Then (Then Luông, 'the Great Then') is the sky-lord at the apex of Tai Dam religion, which remained largely outside Theravada Buddhism. He presides over the upper world, mương phạ, imagined as a celestial mương staffed by subordinate then who govern rain, sickness, harvest and the like; ritual specialists sometimes enumerate a whole bureaucracy of lesser then beneath him. Human vitality is conceived as a bundle of khwan (khoăn) that descend from and are recalled to Then, so that his authority frames the soul-calling of birth rites and the soul-guiding of the funeral. In the cosmogonic tradition Then sends a great flood and afterward reseeds the earth, and the legitimacy of the Tai lordships is traced to a heavenly grant. In the widely shared origin narrative he dispatches the primal ancestor Khun Borom to rule mankind.