Gyeryongsan

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The ridge is the thing one sees first. It runs jagged across the middle of the country, a line of granite teeth crowned with bent pines, and from the right angle it does not read as a mountain at all but as a body: a long serpent spine, and at its head a comb of rock standing up like the crest of a cock. The Koreans who named it called it after exactly that double shape — Gyeryongsan, the Rooster-Dragon Mountain, the dragon’s coil wearing the rooster’s crown. The name fixes a way of seeing the rock that is older than any record of it, and it fixes, too, the conviction that has gathered at the foot of this peak for six centuries: that a place shaped like that, at the center of the land, must hold power, and that the power is waiting to be loosed.

The mountain at the center

Gyeryongsan rises to 845 meters at its summit, Cheonhwangbong, in South Chungcheong province — Chungcheongnam-do — in the west-central reach of the peninsula, where the boundaries of Gongju, Gyeryong, Nonsan, and the great city of Daejeon meet on its slopes. It is a granite massif, hard old rock weathered into the sharp ridgeline that gives it its name; some twenty peaks above the valleys, roughly fifteen ravines threaded between them, and a spine-trail that runs almost wholly on bare exposed rock from one crest to the next. By the plain measure of height it is a middling mountain, lower than the great ranges of the east. By the measure that counts here it is among the first in the land.

That measure is geomantic. In the reading of pungsu — the Korean science of wind and water, the same art the Chinese call feng shui — a mountain is not inert stone but a node where the energy of the earth gathers and pools, and the lie of a ridge, the curl of a watercourse, the way a peak faces the rising or the setting sun, all decide how much of that energy a place commands. Gyeryongsan has long been reckoned to command an extraordinary share of it: traditionally counted among the most charged mountains in the country, a place where the qi of the earth runs thick and close to the surface. The shape that named it was read as the proof. A dragon is the auspicious beast of the geomancer’s craft, its body the very figure of a running energy-vein in the ground; a mountain whose ridge is a crested dragon is a mountain whose force announces itself in its outline. From that reading everything else at Gyeryongsan follows — the temples, the prophecy, the shrines, the long crowd of seekers in its valleys.

Cheonhwangbong and the rock spine of Gyeryongsan, South Chungcheong. Photo by Ryuch, CC BY-SA 3.0 (Wikimedia Commons).

The mountain entered written history through the dynasty that almost made it a capital. When the general Yi Seong-gye overthrew the Goryeo court in 1392 and founded the kingdom of Joseon, he set about choosing a seat for the new state, and the first ground his planners marked out was the southern foot of Gyeryongsan — the plain that came to be called Sindoan, “the site of the new capital.” Construction actually began there in 1393; foundation stones were laid, and more than a hundred of them survive on the spot to this day, registered now as a provincial cultural property — the literal footprint of a capital that was never raised. Within the year the project was abandoned. The court’s geomancers and ministers argued the place against itself: the site sat too far south and west of the peninsula’s center, its rivers too weak for the grain-barges a capital must feed on. In 1394 Yi Seong-gye took his capital instead to Hanyang, the walled basin on the Han River that is now Seoul. Gyeryongsan was left with its half-laid stones and the memory of the throne that had nearly chosen it — a memory that would, in time, curdle into something far more potent than a discarded survey.

The prophecy and the crowd

For what the founding dynasty set aside, a book picked up and turned against it. Sometime in the troubled middle stretch of the Joseon centuries — most likely after the devastations of the Japanese invasions of the 1590s and the Manchu invasions of the 1630s, though parts of the tradition were claimed to be older — there began to circulate, in handwritten copies passed hand to hand, a prophetic text called the Jeonggamnok, the “Record of Jeong Gam.” It is less a single book than a body of coded oracle, written in deliberate obscurity, full of glyph-splitting riddles and veiled geography. Its central message, the one that carried it across three centuries of Korean unrest, was blunt enough beneath the cipher: the dynasty of Yi was doomed, its mandate running out, and when it fell a new house would rise to replace it — the house of Jeong, led by a hidden righteous man, a “True Man” of that surname, who would come out of the sea and open a new and almost perfect age that would stand for centuries.

And the Jeonggamnok named the place where the new dynasty would raise its capital. It named Gyeryongsan. The Wikipedia summary of the Jeonggamnok records that the mountain held a particular weight in the prophecy as the predicted seat of the coming order — which is to say that the text reached for the one site the founders of the doomed dynasty had themselves marked for a capital and then thrown away. The irony is exact and it is the engine of everything that follows. The Yi had begun a capital at Sindoan and walked away; the oracle promised that the Jeong would finish what the Yi abandoned, on the same ground, when the Yi were gone. To a peasant or a fallen scholar reading the riddle in a bad year, the half-built stones at the mountain’s foot were not a ruin but a foundation waiting for its rightful dynasty.

The effect, over centuries, was a steady drift of the hopeful and the desperate toward the mountain. When a region rose in revolt, its leaders reached for the prophecy: the rebellion of Hong Gyeong-nae in 1811 and 1812 cast its army as the vanguard of the coming True Man, and Hong himself was a working geomancer. When the great anti-colonial uprising of the March First Movement of 1919 broke and was crushed, believers in the oracle came to Gyeryongsan and built villages at its foot to wait out the “great calamity” the text foretold and to be present when the new age dawned. Through the late Joseon, the Korean Empire, and the long humiliation of the Japanese colonial period, the plain of Sindoan filled with settlers who had come not to farm but to be near the mountain when the prophecy came true. By the colonial decades something on the order of eighty religious groups had their base there — communities built around the Jeonggamnok’s promise, or around the figure of Dangun the nation-founder, or around the cosmic symbol of the taegeuk, all of them waiting at the foot of the rooster-dragon for the world to turn over.

The mountain of the shamans and the new religions

Out of that waiting grew the thing for which Gyeryongsan is best known: that its slopes became, and remain, the densest concentration of unofficial Korean religious life anywhere in the country. The established faiths were present and ancient here — the mountain carries three Buddhist temples of the first rank, Gapsa traced to the early fifth century, Sinwonsa and Donghaksa to the seventh and eighth, each rebuilt after the wars and still working monasteries within the bounds of the modern park. But it is not the great temples that have given Gyeryongsan its particular charge. It is everything that gathered in the valleys around them.

The shamans came because the mountain is one of the most potent in the country for their work. In musok, the indigenous religion of the Korean spirits, the high places are where the gods are nearest — each peak the seat of its own Sansin, the mountain-lord, the white-bearded old man with his tiger, and a mountain charged with as much spirit-force as Gyeryongsan is a mountain where the spirits press close against the surface of the world. So the mudang, the shamans who serve those spirits, came to its ravines to do what cannot be done as well anywhere else: to pray, to perform the gut, the great rite in which the gods descend to ride the shaman’s body, and above all to be made. A person seized by the spirits’ call — the sinbyeong, the affliction that marks a future shaman — must be initiated before the sickness will lift and the calling turn into a vocation, and the most charged mountains are the places sought out for that initiation. Gyeryongsan is among the foremost of them. Its valleys filled with shrines and prayer-houses, dozens upon dozens of them, small halls and rock-altars and spring-side stations where shamans and pilgrims came to make offering and to be entered by the gods. By recent count the mountain has held on the order of sixty shamanic shrines, one of the densest such clusters in Korea — a whole landscape of the unofficial sacred packed into the folds of a single peak.

Gyeryongsan National Park, South Chungcheong. Photo by Ryuch, CC BY-SA 3.0 (Wikimedia Commons).

And the same ground that drew the shamans cradled a whole crop of new Korean religions. The late nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the great age of religious founding on the peninsula — a time when prophets arose proclaiming that the old heaven was passing and a new one opening, the era the movements called the Great Opening of the Later Heaven. Many of them rose in the orbit of the Jeonggamnok and gravitated to the prophesied mountain. The teachings that grew from Kang Jeungsan, the healer of the turn of the century whom his followers hold to have been the Supreme God come down in a human body, spread into a family of more than a hundred movements — the Jeungsan churches, of which the largest Korean new religion, Daesun Jinrihoe, is an offshoot — and these and others made the Gyeryongsan country a heartland. To stand on the prophesied mountain was to stand where the new age was promised to begin, and the founders and the faithful of religion after religion built their headquarters and their prayer-halls and their waiting-communities in the shadow of the crest. For a long stretch of the modern era Gyeryongsan was, in the most literal sense, the place in Korea where the most people were waiting hardest for the world to be remade.

In all of this the mountain became the great visible theater of the indigenous current in Korean religion — the strand that runs beneath and around Buddhism, Confucianism, and the Daoist inheritance rather than being any of them. Here the shaman’s worship of the spirits and the prophet’s hunger for a renewing age, the two oldest impulses of the Korean sacred, ran together and ran strongest, in the open, on the slopes of one peak. What the Confucian state had despised, what the colonial authorities had cataloged and policed, what the modernizers would later try to clear away, gathered at Gyeryongsan in the densest concentration the country could show.

Park, clearance, and persistence

In the second half of the twentieth century the modern state laid two contradictory hands on the mountain. With one it consecrated Gyeryongsan as a thing to be preserved: on the last day of 1968 it was designated a national park — among the earliest in the country, declared the year after the first of them, Jirisan — its some sixty-five square kilometers of granite ridge, valley forest, and ancient temple given over to protection, and now visited by more than a million people a year. The designation set the rock and the trees and the great monasteries under the care of the state.

With the other hand the state moved against the unofficial religious life the park could not contain. The drive against what the modernizing campaigns of the era branded backwardness fell hard on the shaman-villages of Gyeryongsan, as it fell on shrines across the country in the same years; halls were pulled down, gatherings broken up, the dense sacred landscape of the valleys thinned. The decisive blow was not a religious campaign at all but a military one. In the late 1970s the army marked the southern valley at the mountain’s foot — the plain of Sindoan, the prophesied capital-ground itself — for its new central headquarters, and when construction of the great command complex called Gyeryongdae began in 1983 the remaining religious settlements there were cleared: the prayer-houses and the shrines and the waiting-communities of Sindoan torn down or moved, the shamans who had worked centuries-old shrines in that valley forced out to scatter among the villages around the mountain. The ground that the Jeonggamnok had promised to a coming dynasty, the ground on which Yi Seong-gye had once begun a capital and abandoned it, became at last the seat of the modern republic’s armed command — closed, fenced, and off the mountain to the seekers who had waited there. The artist Park Chan-Kyong, returning to film the emptied plain, made the lost religious world of Sindoan the subject of a major work, an elegy for a sacred site that the state had cleared but not quite erased.

For it did not erase. The shamans driven from Sindoan did not leave the mountain; they moved up its other valleys and went on with the work, and the shrines and prayer-houses of Gyeryongsan persist to this day, thinner than in their crowded prime but unextinguished, the gut still performed in its ravines and the spirit-seized still drawn to its peaks for initiation. The new religions still keep their houses in its country. The pilgrims still climb. The mountain that the founding dynasty almost chose, and that a prophecy then promised to a dynasty yet to come, has outlasted the Joseon throne that left it, the colonial regime that policed it, and the campaigns that tried to clear it — and it stands at the center of the country still charged, in the conviction of those who come to it, with the nearness of the spirits and with a new age that has always seemed, at Gyeryongsan, about to begin.

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