Kirat Mundhum

Kirat Mundhum is followed by the Kirati peoples of the eastern Himalaya, among them the Limbu and Rai, who live from eastern Nepal to Sikkim. Its scripture is the Mundhum, an oral epic first sung by bards and later written down, with the stories of creation, the first human laws and a great flood.

The faith joins nature worship and ancestor reverence with shamanism. The Limbu honour the supreme power Tagera Ningwaphuma, who appears on earth as the mother goddess Yuma Sammang, while the Rai pray to the earth goddess Sumnima. The Sakela festival, danced twice a year at sowing and harvest, thanks Mother Nature and the ancestors.

In the 1770s the Limbu confederation Limbuwan was annexed by Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha. Around then the scholar Te-ongsi Sirijunga revived the Limbu script.