Thais and Fortune Telling

Siripun Sinbuathong 07.12.2010 23:18

The Thai way of life is based upon Buddhist religious beliefs as well as the animistic elements of Brahmanism and folklore.

 As a result, religion has become a mixture of philosophical, mythical and supernatural elements, all of which deeply influence one's way of life. Just as some people go to see the doctors to treat their physical ailments, some Thais go to fortune  tellers or as Thais call them Mhor Doo, the all seeing doctor to cure their spiritual ills and prevent future maladies.

Fortune tellers are engaged to give auspicious names to a baby according to his exact birth calculations. Weddings, investments, travel, car purchases, building construction, traveling and other significant decisions in life, are all directed by the fortune teller. There are many forms of fortune telling: palm reading, star charts, playing cards, physical features, spirit mediums and high - tech computerized fortune - telling.

Fortune tellers can be found in many places; the markets, the temples, beach road and also at the fortune-tellers home.

ManyThais in Pattaya have been known to visit the fortune teller along Jomtien Beach Road Soi 11 and another at Pattaya Beach Road Soi 6. There is a famous fortune teller in Naklua who can tell you your future for just 199 baht. Some fortune tellers accept money while some just want flowers or other donations for the temple. 

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"Hamlet and his father's ghost" by Henry Fuseli (1780s drawing). The ghost is wearing stylized plate armour in 17th century style, including a morion type helmet and tassets. Depicting ghosts as wearing armour, to suggest a sense of antiquity, was common in Elizabethan theater.

European Middle Ages

European Middle Ages

Ghosts reported in medieval Europe tended to fall into two categories: the souls of the dead, or demons. The souls of the dead returned for a specific purpose. Demonic ghosts existed only to torment or tempt the living. The living could tell them apart by demanding their purpose in the name of Jesus Christ. The soul of a dead person divulged their mission, while a demonic ghost was banished at the sound of the Holy Name.^[47]
Most ghosts were souls assigned to Purgatory, condemned for a specific period to atone for their transgressions in life. Their penance was generally related to their sin. For example, the ghost of a man who had been abusive to his servants was condemned to tear off and swallow bits of his own tongue; the ghost of another man, who had neglected to leave his cloak to the poor, was condemned to wear the cloak, now "heavy as a church tower." These ghosts appeared to the living to ask for prayers to end their suffering. Other dead souls returned to urge the living to confess their sins before their own deaths.^[48]
Medieval European ghosts were more substantial than ghosts described in the Victorian age, and there are accounts of ghosts being wrestled with and physically restrained until a priest could arrive to hear its confession. Some were less solid, and could move through walls. Often they were described as paler and sadder versions of the person they had been while alive, and dressed in tattered gray rags. The vast majority of reported sightings were male.^[49]
There were some reported cases of ghostly armies, fighting battles at night in the forest, or in the remains of an Iron Age hillfort, as at Wandlebury, near Cambridge, England. Living knights were sometimes challenged to single combat by phantom knights, which vanished when defeated.^[50]
From the medieval period an apparition of a ghost is recorded from 1211, at the time of the Albigensian Crusade.^[51] Gervase of Tilbury, Marshal of Arles, wrote that the image of Guilhem, a boy recently murdered in the forest, appeared in his cousin's home in Beaucaire, near Avignon. This series of "visits" lasted all of the summer. Through his cousin, who spoke for him, the boy allegedly held conversations with anyone who wished, until the local priest requested to speak to the boy directly, leading to an extended disquisition on theology. The boy narrated the trauma of death and the unhappiness of his fellow souls in Purgatory, and reported that God was most pleased with the ongoing Crusade against the Cathar heretics, launched three years earlier. The time of the Albigensian Crusade in southern France was marked by intense and prolonged warfare, this constant bloodshed and dislocation of populations being the context for these reported visits by the murdered boy.

Roman Empire

Roman Empire

The ancient Romans believed a ghost could be used to exact revenge on an enemy by scratching a curse on a piece of lead or pottery and placing it into a grave.^[41]
Plutarch, in the 1st century AD, described the haunting of the baths at Chaeronea by the ghost of a murdered man. The ghost’s loud and frightful groans caused the people of the town to seal up the doors of the building.^[42] Another celebrated account of a haunted house from the ancient classical world is given by Pliny the Younger (c. 50 AD).^[43] Pliny describes the haunting of a house in Athens by a ghost bound in chains. The hauntings ceased when the ghost's shackled skeleton was unearthed, and given a proper reburial.^[44] The writers Plautus and Lucian also wrote stories about haunted houses.
One of the first persons to express disbelief in ghosts was Lucian of Samosata in the 2nd century AD. In his tale "The Doubter" (circa 150 AD) he relates how Democritus "the learned man from Abdera in Thrace" lived in a tomb outside the city gates to prove that cemeteries were not haunted by the spirits of the departed. Lucian relates how he persisted in his disbelief despite practical jokes perpetrated by "some young men of Abdera" who dressed up in black robes with skull masks to frighten him.^[45] This account by Lucian notes something about the popular classical expectation of how a ghost should look.
In the 5th century AD, the Christian priest Constantius of Lyon recorded an instance of the recurring theme of the improperly buried dead who come back to haunt the living, and who can only cease their haunting when their bones have been discovered and properly reburied.

Classical Greece

Classical Greece

Ghosts appeared in Homer's Odyssey and Iliad, in which they were described as vanishing "as a vapor, gibbering and whining into the earth." Homer’s ghosts had little interaction with the world of the living. Periodically they were called upon to provide advice or prophecy, but they do not appear to be particularly feared. Ghosts in the classical world often appeared in the form of vapor or smoke, but at other times they were described as being substantial, appearing as they had been at the time of death, complete with the wounds that killed them.^[39]
By the 5th century BC, classical Greek ghosts had become haunting, frightening creatures who could work to either good or evil purposes. The spirit of the dead was believed to hover near the resting place of the corpse, and cemeteries were places the living avoided. The dead were to be ritually mourned through public ceremony, sacrifice and libations, or they might return to haunt their families. The ancient Greeks held annual feasts to honor and placate the spirits of the dead, to which the family ghosts were invited, and after which they were “firmly invited to leave until the same time next year”.^[40]
The 5th century BC play Oresteia contains one of the first ghosts to appear in a work of fiction.

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Fate has brought you to my site !I can make you sure you’ve not met a site like this before. First of all, what is probably the most important: I am a real person and not fictitious and this site is not an abusing, money-making one which we all have met before.