No representative image is catalogued for this subject yet.
What this is
A phrommachat (พรหมชาติ; Lanna phromchat) is the household fortune-book — the illustrated almanac that reads a life from its birth-year. Its core is the twelve-year animal cycle: your year sets your fate-figure, your auspicious and inauspicious days, your marriage compatibility, the reading of your dreams and moles and the omens that bear on you. Where the holasat almanac is the astrologer's working table, the phrommachat is the popular face of the same science — the book a family actually kept.
The catalogue gap
The catalogue holds zero witnesses whose title names a phrommachat — every spelling checked (phrommachat, phromchat, phrom chat) returns nothing across the 6,959 manuscripts.
Inference — like lersi, this is a shape of absence, not a sign of unimportance. The phrommachat is one of the most reproduced divination texts in the Thai world; its total absence here says the two academic sources digitised so far simply did not hold one under that name, not that Lanna lacked the genre. It sits near the top of the want-list: maximum thematic weight, zero availability.
Beyond the catalogue — the illustrated fate-book
Tradition — the following is background from the wider Thai tradition, not from these manuscripts; treat specifics as orienting, not authoritative.
- A picture-book of fate. The classic phrommachat is heavily illustrated — the twelve zodiac animals, paired male/female fate-figures, tables of lucky directions and days. It is one of the genres where the image is the text: a bare title line captures almost nothing of what the page carries.
- Syncretic roots. The name reads as Brahma-jāti ("Brahmā's kinds/births"): the tradition folds Brahmanical astrology into a Buddhist frame, exactly the divination-becomes-practice seam this archive tracks under astrology and magic & ritual.
- The popular register. Where a horoscope (holasat) needs a specialist, the phrommachat is meant to be consulted at home — compatibility before a marriage, a day chosen for a journey, a dream read the morning after. It is divination as everyday domestic technology.
Notes
- A prime image-store target. Because a phrommachat is its illustrations, any witness that surfaces should be captured as imagery first — this is precisely the material Phase-2 page-scanning exists to preserve.
- Where to find it. Tradition/Inference — likely reachable through vernacular and commercial sources (fortune-telling reprints, market almanacs) and other digitised collections rather than the two academic libraries crawled so far. A directed search for phromchat in Lanna holdings is the next move. (Not yet verified against specific holdings.)
- Read this as a scaffold. Its only hard catalogue fact is n = 0; everything else is clearly-marked tradition or inference, to be pruned toward the sources as real witnesses arrive.