Chapter Six - The Symbolic Complex of Thai Cults of Wealth

Summary

Introduction: From the Margins to the Centre of the Thai Religious Field

Since the mid-1990s, images and representations of the diverse range of Thai prosperity cults detailed in the previous chapters have increasingly occurred together in the same locations. They have appeared jointly among the images installed on spirit medium shrines, in collections of amulets and other ritual objects, in the symbolism of commercial products such as on New Year greeting cards, and on official postage stamps. While the figures associated with these movements are the objects of distinct devotional cults, an increasing symbolic collocation and interpenetration of the different strands of the Thai cults of wealth has become increasingly evident.

For example, On 5 December 1998, the birthday of the late King Bhumibol and at the height of the Asian economic crisis, Khao Sot daily newspaper carried an advertisement for a set of five gold images that included Kuan Im in her form with a thousand arms (Kuan Im phan meu); Kuan Im in a meditation pose (Kuan Im pang samathi); Ganesh; the Lord Buddha being protected by a serpent naga king (Phra nak prok); and the magic monk Luang Pu Thuat. All these images had been sacralized in a pluk sek magical empowerment ritual on 27 November 1998 under the sponsorship of the then Sangharaja or Supreme Patriarch of the Thai sangha at Wat Bowornniwet, the most important royal monastery in Thailand. The advertisement stated that funds raised from the sale of these diverse images were to be used to renovate Wat Wachirathammawat monastery in Phitsanulok Province in the country’s mid-north. In addition to showing their growing intersection, this example also indicates the extent to which deities and spiritual figures associated with the Chinese, Hindu and Theravada cults of wealth had become mainstream religious forms that had been brought within the scope of state-sponsored official Buddhism by the final years of the 1990s.

In this chapter I show how the coming together of representations of the different cults of wealth in diverse fields reflects the structuring principles of vernacular Thai religiosity outlined in Chapter Three. The symbolic complex is an amalgam of representations of discrete, non-syncretized cults that—while all being found in the same ritual sites, commercial locations and mediatized spaces—remain ontologically distinct.