Su khwan (สู่ขวัญ — "to call the khwan") is the soul-calling rite: the ceremony that summons a person's khwan — the vital essence, the life-spirit that can wander, take fright or leak away — back home to the body and binds it there with a cotton thread at the wrist. It is the most domestic and most universal of the northern rituals, performed at every threshold of life: birth, marriage, ordination, sickness, homecoming, the start of a journey. The catalogue holds 51 witnesses whose titles name it, sitting squarely in the wichaa working core — 38 of 51 flagged research-priority (75%).
The single most revealing pattern here is who gets a khwan. The titles show the rite reaching far past the human body:
This is the clearest window in the collection onto the animist, agricultural substrate beneath Tai Buddhism. The khwan-world is older than the monks: rice, buffalo, elephant and lord all carry the same wandering spirit, and the same thread-tying rite tends them all. To read the su khwan corpus is to read the layer of belief the Buddhist canon was laid on top of, still fully alive on the page.
Split almost evenly between palm-leaf (26) and mulberry paper (23) — a rite old enough to sit in the library yet worked often enough to live on paper — and overwhelmingly Tham Lanna (50 of 51). It clusters hard in Nan (23), led by Wat Si Mongkhon / Kong (8), the vernacular-temple pattern, well away from the canon's Wat Sung Men gravity. Barely dated (13 witnesses) across 1889–1973 — late, living, in-use.