Dr look (mŏr doo) หมอดู

I’ve been looking for a psychic ever since I got back to Thailand.

My interests in the psychic/metaphysical arts goes way back to childhood, waelaa chan pendèk. After my father’s death, this archaeologist in the making went digging for clues for who he was. And when I found his old books I scrutinized his collection.

One book (not the red one mysteriously labeled Kama Sutra which I offhandedly put aside) in particular caught my attention. It was a white book with a sphere on the cover. Within the sphere night and day were divided up in a yin/yang sort of way – white stars against a dark blue sky inhabited one side of the circle and the sun with the signs of the zodiac the other.

I put the book in my room, along with other odds and ends like his yellow construction hat from his engineering days. I looked through Your Horoscope and Your Dreams a lot. In fact, I had to tape it to keep the binding together. Even though it smelled bad, I’ve carried it with me all these years.

Of course, my mom had her own version of that kind of book. The dang thing frightened me – completely written in Thai with some rather odd drawings in it. It could have been a book of magic spells for all I knew. I didn’t like to be alone with the book, if you know what I mean.

But once I understood the basic concept of the book I asked her to “read my fortune” often (boi boi). She would also do a bit of fortune telling or reading from a regular deck of cards. I tried to have her explain how she reads the cards, but I was too young to make hearts or spades of it. In any case, the book held my fascination.

I recognized that the Thai version of the zodiac was in it, along with two other rather important pages that my mom frequented. On one of the pages there were two dragons intertwined. Along each dragon’s body were points, like pin pricks from head to tail. My mom would count along the points, like you would in a connect-the-dots coloring book. She would be counting years, as in which year were you born – 1973, 1974 and so on. I don’t know how she knew all this. Did I mention it was a big book?

So the idea is to see where you are located on the dragon and where maybe your partner or family members are located. If you and husband were on the same dragon then you two are compatible. If you were both located on the same dragon on the exact same point, then boo-yah! You two were super -uper compatible. (Sorry to throw around technical jargon here.) My mom started the counting for the male on one dragon and the female on the other dragon.

She would show me how I was located on a different dragon than herself and my brother. I would nod in agreement. This made sense, I often felt like the “black sheep” of the family. Then she would mention how my father and I were on the same dragon. This made sense, too. So obviously dad and mom were not on the same dragon and she’d explain that they were not meant to be – his death was a clear indication of their separation as represented on the dragons.

So you can imagine, as a teenager I would ask my mom to see if a potential guy and I were compatible many, many and many times. Finally, I stopped once I realized she was fibbing in order to move me away from particular men she wasn’t interested in. Oh mom.

The next page of great importance was one that housed a picture of a wheel. Along the wheel were different pictures or scenes of a man in various states. One picture was the head and shoulders of a man with his head in his hand looking bummed, for lack of a better word. But the most disturbing of them was a beheaded man. I think he was sitting on the ground with a ladder of sorts running vertically around his neck. Did I mention he was headless?

My mom would count around the circle, using each picture as a stopping point until she landed on one. I think she went clockwise when she counted for a man and counterclockwise for a woman. Each picture represented different years in your life and there were good years and years in which you needed to be more cautious. She showed me the year my father died – it wasn’t a happy picture, even as a child I could interpret that much.

Mom would also ask us if we dreamed of any numbers. “What did we dream about?” was a very common question. She would either use the numbers or interpret our dreams in order to find said number, so she could use them for let’s say – investment purposes.

Being immersed in the Thai culture gave me the concept of luck or lack thereof. Outside of the world of God, there were things you could do, things you could carry that would help you in whatever area of life you needed assistance. I think that belief system alone instilled in me a sense of other-worldliness, maybe even magic.

Whenever I asked what this or that, it was for was always the same answer, good luck. Apart from the culture of how to act or not, there was always this element of luck. I have not shaken those beliefs even today. I have not even tried. The only thing I have tried to do is not take it so seriously.

Hmmm. I guess it hasn’t worked. I don’t want to tell you what the astrologer told me, just in case it comes true. Like a birthday wish. Maybe next week.

Part 2 🙂