Thai and Khmer Nagas

A journey through the semiotics of the snake divinity

Can you hear them? Creatures are crawling all around Southeast Asia and beyond. Sometimes they rest underground, or swim deep in rivers, when they are not busy fighting with the garuda. Those creatures who look either humans, like giant snakes, or like a mix of both with one, three, five, seven or more heads, are the nagas (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2017, Web). The king of the snakes, the god of the rain, of the rivers, of the rainbows… There are many different attributes given to this legendary animal. While stories tend to all agree that the naga is associated with snake, water and is a divine being, legends vary a lot concerning its shape, its deeds and its aspiration. The word ‘naga’ is the Sanskrit word for cobra, and is etymologically connected to the English word snake (Apte, 1997, 423). One can hardly define when and where in India the first nagas were imagined. They are already mentioned in the Indian epic tale of the Mahabharata written more than 2500 years ago (El-Fers, 2012, 239), but they could be way older. Present throughout Hindu and Buddhist mythology, the legends of the Naga spread from India eastward and soon became integrated in the culture of various civilizations across Asia. Depiction of Naga are frequent in the 11th-12th century-built Baphuon, Angkor or Bayon temples of the Khmer Empire (Freeman, Jacques, 2006, 30–31), and in the old legends of Isan in Thailand.