Karen Traditional Wrist Tying Ceremony




Before addressing about wrist tying I would like to share about the act of descendant of Karen tribe, the Karen race descended from Babylon to Burma by the year of BC 2234, in the ways to Burma they were passing through Mongolia, Turkistan and Yunnan then settled in Burma on the BC 1125, and as a second group at BC 739. The month of August is a time for Karen traditional wrist tying ceremony when the bonds of tradition that bind the Karen people are tied in a symbolic meaning but also quite literal way.  In Karen families and communities around the world, white threads are tied around wrist in the ceremony is known as Lah Ku Kee Su. Lah Ku means August and Kee Su Describes the act of binding at the wrist. Traditionally the festival take place in the month of August full moon day but the time is flexible in some part of the world.

The festival has no religious significant and much of it is rooted in ancestral belief in spirit – one Karen interpretation of wrist tying, for instance declares that binding a white thread around the wrist of a sick person will cure of alleviate the malady by attraction back to the body a spirit whose absence caused the problem in the first place.



In the time of our Ancestors, the elderly people asked for their family and relatives who are near and abroad coming back together once a year for family gathering, sharing food, and tying thread to the wrist to show and remember that they are one. This tradition becomes part of our Karen culture from generation to generation. Now a day, every once a year some of Karen take part in sharing culture, music, dances and food.


The main purposes of the festival are to reinforce Karen identity and contribute to the continuation of Karen culture. Every aspect of the festival is deep in symbolism. The thread, for instance has to be white because that is the color of good will.

Water is drunk as recognition of its Life-giving properties, these ceremonies begin with prayers imploring the spirits or return from wherever they are roaming and to stay in the Family and community. The practice of Karen traditional wrist tying started at Gobi desert, where our ancestors came across to get in Burma hundred years ago. We traditionally believed in spirit and in order to protect evil spirit from harming us, we used white thread. Twisted it on our hand as a sign of Holy Spirit to defeat evils. White thread on our hand also reminds us that we are Karen: we are the same groups of people. In the past, our ancestors stayed closed to other groups of people and in order to separate or notice them from other, older Karen marked their children with red and white thread.

There are seven types of wrist tying:
1-     For the new born baby.
2-     In the marriage ceremony.
3-     Before and after making the Journey.
4-     When a person is physically unwell.
5-     When a person is in frighten.
6-     After the funeral service.
7-     In every month of August of the Year.


Our forefathers who led us from Yunnan are:

1.     Phue Tot Mae Par
2.     Phue Ka Sount Mae Par
3.     Phue Ta Kae
4.     Phue Kyar Pon
5.     Phue La Young Hae
6.     Phue Maung Tot
7.     Phue Phar Theint
8.     Phue Ta Kone and
9.     Phue Pa La Thu Lanug.


In conclusion, it is an inheritance that our forefather left for us, by tying with white cotton on wrist the holy spirit dwell in the body and expel evil spirit out of the body and in this celebration remind us to reflect the day of our departure from Babylon so we need to cherish our loving Karen Traditional Wrist Tying generation by generation to remember our ancestor to maintain our culture. 

Related

article 191405789346594516

Post a CommentDefault Comments

emo-but-icon

သတင္းႏွင့္ဘေလာ့ဆိုက္မ်ား

ကရင္သတင္း၀က္ဆိုက္မ်ား ျမန္မာသတင္း၀က္ဆိုက္မ်ား နည္းပညာ၀က္ဆိုက္မ်ား

အမ်ားဆံုးဖတ္ေသာသတင္းမ်ား

ဆက္သြယ္ရန္

Name

Email *

Message *

ႏိုင္ငံတကာ တိုက္ရုိက္ေဘာလုံးပြဲစဥ္ေတြကို ဒီမွာႏွိပ္ၿပီး ရွာေဖြၾကည့္ရႈႏိုင္ပါတယ္။

လြတ္လတ္စြာေဆြးေႏြးရန္






မွတ္ခ်က္ေပးထားေသာသူမ်ား

Recent Comments Widget
item