Htaw Meh Pa
Karen · mortal · Karen traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Htaw Meh Pa is the founding ancestor of Karen origin legend, the forefather who led the people out of a distant northern homeland on the long migration that ended in the hills of Burma and Siam. The best-remembered episode of the journey is the crossing of the 'river of running sand', a phrase the tradition applies to a great desert the ancestors had to traverse and which nineteenth-century writers linked speculatively to the Gobi. As eponymous culture-hero he anchors the Karen sense of themselves as a people who came from elsewhere and preserved their identity through wandering; the migration narrative he heads is recited in oral hta and was recorded by Marshall and later collectors.
Domains
- migration
Powers
- led the ancestors across the river of running sand
Sources
- Karen origin tradition names Htaw Meh Pa as the founding forefather who led the people on the long migration, including the crossing of the 'river of running sand', to their present hill homeland.: H. I. Marshall, The Karen People of Burma (1922), 6-9 (secondary); Anders Hovemyr, In Search of the Karen King (Uppsala, 1989), ch. 2 (secondary)