Popa Medaw

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Before the flower-gatherer ever climbed the mountain, there was the eater of flowers already on it. The chronicles and the tellings of the cult place her there alone — a belu, an ogress of the kind Burmese story sets in the wild and hungry places, but this one keeping to the slopes of an extinct volcano and living on nothing but its blossoms. She wanted no traveler’s flesh. She ate the mountain’s flowers, and the mountain was named for them: Mount Popa takes its name from puppha, the Pali word for flower, and the flower-eating woman on it was as much a feature of the peak as the crater or the plug of hardened lava that stands beside it. She had a name of her own, Me Wunna, before she had the greater one the grief would earn her. She was not yet the Mother of anything. She was the wildness of the mountain, waiting.

The names and how she reaches the record

She is remembered under two names, and the pair holds the whole of her. As Me Wunna she is the ogress of the mountain, the flower-eater; the name is glossed in the record as something like “Miss Gold,” a fittingly bright name for the mother whose sons would be called the Gold brothers. As Popa Medaw she is what she became — medaw, the royal Mother, the Queen-Mother, so that the second name is a title conferred by tragedy, the reading the record settles on for her. The Burmese Nat sacred world is full of such doubled names, a wild name and a throne name, because so many of its greatest spirits were nothing before some death made them everything.

Her story reaches the written record the way the whole cult does, threaded through the chronicles of the kings and gathered up in the colonial catalog of the pantheon. She belongs to the cycle of legends attached to King Anawrahta of Bagan, whose reign from 1044 to 1077 is documented history — the first great consolidator of Buddhist Burma, the king who broke Thaton in 1057 and drew the Mon south under Bagan. Around that solid historical figure the tradition wound a set of personal legends whose historicity scholars treat as a separate question altogether; these are tradition-history, the memory of the cult about its own origins, and the tellings genuinely vary. Sir Richard Carnac Temple’s The Thirty-Seven Nats of 1906 fixed a pictorial canon of the pantheon for the colonial archive; Maung Htin Aung, in Folk Elements in Burmese Buddhism (1962), read the lists against the lived cult from within; Melford Spiro’s Burmese Supernaturalism (1967) set the legends beside the working religion of the villages he studied; and Benedicte Brac de la Perriere carried the study forward into the living festivals. All of them note the same thing — that the roster of the Thirty-Seven and the details of any one nat’s legend shift from teller to teller, and that Popa Medaw hovers at the pantheon’s edge, beloved and served but not always numbered among the canonical thirty-seven.

Her genealogy is really the genealogy of the men she loved and bore, for it is through them that she enters the great cult. The man was Byatta, and Byatta came from the sea. The tradition names two brothers, Byatwi and Byatta, shipwrecked off Thaton and washed ashore riding a drifting plank — and it remembers them as Muslim traders, men from beyond the bay of Bengal. Spiro, setting the legend down, glossed the two names as Abraham and Ibrahim, hearing in Byatwi and Byatta the doubled name of the patriarch as Muslim and Christian scripture each carry it; the family’s part Indian-Muslim descent is a plain and poignant thread of the story, stated here as the tradition states it. The brothers gained their superhuman strength, the tellings say, by an act of transgression on the mountain of hermits: they found the preserved body of a dead zawgyi — the Burmese alchemist-hermit, a figure of accumulated occult power — and ate of it, and the eaten power passed into them. It is the same logic that governs Me Wunna herself: on this mountain, one becomes what one eats. She ate flowers and became the mother of the flowering peak; the brothers ate the alchemist and became strong past nature.

King Anawrahta, the chronicles say, took the surviving Byatta into his service for that strength, and gave him a peculiar office. He made him the flower officer, sending him each day the more than thirty miles south from Bagan to Mount Popa to gather fresh blossoms for the king. And so the two eaters of the mountain’s flowers were brought together — the ogress who lived on them and the strong man sent daily to pick them. Byatta fell in love with Me Wunna, and she with him, and on the mountain that had been her solitude she conceived and bore two sons: Shwepyin Naungdaw, the elder, and Shwepyin Nyidaw, the younger — the future Shwepyin brothers, the Lords of Taungbyon.

Statue of Me Wunna (Popa Medaw) with her two sons, the Shwepyin brothers, at a Burmese nat shrine. Emily Khine, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Mother of the mountain

The power of Popa Medaw is the power of grief transfigured into guardianship, and to understand it one has to follow the sequence of losses that made her, though the losses themselves belong to her husband and her sons and are told fully in their own accounts. The short of it is that a king’s severity cost her everything, and the everything came back to her as a throne.

Byatta was executed. The tellings differ on the exact charge — that he neglected the flower-duty because of his love, that the king disapproved of the liaison with the ogress, that he simply failed once too often to return with the blossoms — but they agree on the outcome: Anawrahta had the flower officer put to death, and the strong man from the sea died on the king’s word. The two boys were taken from their mother to the palace, raised as pages in the royal service. And there the second death came for them. When Anawrahta built the Sutaungpyae pagoda at Taungbyon, north of what is now Mandalay, every man in the service was to lay his share of the bricks; the two brothers, boys still, played at marbles instead and left two brick-gaps in the wall. For that lapse — a child’s lapse — they were beaten to death. The mountain had given the king a flower officer and two strong sons, and the king had killed all three.

Me Wunna, alone again on Mount Popa where she had never been anything but alone until Byatta climbed to her, died of a broken heart. And in dying she was not extinguished but exalted: she became a nat. This is the deep grammar of the Burmese spirit world, that a death by violence or injustice or unbearable sorrow does not end a powerful being but fixes it, angry or grieving, into the landscape as a nat — a spirit that must thereafter be honored and fed. Most of the Thirty-Seven were mortals who met such deaths; the cult venerates them precisely for the tragic force of the way they died. Me Wunna’s death was the gentlest kind of violence, grief rather than the blade or the fire, and her nat is correspondingly the tenderest in temper. She did not become a demon of the wild, though she had been a belu in life. She became the Medaw, the royal Mother, watching over the great mountain and everyone who climbs it.

Her elevation is bound to her sons’. As the Shwepyin brothers rose — and they rose very high, becoming two of the most powerful and most feared of all the Thirty-Seven, the Lords whose August festival fills a whole village north of Mandalay — their mother’s standing rose with them. A queen-mother takes her rank from her royal children, and so Me Wunna the mountain ogress became Popa Medaw, the Queen-Mother of Popa, mother of the Taungbyon Min Nyinaung, the Brother Lords. Her power is maternal and protective. Where her sons are approached warily, as spirits quick to take offense, she is approached as one goes to a mother: for shelter, for blessing, for the safety of a child or a household. She keeps the wildness of the mountain in her — she was its ogress, and she is still close to its flowers — but the wildness is turned now to guardianship.

That floral nature governs how she is served. The offerings set before her keep faith with the flower-eater she was: flowers above all, and incense, and candles, and coconut and bananas — the bright vegetable gifts, not the whisky and the raffish tribute that go to a nat like the drunkard-lord Ko Gyi Kyaw. One brings the mountain’s own kind of beauty back to the mother of the mountain. These things are set down here at the distance of the public record, as the plain shape of her cult and not as any instruction in it; the operative heart of nat devotion belongs to those who keep it.

Her place in the sacred geography of the mountain is unusually concrete. Mount Popa is the most important nat pilgrimage site in all of Burma, an extinct stratovolcano rising to 1,518 meters — 4,981 feet — some 50 kilometers southeast of Bagan in the Mandalay Region, its last eruption dated to about 6050 BCE, with the sheer volcanic plug of Taung Kalat standing beside it, 657 meters high and climbed by a stair of 777 steps to the monastery at its crown. Images of all Thirty-Seven are gathered at the shrines of the mountain. But the record is precise that only four nats have their actual abode on Mount Popa itself — the two Mahagiri nats (the fire-lord Min Mahagiri and his sister), Byatta, and Me Wunna. She is not a visitor to the mountain or a figure cataloged there. She is one of its four resident powers, the flower-eating mother who never left, as the record of the mountain sets it down.

The pantheon’s edge and the August dances

The larger settlement that made room for Popa Medaw was Anawrahta’s own. Unable to abolish the older spirit-lords, the king absorbed them — gathering the Thirty-Seven under the umbrella of Theravada Buddhism, setting their images at the Shwezigon at Bagan shown paying their respect to the Buddha, and placing at their head Thagyamin, a Buddhicized form of Sakka, king of the nats. That purposeful and enduring theology — the spirit religion set within the Buddhist scheme, the nats served beside the Buddha rather than against him — is the ground on which every nat now stands, and it is told in full where it happened, at the Shwezigon and in the history of the Burmese people who keep both devotions as one life. What matters for the mother of the mountain is that the settlement had an edge, and she stands on it. Popa Medaw is beloved, served, resident on the holiest of the nat mountains — and yet, in most tellings, she is not counted among the canonical Thirty-Seven. Her sons are; she is not. Her title of Queen-Mother is real and her cult is old, but the numbered roster passes her by, or takes her in only in some lists and not others. The canon of the Thirty-Seven was never fixed to a single form; its membership and its legends vary by teller and by town, and Popa Medaw is one of the figures whose place in it shifts. She is a nat by every measure of devotion and a near-member by the count.

The colonial archive placed her within its catalogs of the pantheon without quite resolving that ambiguity. Temple’s plates and Maung Htin Aung’s and Spiro’s readings all register her — the flower-eating ogress, the mother of the Taungbyon Lords — and all register that the lists disagree about her. Her modern reception, though, is loudest not in the catalogs but in the festival calendar, and there she is unmistakable.

The great engine of it is the Taungbyon nat pwe, the spirit-festival for her sons, held each year in the Burmese month of Wagaung, in August, in the festival-village about 15 kilometers north of Mandalay. Its core days run from the eighth to the tenth waxing of the month — the tellings and the festival’s own longer swell vary the count — and it draws tens of thousands, the largest gathering of the nat cult in the country. That is her sons’ festival, not hers. Hers comes a week later and a little to the south. At Amarapura, in the waning moon of the same month, the Yadanagu festival is held in her own honor, as the Mother of the Taungbyon Min Nyinaung — the mountain-mother given her own days once her sons have had theirs, the sequence of the festivals echoing the sequence of the story, the boys glorified first and the mother lifted after.

At both, the nats are danced into presence. The nat kadaw — the spirit-mediums — are the living heart of the festivals; to the driving strains of the hsaing waing, the traditional Burmese orchestra, they call the nats down and give them a body for a while. The profession was long hereditary, passed from mother to daughter, and the mediums are often women; since the later twentieth century many are acault, the transgender or gay men who have long had a recognized place in the cult, and they are held here with the respect the tradition accords them, servants of the nats and not figures of mockery. What passes between medium and nat in those hours is the cult’s own, described here only from the outside, at the distance the outside record keeps.

Taung Kalat, the volcanic plug beside Mount Popa, with its summit monastery; Popa Medaw is one of only four nats whose abode is the mountain itself. Brian Snelson, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

At Mount Popa itself, away from the crowds of Taungbyon and Amarapura, she keeps the quieter station that is most truly hers. Pilgrims climb to the mountain especially at the full moon of Nayon, in May and June, and the full moon of Nadaw, in November and December, and among the four resident nats they come to is the flower-eating mother, still on the slopes she never left, still close to the blossoms she once lived on. The commercial tourism that now flows to Taung Kalat’s photogenic stair runs past her shrine as well, and the shrines of the nat cult have not been spared the strains of Myanmar’s recent decades. But the devotion is older and stubborner than the tour buses. A Burmese Buddhist who leaves flowers for the mother of Popa is not a lapsed Buddhist; the offering and the refuge in the Buddha are one life, the arrangement Anawrahta built and the country has kept for nine hundred years.

She began as the wildness of the mountain and the loneliness of it, an ogress content with flowers. She lost a husband from the sea and two sons to a king, and the losing turned the ogress into the mother — not a mother of children only, for the children were killed, but the mother of a mountain and of everyone who climbs it grieving. The flowers she ate in her solitude are the flowers laid before her now. What she could not keep, she became the keeper of.

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