is grand.

Above all of this — literally above it — sits the Buddha. The gilded monastery and temple complex on the crown of Taung Kalat, reached by the 777 covered steps, stands directly over the nat shrines at the plug’s foot. The steps were for years tended by U Khandi, a celebrated Burmese hermit who made their upkeep and the care of the pilgrimage his work. The arrangement is exact and it is not confusion: nat devotion at the base of the hill, Buddhist devotion at its summit, the one holy climb passing through both. The two are held together, not ranked; the pilgrim who leaves an offering at a nat shrine and then climbs to bow before the Buddha has performed a single, coherent act of the Burmese religious life.

The gilded monastery crowning the summit of Taung Kalat, above the covered stairway of 777 steps. Jakub Hałun, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The mountain’s calendar turns on the moon. Pilgrimage intensifies at the full moon of Nayon, about May and June, and again at the full moon of Nadaw, about November and December; and it swells at Thingyan, the water-festival New Year in April, the season when Thagyamin — the king of the nats, a Buddhicized form of the Indian Sakka set at the head of the pantheon — is said to descend to the human world. The macaques that swarm the steps, some two thousand wild rhesus monkeys living around the plug and fed for generations by pilgrims, are part of the place’s living texture: bold, thieving, expected, a fixture of the ascent as much as the shrines are.

Anawrahta’s ordering, and the honest record

The turn that bound Popa to the state, in the documented reach of Burmese history, is credited to King Anawrahta of Bagan (reigned 1044–1077), the ruler who made Theravada Buddhism the religion of his kingdom. The chronicles and the living tradition agree on the substance: that Anawrahta, unable to abolish the worship of the nats, absorbed it. He gathered the images of the most powerful indigenous spirits — the Mahagiri pair among them, and Byatta and Me Wunna of Popa — and installed them at his great Shwezigon Pagoda near Bagan in attitudes of reverence to the Buddha, setting Thagyamin above them at the head of a pantheon of thirty-seven. The reasoning is preserved as a policy of patience: that people who would not give up their nats might come to the pagoda for the nats and, in time, come to the Buddha. The full architecture of that settlement — how the spirit religion was folded into the Buddhist frame and held there — belongs to the pagoda where it was made and to the people who have lived it since. What matters for the mountain is that its resident spirits were among the first taken into the official cult, and that before Anawrahta’s ordering the tradition recalls the Popa festivals as having included animal sacrifice, later suppressed.

Three kinds of claim run through all of this, and they should not be flattened into one. The geology is scholarly consensus: a dormant stratovolcano of basalt and basaltic andesite, last active some eight thousand years ago, its plug and its cone as measurable as any landform. Anawrahta’s formalizing of the Thirty-Seven and the Shwezigon installation are chronicle-attested tradition, read critically — grounded in a real eleventh-century reign and a real pagoda, transmitted through court histories that mingle record and legend. And the legends of the resident spirits themselves — Maung Tint De burned on the tree, Byatta the flower-gatherer, Me Wunna the flower-eating mother, the Shwepyin brothers born of them — are contested and genuinely variable: the historicity of the individual figures is doubted by scholars, and the stories are told with real variation in their names, their towns, and their turns. To pin one canonical form would be to falsify a tradition whose life is partly in its variety.

One strand of that tradition deserves to be stated plainly. The Shwepyin brothers, whom the Popa cycle names as the sons of Byatta and Me Wunna, are remembered as being of Indian-Muslim descent — their father, in the telling, a Muslim from India — and their worshipers to this day are said to abstain from pork on their account. It is a factual and openly acknowledged part of the story, poignant against the later history of anti-Muslim politics in the country, and it belongs in the record without embellishment.

The cult that grew here was documented, as much as it was ever documented, from the colonial period onward. Sir Richard Carnac Temple’s The Thirty-Seven Nats (1906) gave the pantheon its first full scholarly catalog, list and image and legend; Maung Htin Aung’s Folk Elements in Burmese Buddhism (1962) read the nat cult from within the Burmese tradition; Melford Spiro’s Burmese Supernaturalism (1967) set it in the frame of a working religious system; and the ethnographer Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière studied the nat festivals and the spirit-mediums — the nat kadaw, often women or the acault, the transgender and gay men who serve as the spirits’ vessels — with a care that earlier writers had rarely brought. The public record of the festival, the offering, and the possession-dance is a matter of scholarship and photograph; its operative interior is the mediums’ own, and stays theirs.

The macaques belong to that afterlife too. They are wild rhesus, fed by pilgrims across so many generations that they have made the shrine their territory and the climbers their commissary; the same offering-culture that feeds the nats feeds the monkeys, and the two thousand of them are as much a part of the ascent as the seven hundred seventy-seven steps. Local guides warn the visitor to carry nothing loose, and the warning is earned.

Today the mountain wears two lives easily. Taung Kalat’s monastery-crowned plug is one of Myanmar’s most photographed sacred sites, a working pilgrimage place and a fixed stop on the Bagan tourist circuit, its market at Nyaung-U a waypoint on the road out; the macaques, the barefoot climb, and the gold at the summit are its postcard. The greater massif around it is protected as Popa Mountain National Park — a green island of forest and spring above the dry central plain, ecologically the flowering the old name promised. Both are true at once: a national park and a spirit-capital, a geological neck of eight-thousand-year-cold lava and the household seat of the Royal Mother. The pilgrim on the steps is not confused about which is which. The mountain gives flowers and springs to a parched country and gives the spirits a place to keep house, and the same barefoot climb reaches the Buddha at the top and the nats at the foot, all on the one hill.

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