Soil as Food: From the Myth of Nguan Din to Soil as Food in Thai Culture

ดินในฐานะอาหาร: จาก “ง้วนดิน” ในตำนานถึงอาหารที่เป็นดินในวัฒนธรรมไทย

Abstract

From the cultural point of view, some groups of primitive societies believed that they originated from the soil or the earth and regarded earth spirits as gods and ancestral spirits. When cooking, they brought clay to make a hearth in the kitchen. When doing important rituals, it must “awaken the earth” or tell the ghost of the earth. Even when someone died, he/she was buried back into the bosom of the land. In addition, “Soil” is considered to be the first food of human beings in the Buddhist legend, as appeared in “Nguan Din”, which is the soil burned by fire "Pralai-kalp" as appeared in the Aggañña Sutta and scriptures in the cosmology group in Thai society. This is why it is interesting to study how the traces of humans eating soil still remains in Thai culture. This article therefore aims to study soil as food both from legends and way of life by studying from documents, textbooks, and scriptures. The results of the study revealed that, in Thai society, there were rituals and beliefs about soil, both from traditional beliefs and new beliefs from Brahminism and Buddhism. It was also found that there were various tales and legends mentioning motif "Humans eat soil". In the real life, it was found that the soil was eaten as well and divided into 3 types of soil which are 1) soil with special characteristics, 2) soil with special properties, and 3) soil with special power. The mythological appearance of soil-eating humans is evidence of eating soil from primitive societies in the real world, reflecting 1) soil and the connection between man and nature; 2) soil and showing that man is one with nature, and 3) soil and the representation that humans are part of nature.