The Bgha is the ancestral guardian spirit at the centre of Karen domestic religion, a power inherited down the female line and shared by all who descend from a common matriline. Its cult is the auh ma or Bgha feast, a closed sacrificial meal at which the kin group eats together to keep the spirit fed and the household's rice-soul and members in health. The Bgha rewards the observance of proper marriage and ritual within the group and punishes neglect or transgression, above all improper unions, by withdrawing its protection and sending sickness. Ethnographers from Marshall to Hayami and Rajah treat the Bgha cult as the ritual core of pre-Christian Karen social order, the mechanism by which descent, marriage rules and agricultural fortune are held together. Sources vary on whether the Bgha is best understood as a single named spirit or as the collective ancestral presence of each matriline.