Horā almanac (Holasat)

What this is

Holasat (horāsāstra, also spelled Horasat) is the almanac of the horā — the working manual of northern astrology: the tables, rules and reckonings by which a mo holasat casts a horoscope, fixes an auspicious day, reads a birth-star, and tells a client when to marry, build, travel or bury. If astrology is the genre, holasat is its beating heart — the practitioner's own book, opened at the moment of consultation. The catalogue holds 99 witnesses whose titles name it.

The most research-dense entity in the collection

Two numbers make holasat exceptional. First, it is almost entirely astrology (84 of 99 fall in that genre), so it is not spread thin across the corpus the way katha is — it is concentrated, a single coherent tradition. Second, and more striking: 91 of the 99 witnesses are flagged research-priority — 92%, the densest priority-share of any subject the scorer touches. For an archive whose priorities run on the wichaa core — divination, astrology, magic — holasat is as close to pure signal as the collection offers.

The shape of the collection — a paper technology

The material profile is the clearest single fact and the real finding here. The canonical genres are 90-plus-percent palm-leaf; holasat inverts that entirely — 84 mulberry-paper against just 14 palm-leaf. This is not an archival text inscribed once and shelved. It is a working document: consulted, annotated, copied and recopied on cheap paper because it was in daily use and wore out. The horā manual is a paper technology, and its support tells you it lived in the practitioner's hands, not the library's cabinet.

The rest follows. Script is 94% Tham Lanna. Dated witnesses are few (4, running 1882–1947) and late — paper does not survive, and these are recent working copies of a much older art. And its geography has no dominant library: Wat Yuan, Wat Pa Mueat, Wat Phra That Lampang Luang, the Tai Lue Wat Nong Bua all hold a handful each. Like the other vernacular working genres, holasat lived scattered across every muang where a mo practised, not concentrated in one great scholastic collection.

Notes

• It rarely stands alone. Almost every witness is an untitled bundle: Holasat, Tholanisan (almanac + calendar), Holasat lae pithikam (almanac + ritual), Katha, Holasat, Sainyasat lae holasat, Pu thao son lan, Holasat (elders' teaching + almanac). The horā manual is the anchor of the household divination book, bound together with katha, su khwan, saiyasat and folk-didactic. To read holasat is to read the practitioner's whole working kit.
• Watch the alias. Holasat / Holsat / Horasat / Horā fragment across transliterations — the count here folds them together deliberately, and this is exactly the normalisation an entity article exists to hold. Separating the tamla holasat (the rule-tables proper) from the almanac-plus-ritual bundles is the obvious next pass.
• A prime crawl target. High importance, high priority-density, and in active living-practitioner use: the holasat corpus is central to the wichaa and under-represented in the digitized record so far. It should sit near the top of the next collection round, and any working mo holasat's manual — historical or contemporary — is a primary source worth documenting.