RELIGION OF THE RED KARENS.
By A. A. B. Crumb
THE Red Karens of Upper Burma number probably two hundred thousand. They are devil worshipers, and the bones of hens, birds, pigs, and animals are their oracles. If they try the bones of chickens, they call it kah-sow-cru, and the whole nation has great faith in these oracles. The way they try the oracle is this: A man (never a woman) takes a small chicken in his hand, and, commencing to choke the chicken, he moves it up and down in front of him, telling it to go up to heaven and ask the angels to tell him whether the things he desires to do will prosper or not. By the time his prayer is finished, the chicken is dead. Then he takes out the femur bones, and puts bamboo splints into the air holes in the bones. If these air holes are parallel, the answer is favorable. Nearly all the fowls in the country are used thus to obtain information about future events. I went to a Red Karen house to see a sick man, and found him sick with congestion of the liver. He said he had consulted the oracle, and it said he must eat a pig; but he did not have any pig, so he ate several fowls, but he got no better. Then he ate a buffalo, but he did not get well. And he was confident if he ate a pig he would recover at once. But as he had no pig and no money to buy one, he was sure that he should die. I gave him some medicine, and when I returned to the village a month later, I found him in comfortable health, even though he had not eaten a pig. They believe there is a God, and that he is a spirit, that he is good, and that he is the Creator of all things, but that he has little or nothing to do with everyday events of life. They believe that there are angels, and that they reveal to man, through the bones of animals, what is best for him to do, being taught of God. They believe in a personal devil, and that he is fully interested in the daily events of life, and that he is the author of all the evil, the sorrow, and the suffering to which human flesh is heir. They believe there are seven worlds, all flat, and one above the other, like a set of shelves, three below the earth, and three above; that the earth is the best of the lot, and, when we leave it, we go to a worse place than we leave. They say that when a man dies, his spirit wanders around his house until his body is decomposed; his spirit then joins his body, and they go into another world. In order that a person may not be destitute in the next world, they fill the grave, or a hole near the grave, with the various articles the country produces; they also put a long box on posts over the grave, and fill this box with grain, hanging pumpkins and corn under the box, putting a plow and other farming instruments on top of the box. There is, however, no especial sacrifice in filling these boxes with grain; it is only an indirect way of feeding pigs.—Rev. A. A. B. Crumb.