Nat (spirit) - Popular Nat Festivals

Popular Nat Festivals

The most important nat pilgrimage site in Burma is Mount Popa, an extinct volcano with numerous temples and relic sites atop a mountain 1300 metres, located near Bagan in central Burma. The annual festival is held on the full moon of Natdaw (December). Taungbyone, north of Mandalay, is another major site with the festival held each year starting on the eleventh waxing day and including the full moon in the month of Wagaung (August). Yadanagu at Amarapura, held a week later in honour of Popa Medaw (Mother of Popa), who was the mother of the Taungbyone Min Nyinaung (Brother Lords), is also a popular nat festival.

Nats have human characteristics, wants, and needs. They are flawed, having desires considered derogatory and immoral in mainstream Buddhism. During a nat pwè, which is a festival during which nats are propitiated, nat kadaws (နတ်ကတော်, lit.: nat lady, i.e. mediums) dance and embody the nat's spirit in a trance. Historically, the nat kadaw profession was hereditary and passed from mother to daughter. Until the 1980s, few nat gadaws were male. Since the 1980s, transgendered gay men and transvestites have increasingly performed these roles.

Music, often accompanied by a hsaing waing (orchestra), adds much to the mood of the nat pwè, and many claim to be entranced. People come from far and near to take part in the festivities in various nat shrines called nat kun or nat naan, get drunk on palm toddy and dance wildly in fits of ecstasy to the wild beat of the hsaing music, convinced that they have become possessed by the nats.

Whereas nat pwes are annual events celebrating a particular member of the 37 Nats regarded as the tutelary spirit in a local region within a local community, with familial custodians of the place and tradition and with royal sponsorship in ancient times, hence evocative of royal rituals, there are also nat kannah pwes where individuals would have a pavilion set up in a neighbourhood and the ritual is generally linked to the entire pantheon of nats. The nat kadaws as an independent profession made their appearance in the latter half of the 19th C as spirit mediums, and nat kannahs are more of an urban phenomenon which evolved to satisfy the need of people who had migrated from the countryside to towns and cities but who wished to carry on their traditions or yo-ya of supplicating the mi hsaing hpa hsaing tutelary spirit of their native place.