Then, again, if born on a Thursday, a man will probably be mild; on Friday, talkative; on Saturday, ill-tempered and quarrelsome; on Sunday, parsimonious. Saturday is a bad day for everything. Not only has every day its special character and its fixed letters, but there is also (according to Mr. Scott) a particular animal assigned to symbolize it—for example, a guinea-pig stands for Friday; a dragon for Saturday; a tiger for Monday—and red or yellow wax candles are made in the forms of these animals to be offered at the Pagoda by the pious. Each worshipper offers the creature-candle representing his birth-day. Then a careful note is made of the exact hour of birth, with the important object of drawing up the child’s horoscope. This may be delayed till the fifth or sixth year, and a Brāhman astrologer may be called in for the purpose. He records the year, the month, the day and hour at which the child was born; the name given to it and the planet in the ascendant at the moment. All this is scratched neatly on a palm-leaf with a metal style. On the other side are a number of cabalistic squares and numbers from which future calculations may be made. A person born on Monday remains under the influence of the moon for fifteen years. Then he passes under Mars for eight years. At the age of twenty-three Mercury presides over him, and so on through all the planets to the end of his life, which may be protracted to 108 years. Rāhu, and especially Saturn, have a particularly sinister influence. A man does most of the stupid and wicked things in his life while he is in Saturn’s house. Other details will be found in ‘Shway Yoe.’ The horoscope is carefully kept by the parents until the child is old enough to take care of it himself, and thenceforward it is guarded as a valuable possession. All these Buddhist customs have their counterpart in the ceremonies of Brāhmanism and Hindūism. For example, the Hindūs have their birth-ceremonies (Jāta-karman), and their name-giving ceremony (Nāma-karaṇa[163]), and the latter is a solemn religious act fraught with momentous consequences in its bearing on a child’s future. Hence Hindū boys are generally called after some god, or the name indicates that the child is the god’s servant. Horoscopes, too, are as important in India as in Buddhist countries[164]. In India, too, all Brāhman boys go through the ceremony of tonsure and cutting off the hair.