Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/94

82 one god would have gradually assumed more importance than the rest, and perhaps even have ousted them, we cannot tell; for the advent of Buddhism, and from its establishment as the State religion in the eleventh century, checked the natural development of the native cult, and destroyed the power of its priests. It is possible that the Hindu god Sakra or Indra, who, as already mentioned, became a kind of Buddhist archangel, was identified with, and therefore obliterated, a native god of the sky. His connection with the Burmese new year and water-festival do not seem to be traceable to any Indian source.

The Burmese nat.—The Burmese word nat is usually translated "spirit," or "disembodied spirit." These terms, however, are much too wide. The spirits of the dead may remain in the house where death took place until bidden to depart, or may annoy the living by returning to the occupations they followed in life, or may hover about cemeteries and frighten the wits out of passers-by, but that does not make them nats. When they are visible they are called ghosts by us and tăse by the Burmese. A nat is something quite different. The word is the equivalent of our word god, in the sense in which we speak of the gods of ancient Greece and Rome. How exactly a spirit becomes a nat it would be difficult to say, though it seems often to have been by royal decree.

Whether every nat was once a human being is another question. The term is applied to the spirits or gods of mountains, of rivers, of whirlpools, of trees, of villages, of houses, of earth and sky, of rain and wind, of a hundred other things. When I have heard it so used of a local spirit I have always asked who the spirit was in life, and have always been told that this was not known. Professor Ridgeway, differing from Sir James Frazer, would doubtless say that its identity has been forgotten. This is confirmed by some of the legends which I shall tell. There seems nothing improbable in the explanation.