Then Luông

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.

Children

• Khun Borom

Domains

• sky
• creation
• fate souls
• sovereignty

Powers

• rules the celestial mương
• sends down the soul-substance of the newborn
• sends the world-destroying flood
• grants the mandate of the mương-lords

Epithets

• Then Luông — the Great Then, supreme lord of heavenCầm Trọng & Phan Hữu Dật, Văn hóa Thái Việt Nam (Hà Nội, 1995) (secondary)
• Chảu Phạ — Lord of the SkyBaccam Don et al., Tai Dam–English English–Tai Dam Dictionary (Eastern Michigan University, 1989), s.v. phạ, chảu (secondary)

Relations

• parent: Khun BoromThen dispatches Khun Borom from heaven to rule the earth.Charles Archaimbault, La naissance du monde selon les traditions lao (Seuil, 1959), where Khun Bulom is sent to earth by the sky-lord Then/Phaya Then (secondary)

Sources

• Then is the supreme sky-lord of the non-Buddhist Tai Dam, ruler of the celestial world (mương phạ/mường then) and ultimate source of human souls and of the mương-lords' authority.: Cầm Trọng & Phan Hữu Dật, Văn hóa Thái Việt Nam (NXB Văn hóa Dân tộc, Hà Nội, 1995) (secondary); Georges Condominas, From Lawa to Mon, from Saa' to Thai (ANU, 1990) (secondary)
• The Tai Dam cosmogony has Then order heaven and earth and, after a deluge, populate the world.: Quám Tô Mương, in Đặng Nghiêm Vạn (ed.), Tư liệu về lịch sử và xã hội dân tộc Thái (Hà Nội, 1977) (primary)