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Kevin, I hope you don't mind, but I shared part of our conversation with the forum at Sutta Central, to see if any monastics, or any of the Dhamma scholars/student on that site (of which I am a member), have any thoughts on this most compelling subject. see https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/thai-buddhism-muay-thai-aesthetics-and-thai-animist-culture/16140 I'm going to continue to do some informal research on my own...your question: It would be super interesting to know what animistic, magical practices were preserved throughout the century, and the wat pedagogy of Muay Thai itself, and how much the two came together if at all. is captivating and worthy of study.

I wish we could have these kinds of conversations! (This mode of analysis, instinctively, feels far from Thai conceptualization about things, to me.) I would point out, also interestingly enough, that even though it is true that much of Muay Thai was transmitted through wat education, the State formalization of Buddhism that began with the turn of the 20th century, and extended through the time of the article above, did work to really narrow the diversity of Thai Buddhism (and likely Muay Thai) in that process. As King Chulalongkorn, for instance, named (and therefore ostensibly created the "schools" of Muay Boran in 1910, this has been seen by historians as an attempt to actually secularize Muay Thai in the country, by putting under State camp auspices. These two dates in our Modernization of Muay Thai bring this forward: The Modernization of Muay Thai - a timeline It would be super interesting to know what animistic, magical practices were preserved throughout the century, and the wat pedagogy of Muay Thai itself, and how much the two came together if at all.