Khmer Zodiac

In the old Cambodian inscriptions, years are often given as chronograms, where words stand for numbers — "eyes" for two, "arrows" for five — or as numerals spelt out (Eade, after Cœdès). The Khmer year carries the name of one of twelve animals and a number from one to ten in Pali, Ekasak to Samrethisak; since there are twelve names and ten numbers, the same name and the same number come back together only after sixty years (Faraut; Leclère). Faraut, writing in 1910, says that the twelve names then served only in astrology and to fix the date of a document, and that the era used for astronomy, for official acts and for private ones was the Chulasakarat.

The names of the years are not the Khmer words for the animals. George Cœdès showed that most of them were related to the animal names of the Muong, a language close to Vietnamese; Michel Ferlus has since shown that all twelve, together with the word for "year", were borrowed from Old Vietnamese. The ancient Vietnamese had translated the Chinese cycle into their own words; the Khmers took that Vietnamese cycle without translating it, through the exchanges between ancient Vietnam and ancient Cambodia, and the Siamese then borrowed it from the Khmers. Ten of the thirteen terms are found in Khmer inscriptions, the word for "year" as early as the sixth and seventh centuries (Ferlus). The Cambodians take the second year, čhlóv, for the ox, but after the study of Cœdès the word means the buffalo in the Muong languages it was borrowed from; and the fifth is for them the nāga (nâk), taken to be a serpent (Porée-Maspero).

The animal changes at Moha Songkran, the moment the Sun enters the first sign. For 2026 the Ministry of Cults and Religion announced it for Tuesday 14 April at 10:48 in the morning, the start of the year of the Horse, eighth of the decade; Wednesday 15 April was Vonabot and Thursday 16 April Leung Sak, three days in all. Faraut already described a New Year of three or four days: the day of entry, the days in between and Langsak, which closes it. The sources do not all agree: Bizot writes that the new year that changes the name and the number begins on the first day of Chet (March/April). In the Thai record, Eade notes that some, Cœdès among them, hold that the animal changed on the first of Caitra and the number of the year at the lunar New Year; he knows of no certain evidence for this in the early record, while an inscription of 1777 from Suratthani gives good evidence to the contrary.

Each year the official calendar announces the deity who comes down at New Year. In the calendar of 1908, translated by Faraut's son Léon, a son of the gods dressed in red, with pomegranate flowers at his ears, a spiked wheel in his right hand and a conch in his left, rides a garuḍa and leads a hundred thousand koṭi of gods around Mount Meru; the same calendar foretells a middling rice harvest, with the people having as much pain as joy, rice in the fields bearing three tenths while the other seven are lost, many skin diseases, great winds and storms. In the calendar of 1910 that Leclère quotes, the deity, dressed in black and riding a pig, takes from a crystal cave on Mount Kailāsa the holy head of Kapila Mahā Brahma and carries it around Mount Meru. It is not the same deity every year, Leclère writes, but each, when it returns, always has the same colour, the same weapons, the same food, the same flower and the same mount. The directive of 2026 still names the deity of the new year.

To Porée-Maspero's knowledge there is no Khmer work on the twelve-year cycle as a whole: what is known lies scattered in the treatises of the ācār, the masters of ceremonies, and in the texts collected by the Commission of Customs of Cambodia (1962). The divination manuals Bizot saw among the manuscripts saved from Cambodia in 1975 are never dated, often illustrated, written for masters and so give few explanations; some copies may go back to the eighteenth century, and their content is usually much older (Bizot, 2013).