The One God the Angami Nagas Worshipped Before Anyone Else Arrived

There is a god in these hills that the Angami arrived at entirely on their own.

What was here first

Before Christian missionaries reached the country that is now Nagaland, every hill had its own religion.

The Naga peoples were never one people with one faith. Each community had its own gods, its own rites, its own words for them. What they shared was a way of seeing the world.

Spirits lived in the rivers. Spirits lived in the mountains and in the trees. Certain elders were trained to speak to them when a village needed something, and that training passed from one person to the next by hand and by mouth.

Nothing was written down. None of these traditions had writing until outsiders brought it.