Hrmal Ngo

The rice soul is the animating life-essence of the grain, imagined as a feminine, grandmotherly presence that dwells in the growing paddy and the filled granary. Khmu ritual treats it as an individual that can be pleased or offended, coaxed home or driven to flight: at harvest its soul is called back with offerings and gentle words so that the crop will not dwindle, echoing the widespread Southeast Asian conception of a 'Rice Mother.' Khmu myth explains that rice was once so bountiful that the grains came of their own accord to the granary, until a careless or angry person struck the rice, which then shattered into small grains and fled to the wild, obliging humans thereafter to labour for the harvest and to court the rice soul's return. Sources treat the being primarily through ritual and etiological narrative rather than as a personage with a fixed biography.

Domains

• agriculture
• fertility

Powers

• ripens and yields the rice crop
• must be summoned back to the granary

Sources

• In Khmu belief the rice crop possesses a soul (hrmāl ŋɔ̀ɔ), personified as feminine, which must be ritually summoned and fed at harvest so that the grain remains abundant.: Kristina Lindell, Hakan Lundstrom, Jan-Ojvind Swahn & Damrong Tayanin, The Kammu Year: Its Lore and Music (London: Curzon Press / Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Monograph No. 40, 1982). (secondary)
• Origin-of-rice narratives and rice-soul observances are a central element of Khmu swidden ritual life.: Damrong Tayanin, Being Kammu: My Village, My Life (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1994). (secondary)