Paṭiloma (Pali, "against the hair") is reverse order — the paired opposite of anuloma, "with the hair," forward order. The pair is canonical before it is magical: at ordination a monk recites the five parts of the body forward and backward, เกสา โลมา นะขา ทันตา ตะโจ then ตะโจ ทันตา นะขา โลมา เกสา (Conducting Religious Rituals, Complete Edition, p.19 and p.25), and traditional medicine sorts the three disease-origins the same way, "forward and in reverse, adjusting by the age of the disease" (Thai Traditional Medicine, vol. 2, p.180).
The wichaa takes that same operation — run it backward — and turns it into a technology in its own right, in two forms. A katha may be recited backward, syllable by syllable, as its own distinct rite. And a katha may be built as a mirror to begin with: a formula whose second half is the first half read in reverse, so that reciting it forward and reciting it backward are the same act. The Kai entity page walks through one worked example, the rooster's own katha; this page is the general pattern behind it, and the wider register the catalogue and the contributed textbooks preserve around it — including its extension into the drawn yantra, where the same operation runs across a grid instead of down a line.
The single most attested reversal-rite in the printed corpus is the Itipiso recited backward. The Compendium of Ancient Katha (p.22) gives the full text syllable by syllable — ติ วา คะ ภะ โธ พุท นัง สา นุส… ๚ะ๛ — with an application table keyed to the count: 108 times over water for invulnerability, 90 against poison, 63 to propitiate an astrological affliction, 30 to subdue a crocodile, 24 before battle, 10 against a solar or lunar ill-omen, 4 to make a blade slip from an enemy's hand. Vedic Katha for the Chai Chatri (p.39) calls it plainly "a reversed or counter-spell," used so that "his enemies will merely think of doing him harm but not dare to — it instead becomes a source of affection." A third witness, Luang Pho Thob's own katha set (The Life of Luang Pho Thob and the Katha He Used, p.127), keeps it among his personal formulae; a fourth (Making Sacred Charms and Amulets, p.112, consecrated 108 times) calls it "a reversal-katha for potency."
The reversed Refuge — ยะธาพุทโธนะ for นะโมพุทธายะ — is the single most frequent reversal-token in the corpus: 48 occurrences across six of the contributed books. Its own smaller sibling, มะอะอุ / อุอะมะ, is a mirror pair in miniature — three syllables and their own reflection, nested inside a line about the nested reversal of nine.
Beside the reversed recitation sits the built palindrome — not a text that gets read backward, but a text made of nothing else. The rooster's katha has a sibling on the very same manuscript page: คาถาพญากาน้ำ, the Cormorant King, เทวากานิ นิกาวาเท · วาหิกาสุ สุกาหิวา (Yantra Inscription Formulas in Mixed Khom and Thai, p.12) — the identical four-pair mirror architecture, a different bird. The same manuscript carries a matched pair of mirror-katha, "Brahma Surveying the World," right side and left side, each independently palindromic (p.14) — symmetry doubled, once inside each formula and once again across the pair. And คาถามงกุฏพระพุทธเจ้า, the Crown of the Buddha — อิติปิโสวิเสเสอิ อิเสเสพุทธะนาเมอิ… — is built the same way and recurs across seven of the contributed books, used as a self-protection recitation before lighting a rite's candles and as the formula chanted into protective powder.
Most of this register is Pali-Khom nonsense-syllable, deliberately untranslatable. One rare exception is in plain Thai: ม้อล้อข้อไข ไขข้อม้อล้อ — "Katha to Neutralize Cursed Saliva" (Compendium of Ancient Katha, p.27). And one pair is coded to a specific being: Rahu's day-katha and night-katha (Yantra Craft and Katha of the Lanna Lineage), each phrase of the night recitation folding around a repeated pivot syllable, มะมะ — a mirror with a fixed point at its center, the hinge that does not move.
A third device sits beside the strict mirror: cyclic rotation, the same syllables run through every position in turn rather than reflected once. Phāsangsimō — พาสังสิโม สังสิโมนา สิโมนาสัง โมนาสังสิ (Making Sacred Charms and Amulets, p.141) — is recited to jam and disarm firearms, four lines that are one cycle of four syllables written out in full. A named construction for this survives in Ajarn Thep Sarikabutr's own words (Mind-Stream: Secrets of Saiyasat, p.151): the heart-syllable พุทธะสังมิ rotated through all four of its own syllables, called อุณาโลม ปฏิโลม, "cycling them through until sixteen syllables are complete — that makes exactly one khaap." The same logic, at 108-fold scale, generates the นะ rosary: "Namo Buddhaya, Mo Buddhayana, Buddhayanamo… rotate the syllables onward like this until all 108 are complete" (Maha Yant Manual, p.162) — a cyclic group inscribed bead by bead onto a physically closed loop.
A labeled example of the same cyclic construction sits in the Maha Yant Manual itself (p.81): a 4×4 grid reading row by row นะ มะ พะ ทะ / มะ พะ ทะ นะ / พะ ทะ นะ มะ / ทะ นะ มะ พะ — every row and column carrying all four syllables once, a clean rotation square rather than a mirror. The same book elsewhere (p.109) labels an explicit reversal by name: "อุทธังอัทโธ ธังอุทโธ อัท อัทโธ อุทธัง โธอัทธังอุท ๆ เสกเป็นอนุโลมปฏิโลม" — four syllables cycled through their rotations until the closing line, โธอัทธังอุท, is the exact reverse of the opening one, with the text naming its own technique: "anuloma-patiloma."
ตรีนิสิงเห turns out to recite a magic square as a litany rather than draw one: tri-nisiṅghe ๓, satta-nāge ๗, pañca ๕, catu-devā ๔, cha ๖, eka-yakkhā ๑, nava ๙, aṭṭha-arahantā ๘ (the same manual, p.45) — the digits one through nine, no repeats, named as a roll-call of beings rather than written as a grid. The powder procedure that follows (p.47–49) chalks the square onto a board, then erases and works the dust into the amulet: the letter-square is not depicted on the finished object, it is consumed into it.
The clearest single sentence joining spoken reversal to drawn diagram is in the instructions for the Khu Chiwit ("life-companion") takrut, whose two faces are square grids of Khom syllables: "ลงแล้ว ให้เอาคาถาที่ลงในยันต์ ทั้งข้างหน้าข้างหลัง ตามตาราง เอาตัวเองเสกเป็นอนุโลม ปฏิโลม" — "Take the katha inscribed in the yant, front and back, according to the table, and consecrate it upon itself forward and backward, until the table is complete" (Making Sacred Charms and Amulets, p.132).
The grid is the score; anuloma-paṭiloma recitation is how it is traversed. It is the same instrument in two registers, not two traditions that happen to resemble each other.
The strongest case for that claim is a diagram with no syllables in it at all. Akhom Magic of the Phra Narai Era (p.118) draws a "Ruesi Yantra" as a 9×9 grid of plain numerals, row by row:
Every row reads the same left to right as right to left; the grid also mirrors top to bottom, row 1 matching row 9, row 2 matching row 8, and so on in to the single 1 at dead center. A palindrome running in every direction at once, on a page that never uses the word — which is exactly why a search for the vocabulary of reversal will not find it. The same manuscript's smaller figures nearby (p.111–112) run the identical idea in miniature, a 3×3 and a small cross of numerals, with the symmetry sometimes only partial: whether that is a deliberate weaker charm or a transcription slip in an unseen scan is not yet resolved.
The same manuscript's two Rahu figures each carry a yantra on the chest, sun-radiance and moon-radiance — a mirror pair of squares, not just of texts — and the "elephant-ear Itipiso" of the Khom-Thai inscription formulas is one canonical text folded along four different paths into four different diagrams, the identical string worn as four separate devices depending on how it is walked.
Symmetry gets carried into space, too. The eight-direction Itipiso re-segments the same text eight ways, one per compass point, and sends the practitioner out to enchant eight clods of earth and hurl them to the eight directions — a yantra with no ink at all, laid onto the ground itself (Compendium of Ancient Katha, p.27; Maha Yant Manual, p.6). And the mirror keeps a fixed point even when it is drawn: Somdet To's anti-thief yantra may be written entirely in reverse, "but the letter ร must always remain as it is" (Yantra Craft and Katha of the Lanna Lineage) — a drawn palindrome with one glyph held exempt at its center.
Search the palm-leaf catalogue directly for the operation and it goes nearly silent: ถอยหลัง ("backward") and ปฏิโลม score zero across all 6,990 titles; อนุโลม scores three, and only loosely — one is a canonical Abhidhamma matika text (บาฬีอนุโลมทุกกติกกปัฏฐาน, Wat Sung Men), unrelated to spell-craft. But search for the text most often reversed and the catalogue answers: six witnesses name the Itipiso outright, spread from Nan to Phrae to Phayao to Chiang Mai — Wat Phra That Chang Kham Worawihan's "Itipiso kaeo" (33pp), Wat Si Mongkhon's "Itipiso kum kaeo" (palm-leaf, 11pp), Wat Chiang Man's "Cumnum itipiso" — "Itipiso assembly" — bundled with a Ramayana text (58pp), and, most suggestively, Wat Sung Men's "Sap itipiso" — สับ, "interleaved" or "cut and mixed" — a title that, on this page's evidence, may well name exactly the folding and permutation devices the printed treatises document.
Those six sit under four different genre labels — two filed as astrology, two as liturgy and chanting, one as Buddhist canonical, one as "other" — and not one of them under magic and ritual. Inference — that scatter is itself evidence: a text whose power lies in how it is walked rather than in what it says gives a cataloguer nothing to file it by, so it lands wherever the surrounding bundle happens to point.
Inference — the base text is catalogued; the operation performed on it is not. Reversal and rotation are section-level phenomena, worked inside the same untitled "ยันต์ และคาถา" bundles documented on the yantra entity page — 74 witnesses, mostly Nan and Lampang, overwhelmingly mulberry paper. A title search alone will always undercount this register; it has to be read for, not searched for. Palindromic and reversal-built gathas in Thai and Lanna practice appear to be a genuine hole in open-access scholarship — none of the readings on this page have turned up in a Western-language study.
Two independent readings survive in the source material, neither borrowed from outside it. Tradition holds — the Wat Phlap lineage biography behind the rooster's katha stages a teaching dialogue: the four mirror-pairs are the โลกธรรมแปด, the eight worldly conditions — gain and loss, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. Each phrase, read forward and then back, enacts one pair — everything that arrives, reversed, is its own departure, and the chanter is asked to cling to neither direction. Tradition holds — the same thought, reached independently through an eclipse rather than a bird: reversal is read elsewhere in this tradition as the register proper to the being who runs the world backward, so that an eclipse itself becomes a palindrome — it undoes itself.
A third reading sits underneath both, and is testable against the manuscripts rather than only interpretive: the mirror doubles as a checksum. The Khom-Thai inscription formulas (manuscript 6977) actually transmit the rooster's second phrase with a dropped syllable — กสาทาเว for กุสาทาเว — and the structure itself is what exposes the error: check the phrase against its own reflection and the gap names itself. No circulating version of the katha, checked this way, keeps the broken form — including the rest of that same book, which prints the phrase correctly a hundred-odd pages later, in the consecration instructions for the Wild Rooster King yantra. One volume, two passes at one formula, and only the pass with no diagram beside it drops a syllable. Inference — a formula built to survive being read in both directions cannot be quietly corrupted in either one; that may be closer to why these texts were built as mirrors than any claim about their meaning.
Tradition — background from the wider region, not drawn from these manuscripts. The device has real depth outside Lanna. Sanskrit poetics has a whole class of verse built the same way — citrakāvya, "picture-poetry" — and its most prized form is the sarvatobhadra, "auspicious from every direction": a verse from the Kirātārjunīya or the Śiśupālavadha that reads identically forward, backward, and by column. The Pali poetics manual that would have reached Southeast Asian monasteries, the 12th-century Subodhālaṅkāra, tracks this Sanskrit tradition closely. Cambodian Buddhism kept its own developed practice of exactly this kind — François Bizot's study of the Itipiso Ratanamālā documents a Khmer liturgical text built the same way the printed treatises above build theirs, decomposed by letter-count and folded into yantra diagrams. Burmese in and sama — letter-squares of the weizzā path — are the nearest regional parallel to the lek-yant grids on this site's yantra page: power carried by placement in a grid rather than by sequence in a line. Whatever the exact transmission history, the pattern recurs everywhere Pali liturgical Buddhism took root: a text engineered to hold its shape under reversal is treated, across the region, as a text that protects.