Lucifer in Myanmar

An indigenous creation myth echoes Genesis

Chittagong Hills, home of the Kumi people

Captain Thomas Herbert Lewin wrote in 1869:

“The Kumis have a tradition of the Creation, but I am unable to say whether it is peculiar to them or derived from some other source¹. It is as follows: —"God made the world and the trees and the creeping things first, and after that he set to work to make one man and one woman, forming their bodies of clay; but each night, on the completion of his work, there came a great snake, which, while God was sleeping, devoured the two images. This happened twice or thrice, and God was at his wit’s end, for he had to work all day, and could not finish the pair in less than 12 hours; besides, if he did not sleep, he would be no good," said my informant. "If he were not obliged to sleep, there would be no death, nor would mankind be afflicted with illness. It is when he rests that the snake carries us off to this day. Well, he was at his wit's end, so at last he got up early one morning and first made a dog and put life into it, and that night, when he had finished the images, he set the dog to watch them, and when the snake came, the dog barked and frightened it away. This is the reason at this day that when a man is dying the dogs begin to howl; but I suppose God sleeps heavily nowadays, or the snake is bolder, for men die all the same."” The Hill Tracts of Chittagong and the Dwellers Therein

The Chittagong Hill Tracts lie at the border of present-day Myanmar and Bangladesh. Like Yahweh in the Near East, the god of the Kumi forms man and woman from clay. Initially, he creates the world and its living creatures, beginning with plants and animals and culminating with humans. However, a serpent attacks the first people and introduces death to the world.

Some aspects could be explained by psychic unity. Snakes have killed humans for millions of years, so perhaps it makes sense for them to introduce death. Similarly, as with many other mythologies, the first couple is constructed from clay. How often has that been re-invented?

However, most languages are not isolates; they belong to a language family with whom they share history, vocabulary, and grammar. The same applies to creation myths. The myths may say creation was ex nihilo (from nothing), but the myths themselves were not created ex nihilo. They are the result of a long line of mythic material.

It doesn’t seem like the shared themes resulted from Christian or Muslim missionary work in the last few centuries. Lewin and others considered the Kumis to be the original inhabitants of the land because they showed the least amount of contact with monotheistic “high cultures.” Synthesizing influence in a creation myth would be strange without also adopting other more superficial aspects of Western culture.

Or, the myth could be “indigenous,” but if one goes back far enough, it shares a common ancestor with Genesis². Germane to that model, Lewin cites a paper by Brian Hodgson, Esq. from the 1851 issue of the Journal of the Asiatic Society: “On the Mongolian Affinities of the Caucasians.” The paper is interesting for its data, how it is interpreted, and the fact that modern linguists have reached similar conclusions. First, a couple of notes on terminology. “Caucasian” here means those who live in the Caucasus and is not a stand-in for “white.” “Mongolian” means Asian. So, the paper argues that those living in the Caucasus are, ultimately, of Asian stock. To that end, Hodgson reminds the reader that “no fact is better established in Glossology, than the frequent equivalency of the roots for man and I.” That is, the word for human or member of the tribe (endonym) often has the same root as I. (In English man is usually etymologically linked to “one who thinks,” which is a similar idea. Human thought is predicated on having a self-reflective “I.”)

The paper consists mostly of word lists demonstrating linguistic similarities in terms for man (i.e., human, person), I, and other common words (e.g., dog, we, egg, etc.) in many languages. He discusses 81 languages in 13 language families (by modern classification), including Kumi. The word for man is Ku-mi in Kumi and Ka-mi in the related Kami language, to which he adds variants of mi or ma meaning man in Tibetan, Lhopa, Murmi, Moitai, Gurung, Magar (Hungarian), Burmese, Gyarung, Garo, Limbu, Kuki, and Newar.

Hodgson interprets these linguistic similarities as evidence that all these peoples descend from a group whose word for I was mi or ma (consider me/mine in English), from which the endonym was constructed. He identifies this people as likely related to the Scythians. Over 150 years later, a 2013 paper, “Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia,” largely replicates these results, though on a much deeper timeline. This paper compares 200 words reconstructed in seven language families in Eurasia, finding I and thou cognate across six and seven families, respectively, and man across four. This is interpreted as evidence that a language spread across Eurasia around the end of the Ice Age, possibly due to the receding ice making migration easier. (I prefer the invention of psycho-social technology driving cultural diffusion.)

You can read more about the paper and the general enigma of pronoun similarities in my previous article, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns. I stand by the argument therein that if introspective self-awareness is recent (a la Jaynes), then words for I, self, human, or to think should be cognate worldwide.

Regarding the similarities between Genesis and the one from Myanmar, I make a much softer claim. If pronouns are cognate in Dravidian and Inuit, as argued in 2013, or Finnish and Tai, as argued in 1851, then we should also expect similarly far-flung mythological cognates. After all, we have better evidence that myths can last 10,000 years than we do for words, given the many flood myths that can be linked to sea levels rising following the Ice Age. No such type of study is possible with words. Further, this analogy is especially apt for creation myths, which are particularly prone to last and explain the nature of “I.” Thus, don’t rest on Lucifer, the Bringer of Light (and death), having visited Myanmar.

If you haven’t already, read about the version of Genesis found in Togo:

Kumi Dancer, Indigenous People's Day, 2014, Dhaka, Bangladesh

1. There are many variations of their name in the literature: Kumi, Khumi, Khami, Kweymee, Koomee.

2. The quotation marks are meant to indicate the definition is uncertain in these cases. If something was introduced 1,000 years ago, is it still an import? 5,000? 10,000?