Growing numbers of anthropologists and religious studies scholars have detailed the rise of diverse new forms of both fundamentalist and magical religiosity in Southeast Asia over recent decades. They have also outlined the ways that these phenomena fundamentally challenge the predictions of Weberian sociology—still influential in fields such as history and politics—that modernity is a process of ineluctable rationalization and a condition of unavoidable disenchantment. But these empirically based critical studies have not yet presented integrated accounts of how modernity produces new modalities of enchantment. While we have excellent critiques of Weberian sociology, we have comparatively few positive accounts that theorize the productive relationship of modernity to magic and enchantment. In this study I argue that since the end of the Cold War the performatively productive role of ritual practice operating in the specific conditions of neoliberal capitalism, new visual technologies and digital media have been engines of modern religious enchantment in Thailand and across mainland Southeast Asia. The performative effects of ritual practice (Tambiah 1977, 1981, 1985) provide a frame for bringing separate accounts of the enchantments of neoliberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000) and the auraticizing effects of new media (Morris 2000a), as well as the retreat of rationalizing state power from the religious field (Hefner 2010), into a fuller account of how modernity makes new forms of magic.

My analysis is built upon a study of cults of wealth centred on a range of Buddhist, Hindu, Chinese and Thai spirits and deities that have become prominent features of the religious landscape in Thailand since the 1980s. While having diverse origins, these cults are not isolated instances of ritual innovation but rather form a richly intersecting symbolic complex that is now central to national religious life, including monastic Buddhism. Emerging from multiple religious and cultural origins, I detail the many similarities among the cults of wealth, their close relationship with cults of amulets and professional spirit mediumship, and I trace how these prosperity cults intersect symbolically in a wide range of settings and ritual products.

Introduction: The Making and Remaking of Magic in Global Modernity

The diverse new forms of supernatural observance and magical ritual apparent in Thailand, and across Buddhist and Confucian East and Southeast Asia (see Yang 2000; Bautista 2012; Brac de la Perrière et al. 2014), demonstrate the intense religious dynamism that emerges in the context of market-centred, mediatized global modernity (Dirlik 2005). The novel forms of magical ritual in Thailand may escape classical definitions of modernity, but they are not premodern traditions.

On the contrary, they are highly contemporary phenomena. As David Lyon contends, “[m]any modernities exist, and they may be shown to have different ways of relating to the religious sphere” (Lyon 2000, p. 21). The Thai cults of wealth provide a lens through which we can see broader processes operating at the global level. This emergence of magical cults of wealth out of the economic and social conditions of late twentieth-century capitalism challenges us to rethink the meaning, character and direction of modernity. Indeed, the efflorescence of spirit cults in the midst of rapid market-based economic growth contradicts classical theories of the relationship of religion and capitalist expansion. As Sanjay Seth observes,

Introduction: Modernity and the Making and Remaking of Enchantment

The diverse and diverging trends of religious change across the globe in recent decades have taken many by surprise. In Southeast Asia many scholars of religion have been kept busy keeping up with the pace of change by detailing the empirical contours of the many new ritual-based magical and doctrinalist reform movements that have appeared with such rapidity. As Boike Rehbein and Guido Sprenger observe,

Change in post–Cold War social reality has often outpaced our capacity to develop analyses that account for what is happening in the world’s religious cultures. In Chapter One I noted that in some of his writings Weber described modernity as a complex of contradictory rationalizing and potentially enchanting processes. However, as a sociologist Weber only presented a theory of modernity as a force for disenchantment, and this theoretical exposition still dominates much contemporary social analysis. By and large it has been anthropologists who study non-Western societies who have presented theories of how modernity may be productive of new forms of enchantment. A range of anthropological studies have provided theoretical perspectives on the respective impacts of state power, capitalism, new media and the performative force of ritual on religious thought and practice. We now have enough reflective analyses based on detailed empirical work to begin to address broader comparative questions of what is taking place across the full spread of religious expression in Southeast Asia. As Jean Comaroff states in critically assessing the research now at hand, a key guiding principle is the need “to be cognizant of the complexity of the world, to be accountable to its paradoxes” (Comaroff and Kim 2011, p. 176).

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.

Introduction: Autonomization and Contextualization of Modalities of Modern Enchantment

Followers of the cults of wealth engage with the deities at the centre of these ritual forms in a number of ways. Each deity and spirit in the cults has a dedicated khatha, a mantra or incantation usually composed in a mix of Pali and Sanskrit that is chanted by the devotee when worshipping or requesting a boon or blessing. These khatha are often written on boards attached to the base of public shrines that house images of the deities in order to facilitate ritual worship by the faithful. If a requested boon is granted, then it is incumbent upon the devotee to recompense and thank the deity in a ritual called kae bon. Each deity is believed to have a set of personal preferences, and the type of kae bon ritual performed will depend on the particular likes and interests attributed to the boon-granting spirit. Some deities, such as Brahma at the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok, are believed to enjoy being entertained by Thai classical dance and music, and a troupe of professional dancers and musicians is always present at this shrine ready to be hired to perform for the deity by devotees whose boons have been granted. Other deities are believed to enjoy particular forms of food or drink, and offerings of these items may be placed at the deity’s shrine in a ritual expression of thanks.

Thailand’s cults of wealth also lie at the intersection of two other major phenomena that are distinctive emergent features of the Thai religious field and which reflect novel modalities of ritual enchantment; namely, the cult of amulets sacralized by magic monks and professional spirit mediumship. One of the most widespread and popular ways of demonstrating attachment to a deity, or to request a spirit’s helping presence, is to own or wear an amulet bearing an image of the god. Sacralized amulets are an especially notable category of ritual objects that represent the deities and spirits of the cults of wealth. As Justin McDaniel notes, the cult of amulets in Thailand has expanded well beyond representing figures that relate directly to Theravada Buddhism:

In the early twenty-first century, the Thai cults of wealth have continued to proliferate and diversify, spreading into new forms and finding new followers in Thailand as well as in neighbouring East and Southeast Asian countries. One new figure in the Thai pantheon of wish-granting deities is Thep Than-jai, the “Deity [who grants wishes] immediately”. Thep Than-jai is the Thai name given to the Burmese spirit being called a bobogyi, a generic spiritual figure that in Burma is believed to guard treasures buried beneath pagodas and whose name means “great-grandfather” (Brac de la Perrière and Munier-Gaillard 2019). In Thailand, Thep Than-jai is represented as a grandfatherly figure dressed in regal Burmese attire standing and pointing his index figure towards the faithful. In Burma, this figure is linked to the foundation of the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, where he is believed to be pointing to the location where relics of past Buddhas are supposed to have been enshrined.

The cult of the Hindu deity Ganesh has also expanded rapidly since the turn of the new century and increasing numbers of white-robed lay ascetics called reusi, from the Sanskrit rishi, now offer spiritual advice for wealth and wellbeing (see McDaniel 2013). New digital media and social networks have quickly become central features of the expanding field of Thai popular ritual and belief across the region. In 2017, The Nation reported how a fortune teller reusi in Northeast Thailand named Toon used the internet to provide divinatory commercial advice to clients in several countries:

Introduction: Strategies for Negotiating Cultural and Religious Multiplicity

The fractured structure of modernity that arrived in Thailand in association with Western imperial power engendered fissures within the total field of religious practice; structurally, administratively as well as in terms of academic analysis. While monastic Buddhism and the canonical Theravada Buddhist scriptures, the Tipitaka, came under state administrative control, support and sponsorship, multiform varieties of ritual conducted predominantly by lay specialists outside of monasteries largely fell outside the scope of state interest and bureaucratic oversight. And while scholars affiliated with departments of religious studies, history and politics studied Buddhist monastic structures and doctrine, research on non-monastic cults has predominantly been undertaken by anthropologists. These formal and academic divisions within the Thai religious field belie the fact that the religious lives of large numbers, perhaps the majority, of Thai practitioners from all walks of life cross over and between Buddhist and non-Buddhist ritual observance. To some extent this fact has been obscured by a regime of representation, instituted in response to Western power, that has foregrounded Buddhism while placing ritual practice in a subsidiary position in the background of religious life.

The fracturing of academic research on Thai religiosity between different disciplines, which have focused on Buddhism and non-Buddhist ritual separately, means that to a significant extent we have lacked conceptual categories and theoretical models of the total field that constitutes the religious lives of so many people in the country. This gap also means that we lack generally agreed frames by which to understand new forms of magical practice both in relation to establishment Buddhism as well as the deep history of divination, astrology, spirit possession and other ritual practices. Religious studies has struggled to provide concepts for the structuring patterns of the Thai religious field because its origins in analyses of monotheistic doctrine-based religions has left it largely bereft of ways of imagining a cultural order that is founded upon irreducible, and expanding, difference rather than notions of a uniting set of teachings.