Profile: Sirirat Rattanasuanjig – it’s all on the cards

Fortune teller Sirirat Rattanasuanjig, or ‘Adina’ as she is better known, had a near-death experience when she was a child. She was a bystander as a couple were quarreling. One of them had a knife which ended up embedded in her chest.

She was rushed to the hospital and nearly died from her injury, but eventually pulled through. The near-death experience, she says, turned out to be a gift that has given her psychic abilities, which she uses to consult people on life matters and tell fortunes with tarot cards.

Over the past ten years Adina’s unique ability to see inside people’s hearts and minds to give advice on their life’s path has earned her a reputation as a respected fortune teller and many of her clients are A-list celebrities, politicians and wealthy business people.

Adina travels between Phuket and Bangkok to meet with her clients, for which she earns about 20,000 baht a week.

For her, fortune telling was a vocation that developed naturally over time, but as a business it is one that requires little financial investment. Of course it’s not something just anyone can do.

While some may consider fortune telling and psychic abilities pseudo science, Adina insists that if she wasn’t telling the truth to her clients, she wouldn’t have kept them for so long. “The people I work with see that I know their past and can predict their future, or at least give them advice on the decisions they can make.”

“Fortune telling is a multi-disciplinary practice that brings together the supernatural, psychology and probability. Fortune tellers have to be well versed in all these areas to do their job properly.”

Adina says her job is to ‘heal minds’, which is not something people with a troubled mind can always do on their own. Calling in a fortune teller is often the last resort.

“People call on me when they cannot solve their problems by themselves. They want to know what will happen in their future. It’s human nature, really. Some come to me in tears. Maybe their business has gone down the tubes or they are troubled about love issues, so we become a personal consultant.

“We can’t always know everything about their past, but we can see the effects past events have had on their current situation. This is where knowledge of psychology comes in… sometimes it’s necessary to tell a white lie.”

But “the cards don’t lie” says Adina. Each card has a meaning.

“The cards you pick are for your own story. I ask people to shuffle the cards to begin a reading. Some will shuffle the cards seven times and others only three times. These actions are all part of the client telling his or her story,” she says.

In tarot, nine is the magic number. In a reading, Adina tells her clients to pick only nine cards from the entire set spread face down in front of them.

“These nine cards tell an entire life story – the past, the present and the future,” she says.

— Kongleaphy Keam