Taebaeksan

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A traveler who climbs out of the forest onto the broad back of the mountain comes, near the highest point, on a thing made by hands: a heaped enclosure of gray stone, oval, the height of a tall man, standing open to the wind and the sky with nothing built over it. No roof, no hall, no image. The stones have been gathered and set there for so long that no record fixes when the first of them was laid. This is the Cheonjedan, the Altar of the Heavenly Rite, and the mountain it crowns is Taebaeksan, the Great White Mountain, where Heaven has been worshipped under the open air since before the kingdoms had names.

Taebaeksan rises to 1,566.7 meters on the spine of the peninsula, where the eastern range runs down the Korean coast, its bulk shared between Gangwon Province and North Gyeongsang. It is not the tallest of Korea’s peaks, but it is among the most charged. Its name — Tae-baek, “Great White” — it shares with a higher mountain far to the north, on the border the Korean kingdoms once held and the two Korean states now divide, and that doubling of the name lies at the root of one of the oldest unsettled questions in the country’s sacred geography.

The mountain and the question of the name

In the founding story of the Korean people, the high god Hwanung looked down on the world below and longed to bring it order, and his father Hwanin, ruler of Heaven, consented and gave him three heavenly seals. Hwanung descended with three thousand spirits to the top of a mountain the text calls Taebaek — the Great White — and there beneath a sacred sandalwood tree he founded Sinsi, the City of God, and took the wind, the rain, and the clouds for his ministers. A bear and a tiger prayed to become human; the bear endured the trial of darkness and garlic and mugwort and was made a woman, Ungnyeo; and from her union with Hwanung was born Dangun, who founded the first Korean kingdom, Gojoseon, and ruled it long before becoming, in the end, a mountain-god himself.

That story survives in writing only from the late thirteenth century, in the Samguk Yusa, the “Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms,” compiled around 1281 by the Buddhist monk Iryeon, and echoed soon after in the Jewang Ungi of 1287 — texts set down by Buddhist and Confucian-literate hands well over three thousand years after the events they relate, in the World History Encyclopedia’s account of the myth’s transmission. The text names the descent-mountain only as Taebaek. Which physical peak it means has never been agreed. Most scholars now read the myth’s Taebaek as Baekdu Mountain, the still higher volcano on the northern frontier that later tradition fixed as the cradle of the Korean people. But a long and living counter-tradition reads it as this mountain, the Taebaeksan of the eastern range, and on this mountain Dangun is honored as though the descent had happened here — by nationalists, by devotees of the founder-cult, and above all by the shamans, for whom the question of which northern volcano a thirteenth-century monk had in mind matters less than the god who is present on the peak before them. The identification is contested and the entry leaves it where the record leaves it: open. What is not in doubt is that the name Taebaek, the Great White, binds the two mountains together, and that the rite of Heaven is kept on this one.

Whatever the myth’s intent, this mountain was a seat of the heaven-rite within recorded history. The Samguk Sagi, the twelfth-century official history, notes that the kingdom of Silla numbered Taebaeksan among the great mountains where the state offered sacrifice, ranking it among the sacred peaks to which the court sent its rites. The mountain was holy to the state before it was a national park, before it was a heritage monument, before the founder-cult of the modern era took it up. The altar on its summit is the visible sign of that long standing.

The name itself carries weight. Tae-baek means the Great White, and the whiteness is not idle: the high peaks of the eastern range stand under snow for much of the year, and in the old color-symbolism of the Korean and Chinese worlds white belongs to the west, to autumn, to the metal that rings, to purity and to mourning together. A white mountain is a clean mountain, a fit place to address Heaven. The Buddhist tradition settled lower on its slopes without displacing the older rite above: Manggyeongsa, a temple set high on the mountain at about 1,460 meters and ascribed to the Silla monk Jajang of the seventh century, enshrines the bodhisattva of wisdom near a spring, so that the mountain holds a Buddhist sanctuary on its flank and a heaven-altar older than Buddhism on its crown — the layering of the Korean religious world made vertical, stacked up one slope. Taebaeksan is not, by this reckoning, a single tradition’s mountain but a place where several have settled in turn without any of them clearing the ground first.

The main peaks of Taebaeksan viewed from Munsubong. Photograph by Dcpeets, 2014, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The altar of Heaven

The Cheonjedan is not one altar but three, set in a line along the summit ridge from north to south. At the center, on the high point, stands the Cheonwangdan — the Altar of the Heavenly King — the principal of the three: a stone enclosure built of natural rough stone gathered on the mountain, oval in plan, about 2.4 meters high and some 27.5 meters around. Its form carries an old cosmological grammar. The outer wall runs round and the inner platform is laid square, in the figure the Korean and Chinese traditions call cheonwon jibang — Heaven is round, Earth is square — so that the altar itself is a small model of the order it addresses, the round sky set over the squared ground. To the north, about three hundred meters along the ridge, stands the Janggundan, the General’s Altar; to the south, lower down, a third altar, the Hadan or Lower Altar. Together they make the heaven-altar complex that the Korea Heritage Service designated a National Folk Cultural Property in 1991.

What is done at the altar is the cheonje, the rite to Heaven — the bare, ancient thing that gives the place its weight. It is older than the temples lower on the mountain, older than the Confucian shrines of the towns, older in kind than either Buddhism or Confucianism on the peninsula: a sacrifice offered upward, under the open sky, to Heaven itself and to the founder who came down from it. The tradition holds that such offerings were made on this summit from the time of the tribal confederations, carried on through Silla, through Goryeo, through Joseon, a thread the heritage record traces unbroken in form if not in continuous practice. Korea’s mountains are not, in the old understanding, mere terrain; each great peak is the seat of its sansin, its mountain-god, the most powerful of the spirits rooted in a place, and the altar on Taebaeksan addresses both the sky-god of the founding and the lord of this particular height.

On the carved stone of the central altar stands a single word: Hanbaegeom, an honorific name for Dangun. It was set there by Daejonggyo, the modern religion founded in 1909 that takes Dangun as its supreme object of worship and made the summit one of its holy places, so that the founder-cult left its mark in stone on an altar far older than itself. The layering is exact and visible: an antique heaven-altar of uncertain origin, claimed and inscribed in the twentieth century for the cult of the heaven-descended ancestor.

Near the summit of Taebaeksan in winter. Photograph by Jyuri08, 2016, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The shaman’s mountain

If the Cheonjedan is a national altar, the mountain around it is something else again — one of the great spiritual peaks of the mudang, the Korean shaman, sought out across the centuries for the strength of its god. In the world of Korean folk religion, musok, the mountains are reservoirs of sacred power, and the most prominent of them are reckoned to hold the mightiest mountain-gods. Taebaeksan’s sansin is held among the most powerful of all. To climb to such a peak is, for the shaman, to draw near a source — to gather strength, to seek a sign, to perform the gut, the shaman’s rite in which the gods descend and ride her, against the most charged backdrop the geography offers.

The mudang’s pilgrimage to the high mountains was once a rare and arduous undertaking; in the words of the survey of Korean shamanism, such mountain journeys were uncommon events that the improved roads and transport of the later twentieth century made far more regular, so that by the closing decades shamans could reach the great peaks readily and often. Taebaeksan became, in that sense, more accessible and no less holy: a mountain a kangsinmu — a shaman seized by the descended god, as against the hereditary practitioner — might climb to renew her bond with the spirits, leaving offerings, calling on the mountain-god of the Great White Mountain. Where the state altar addresses Heaven in stately form on fixed days, the shaman addresses the living god of the place directly, and the two devotions overlay one another on the same summit without canceling out — the official rite and the ecstatic one, the national altar and the shaman’s mountain, the squared stone of the Cheonwangdan and the spread cloth of a gut.

This double character is the heart of the matter. Taebaeksan is at once a mountain of the state and a mountain of the mudang; the heaven-rite of the founder-cult and the mountain-worship of the shaman meet on it and have never been disentangled. The shaman who climbs here works in a tradition that distinguishes its callings: the kangsinmu, who comes to the vocation through sinbyeong, the spirit-sickness that breaks a person until the god is accepted and the descent-rite performed, against the hereditary sesumu who inherits the craft as a family office. For the seized shaman especially, the great mountain is a place of renewal — a height where the bond with the descended god can be drawn tighter, where strength can be gathered against the work of the gut, the rite in which the gods come down to ride her and speak through her mouth. To stand on the summit of the Great White Mountain, near the seat of so mighty a sansin, is to stand close to the source of that power.

The literate tradition that ran the country for five centuries under Joseon held the shaman in contempt and counted her among the low; her rites were ranked as the worship of the ignorant, beneath the notice of the Confucian gentleman. The pressures of the twentieth century fell harder still — colonial-era regulation and surveillance of folk religion, and later the anti-superstition drives that rode in with the rural modernization campaigns of the 1970s, when shrines were pulled down and rites discouraged as obstacles to a forward-looking nation. Yet much of what is reliably known of the living shaman tradition was preserved precisely by outside observers — colonial-era ethnographers and, after them, Korean and Western scholars who recorded the gut, the shaman-songs, and the mountain-cults that the official culture despised. The mountain outlasted all of it. The sansin kept its peak, and the shamans kept climbing to it.

The altar kept, the sunrise sought

The heaven-rite of Taebaeksan is performed still. Each year on the third of October — Gaecheonjeol, National Foundation Day, the day that marks in the modern calendar the founding of the first Korean kingdom by Dangun — the cheonje is offered again at the Cheonjedan, in a ceremony that is at once a religious act and a civic one, an observance of the nation and of its oldest devotion together. Rites are likewise kept at the turning of the year. The form is grave and old: the offering carried up the mountain, the words spoken at the open altar, the smoke rising from the summit into a sky that has received such offerings, by the tradition’s reckoning, since the founding age. In recent years the keepers of the rite have sought to have the Taebaeksan cheonje recognized formally as intangible cultural heritage, the living ceremony pressed toward the status of a protected tradition — the same upward movement that has carried Korean folk religion as a whole, within a few generations, from the thing the modernizers wanted swept away to the thing the state now lists, protects, and sends abroad as heritage.

The mountain’s outward standing has risen with it. The altar complex was entered on the national register as a Folk Cultural Property in 1991, and in 2016 the surrounding heights were made Taebaeksan National Park, the country’s twenty-second, drawing hikers in every season to the high meadows, the wind-bent yew that grow near the treeline, and the snow that gives the festivals of midwinter their name. The protection has substance, and so does the slight strangeness of it: the state that once sent campaigns against the shaman now fences her mountain as a park and marks her altar as a monument, and the rite that the Confucian gentleman would not deign to watch is now offered each autumn with civic dignitaries in attendance.

And on the first morning of each new year the mountain fills. Greeting the year’s first sunrise is, across Korea, a cherished thing, and hundreds of thousands climb the coasts and the high peaks in the cold dark to meet it; of the mountains, Taebaeksan is by a wide margin the most sought. Ask Korean hikers where to stand for the new year’s first light and the answer comes back, again and again, this peak. They come in the thousands up the snow trails, lamps swinging, to wait on the broad summit near the old altar for the sun to break over the eastern sea — a crowd in which the modern nation, out for a sunrise and a clean start to the year, stands on the same ground and at nearly the same hour as the founder-cult that worships Dangun and the shaman who has climbed to her god. The mountain holds them all at once.

Mountain Spirit (Sanshin), Korea, 19th century, ink and color on silk. The mountain-god is shown as the white-bearded elder with his tiger. Brooklyn Museum (no known copyright restrictions; public domain).

What stands on the summit of Taebaeksan is the plainest of sacred things — gathered stone, open sky, an offering sent upward — and it has outlasted the dynasties that ranked it, the empires that regulated it, and the campaigns that despised the shaman who climbs to it. The Great White Mountain wears two names with its northern twin and answers to two devotions on one peak, and on the year’s first morning the country that has half-forgotten why still climbs in the dark to stand by the old altar and watch the light come up.

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