This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Satsana Phi organizes its spirits the way a map organizes places: by scale. Phi ban are guardian spirits bound to a single village, propitiated through the Liang Phi Ban ceremony, an annual communal offering, historically including a water buffalo sacrifice, that both feeds the spirit and reaffirms the village's own boundaries and shared standing among its residents. Phi muang stand a level up, guardian spirits of a wider region or a former principality, the scale a mueang, a Tai polity larger than a village, once occupied.
Other tiers are recognized above and below these two, giving Lao religious geography a spirit assigned to nearly every scale of settlement rather than one undifferentiated category of ghost or ancestor. The hierarchy is not merely descriptive; it carries an obligation at each level, the yearly offering that keeps a spirit favorably disposed toward the place in its charge, and failing to make it is understood to put the community's protection at risk.
City shrines built to more prominent guardian spirits, called lak mueang, such as Vientiane's Wat Si Muang, sit at the top of this local geography, a spirit answerable for an entire capital rather than a single village, but built from the same logic that governs the smallest phi ban shrine in an ordinary Lao village.