Fortune-telling manuscript

Fortune-telling manuscripts of this type were fairly common in the nineteenth century, and people of all backgrounds referred to them—or had a specialist interpret them—in order to learn what the future held. "The sort of fortunetelling practiced by the ordinary Thai calls for no reckoning of the stars and planets, and the fortune-telling texts are simple and popular, quite similar in fact to the sort of fortune-telling we find today in our newspapers and magazines," said Henry Ginsburg, the Western scholar who has studied such manuscripts most thoroughly.

The Asian Art Museum's manuscript provides instructions, diagrams, and illustrations for several methods of divination. One involves the twelve-year animal cycle of rat, ox, rabbit, and so on. Each of the years is illustrated with four different forms of its animal—one for each
quarter—and a brief text describes the characteristics of persons born in each of those quarters. There is also a drawing of the personified "mascot" of the year.