Human sacrifice

Sacrificial backpacker-maiden, Vat Phu, from loupiot.com

The earliest evidence of human sacrifice among the Khmers might be this stone crocodile at Vat Phu Champasak. Today it’s in Laos, but it’s a Khmer temple dating from the 5th century, the very dawn of the Khmer kingdom.  (The current temple is from the 11th/13th centuries – more on Wikipedia).

Crocodiles keep turning up. Every time a funeral is held a white flag is flown nearby. According to legend the custom commemorates a magical crocodile who ate a princess. The king killed the croc and hung his hide up at the place where his daughter’s ashes were enshrined, which was the start of the custom. After a while crocs became too difficult to find, and so the flag is now used instead. This relates to human sacrifice because the princess’s hundred handmaidens were supposedly buried under the hundred columns of the temple  (this post has slightly different details, and mentions sacrifices for bridges).

There’s a pretty well documented report of a royally-sponsored human sacrifice at Ba Phnom, a sacred mountain near Phnom Penh, in 1877 (a prisoner taken at the end of a brief insurrection, but not simply executed, as there were strong religious overtones). A neak ta (local spirit) called Neak Ta Krol was receiving sacrifices as recently as 1904 – I got the little I have on that from an encyclopedia called Asian Mythologies, entry on Cambodian earth deities by Solange Thierry, who’s a highly reliable source, but no idea where it ultimately comes from – shocked French administrators putting a stop to it, perhaps? Someone should ask them about the symbolism of the Eucharist – at least the Cambodians weren’t eating the victims.

Japanese Bridge destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, 1973. From Getty images, entirely without permission.

Much more recently, there were rumours in the early 1970s that the government authorities were kidnapping children and burying them under the Japanese Friendship Bridge, which connects Phnom Penh to the north. The idea was that the spirits of the sacrificed children would protect the bridge from the Khmer Rouge.  The story is in the Phnom Penh Post. The person telling the story says he didn’t believe it at the time – but interesting that such a rumour should even be circulating.

Seima stone showing the earth-goddess Torani (pronounced torr-nee). This stone is flat-faced, but the stone buried in the pits around the shrine hall is spherical. From Andy’s Cambodia.

And then of course there’s human sacrifice and monastic boundaries. When a monastery is being established or re-established, the shrine hall has to be marked off from the secular world. Eight sacred stones, called seima, are buried in pits at the eight compass points and half-points (north, south, etc). A ninth stone is buried at the centre of this space, directly in front of the main Buddha image – this one represents the god Indra, king of Meru and the gods (because good Buddhists do believe in Hindu gods). Nowadays these stones are just stones, albeit holy ones, but they are the size and shape of a human head.

If you’d like to learn more about human sacrifice around the world, with a focus on Europe and the British Isles, I recommend the blog which calls itself Bizarre History. In fact I recommend that blog for everything.

Spirit-flags

Cambodian spirit-flags have long fascinated me. Their functions are pretty clear – they’re to signal that something is going on, a festival or funeral or whatever. Aesthetically they’re genuine art, elegant and original. Their origins and symbolism, however, are totally obscure. This post is a summary of the best article I could find on the ‘net, a guest post by Dr Rebecca Hall on the blog Alison in Cambodia. The photos are also hers – I’ve not had much luck photographing banners, they tend to blow in the wind and they’re a long thin shape that doesn’t fit easily in a normal 2:3 photo.

The Khmer word for a flag or banner is tung, and the commonest type is the tung rolok. These are the ones you see in the grounds of monasteries, usually outside the main prayer hall (the preah vihear). I’ve been told that they should always go behind the hall, never in front of it – but in Phnom Penh they’re always in front of it, never behind. The friend who told me this was quite shocked.

The tung rolok announces a festival or celebration. As the photo shows, they’re huge. The number of bamboo rods through the body indicates who’s being honoured – father, mother, monks, Buddha, the teaching, etc.

Note the overall structure of the flag: a triangular “head,” a body, and two “feet” at the bottom. Note also the dark patch of cloth at the crotch, where the genitalia would be if this were what it looks like, a humanoid figure. Note also the little triangular pennons off the main body.

Next is the tung sasana, the “religion flag”. The idea of a flag for Buddhism came from an international conference in Sri Lanka in the early 1950s, and all Theravadin countries have adopted it. The colours stand for the multi-coloured rays of light that broke forth from the Buddha at the moment of his enlightenment, illuminating the entire world. They symbolise the various attributes of the Buddha; there were five rays each of a pure colour, and one of the other five mingled.

So this banner is comparatively new, but it’s become completely acculturated and is frequently seen around monasteries – and unfortunately I have no idea exactly what it’s function is.

Finally we come to the most interesting banner. Dr Hall’s informants, who were mostly abbots and achars (achars are the monastery’s experts in ritual) all told her they were called tung aphithoam. I gather that aphithoam is the Khmer pronunciation of abhidamma, which is Buddhist metaphysics. Dr Hall had been expecting to hear them called tung krapeu, meaning crocodile banner, but the abbots and achars never did. Her translators called them crocodiles, but not the experts.

Here’s the tung aphithoam/tung krapeu. It looks very like the tung rolok, but it’s always white. It’s a death-banner. It’s hung outside a house where someone has recently died, and stays up for 3 to seven days, both being significant periods in the life of the new ghost.

And their function…  Dr Hall’s informants told her it’s to tell people there’s a death and funeral. The cremation takes place at the end of the seven days, with a big funeral feast.

I wonder though. In these seven days between death and cremation the ghost stays around the house, not yet aware that it’s dead. It’s invited into a new “house” (the coffin), and the word “coffin” must never be mentioned lest it be frightened. In other words, the seven days immediately after death is an extremely risky period for the ghost, and so I wonder if the flags have something to do with it – but I don’t know for sure.

And what about the crocodile? The reason Dr Hall was expecting to be told that this is a crocodile flag is that that’s the way it’s described in the scholarly Western literature. One very famous study links the crocodile to the naga, and suggests that the original earth-spirit of the Khmers, before nagas arrived from India, was the crocodile. Crocodile and naga and Preah Torani the earth-goddess all tie together, somehow, though it’s not for me to say just how. But for sure, earth-gods combine the functions of death and fertility (those patches on the groin of the tung rolok), and when I was walking around the monasteries of Phnom Penh with my friend, the one who was shocked to find banners at the front of the prayer halls, everyone we spoke to called them crocodile flags. And those little triangular pennons make the “body” look very crocodilian to my mind, though I’ve never seen them discussed.

There’s a story. Once upon a legendary time there was a monk who transformed himself into a crocodile and swallowed a princess. Bad croc. The king sent his army to rescue the princess, but alas, when they cut open the belly of the beast they were too late, and beauty was dead. So they skinned the crocodile and hung its hide up at her funeral.

That particular story ties in with ritual human sacrifice traditions (it has to do with the pagoda where the princess’s funeral was held, and a requirement for sacrificial virgins), but this post is long enough already.