The Jeju Islanders

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A box drifts in from the sea, carrying three women, foals and calves, and seeds of the five grains. Three men who have risen out of the ground — out of three holes in the earth where the island’s oldest shrine still stands — open it on the slope of the mountain, take the women as wives, and plant the grain. From them descend the Go, the Yang, and the Bu, the three clans whose names the island still carries; from them descends the kingdom of Tamna. The story is told on Jeju as a founding charter, and it begins not with a god come down from heaven, as the mainland tells it, but with men coming up out of the ground of the island itself. The people of Jeju have always been, in their own telling, a people apart.

A people apart

Jeju — older Korean Cheju — is the great volcanic island off the southern coast of Korea, a shield of black basalt heaped around a single mountain. It lies far enough out in the strait that for most of its history it was a world unto itself. The kingdom of Tamna traded with Han China, Yayoi Japan, and the Samhan peoples of the peninsula by the first century, and it kept its own kings long after the mainland states had risen and fallen around it: a tributary of Baekje from 476, of Silla from 662, and only in 938 subjugated by the new dynasty of Goryeo, which absorbed it outright in 1105 and let it keep a measure of local autonomy until 1404, when the Joseon state finally folded it into the ordinary administration of Korea.

What that long separation left is an island that is Korean and not Korean at once. The Jeju tongue, Jejueo, is by the judgment of many linguists not a dialect but a language — not mutually intelligible with mainland Korean, a separate branch of the Koreanic family that the centuries of isolation grew into its own thing. UNESCO entered it in 2010 into the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger as critically endangered, the gravest rank; the fluent speakers, mostly old now, are counted in the hundreds. The island is dressed in its own stone, too: the dol hareubang, the “stone grandfathers” carved from porous lava, broad-eyed and mushroom-capped, stand at the old village gates and ward the place.

A dol hareubang, the basalt “stone grandfather” carved from Jeju’s lava rock. Photo ProjectManhattan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The mainland did not always treat the island kindly. Joseon used Jeju as a place of exile, a far edge to which the disgraced were sent; the Confucian-literate officials who governed it ranked the islanders’ religion among the low and the islanders themselves among the rude. For long stretches the people were forbidden even to leave. Out of that distance — geographic, linguistic, political — the islanders kept what the mainland slowly lost: not the shaman tradition of the peninsula in a southern accent, but a religious cosmos genuinely its own, the densest and best-preserved body of living shamanism anywhere in Korea.

The island of eighteen thousand gods

The proverb gives the number as eighteen thousand. It is not a census but a way of saying that the island is saturated with the divine — that there is no village without its gods, no shore or spring or great tree or strange rock without a spirit lodged in it. Each settlement keeps its bonhyangdang, its guardian-shrine and the guardian god who holds the village; around two hundred such shrines are still active across the island, and a single village may keep more than one. The gods of these shrines are local in the fullest sense: a founder who once lived there, an ancestor, a hero, the spirit of a particular cone or cave. To be born in a village is to be born under the protection of its god, and to belong to the women’s-line of households that tend its rite.

Over and through this dense local pantheon runs the great frame of Jeju cosmology, and at its head stands the giant. Seolmundae-halmang — Grandmother Seolmundae — is the creator of the island, a goddess so vast that she could lie with the central mountain for a pillow and dip her toes in the far islets of the sea. She made Jeju by gathering earth in her skirt and pouring it into the water, and the some three hundred sixty oreum, the lesser volcanic cones that pock the island, are the crumbs that fell through the worn cloth as she carried it. The mountain at the center she heaped up with her own hands. Its sharp top she knocked off — it became a peak elsewhere on the island — and the hollow it left filled with water to become the crater-lake at the summit. Her body, in the end, is the land: the island is the giant lying down, and the mountain is where she rests.

Hallasan, the shield volcano at the heart of Jeju, rising to 1,947 meters — the highest point in South Korea. Photo Norm Banks, U.S. Geological Survey, public domain.

That mountain is Hallasan, 1,947 meters, the highest in South Korea, with the crater-lake Baengnokdam at its head. The whole island is its slope. To the geologist it is a shield volcano that last erupted around the year 1007; to the islander it is the goddess’s heaped earth and her resting place, and the two accounts sit on the island together, neither cancelling the other. Hallasan is now a national park and is carried, with Jeju’s lava tubes and cones, on UNESCO’s roster of World Natural Heritage — the documentary honor laid over the older sacred one.

The deep origin of things is sung, not stated. When a Jeju shaman opens the world at the start of a great rite, the chant is the Cheonji-wang bon-puri, the song of how the Heaven-and-Earth King came down — into a world made unlivable by two suns and two moons, the doubled lights that scorched and froze it by turns — and how the order of the cosmos was set. It belongs to a whole genre of Jeju sacred song, the bon-puri, the “origin-explanations,” each of which tells how a particular god came to hold a particular office. The twelve general bon-puri, known across the island, are the ones every shaman must carry; the village-shrine bon-puri are the local songs, the biographies of the bonhyangdang gods. They are not read from a book. They are taught line by line, by an accomplished shaman to a novice, over the course of many rites, and chanted from memory for hours at a stretch.

The simbang and the rite

The Jeju shaman is not called by the mainland word. On the peninsula the shaman is the mudang; on Jeju the shaman is the simbang, and the difference of name marks a difference of vocation. Where the mainland calling often comes as the sinbyeong, the “spirit-sickness” that seizes a person and makes her a vessel for a descending god, the Jeju simbang’s authority rests more on inheritance and on craft — on the mastery of the immense corpus of bon-puri and the long apprenticeship that hands it down. The simbang holds the ritual tools, the chant, and the knowledge of the gods’ biographies; the rite, the gut, is the occasion on which all of it is brought to bear.

The most celebrated of these rites belongs to the sea-villages and to a goddess who comes only in the early spring. Yeongdeung-halmang — Grandmother Yeongdeung — is the wind-goddess, and she visits the island each year at the turn of the second lunar month, walking the shore, sowing the seed of the sea-harvest, and going again after a fortnight. She is welcomed when she arrives and seen off when she leaves, and the rite that does this is the Yeongdeung-gut. At the Chilmeori shrine in the harbor quarter of Jeju City, the simbang perform it for the goddess of the winds, for the Dragon King Yongwang who rules the sea, and for the mountain gods, putting up posts and bright silk, chanting and dancing, while the diving women and the boat-owners lay out the food and the offerings — praying for a calm sea, a full net, and a rich harvest of the shallows in the year to come.

This Chilmeoridang Yeongdeunggut was inscribed in 2009 on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and within Korea it carries the older designation of Important Intangible Cultural Property. Part of what the scholars valued in it is precisely what makes it a Jeju thing and not a mainland one: it is the one rite in Korea that binds the cult of the diving women to the folk-religion of the wind-goddess in a single ceremony. That it survived the modernizing century at all owes much to one simbang, Ahn Sa-in, who from 1980 fought to keep it and gathered the island’s shamans into an association to safeguard it before his death in 1990.

The women of the sea

The island lives off the cold water, and the keepers of the sea-cult are women. The haenyeo — the “sea-women” — dive without air, holding a breath for a minute at a time, ten meters down into the chill to gather abalone, conch, sea urchin, and seaweed; the oldest of them are still working in their eighties. They go down in cohorts ranked by skill — the hagun the beginners, the junggun the able, the sanggun the masters who guide the rest — and they surface with a long whistling exhalation, the sumbisori, that is the sound of the Jeju coast. Their work made a society tilted toward the women’s line, in which the divers were often the household’s earners and the shrines the women’s to keep.

A haenyeo, one of Jeju’s women free-divers, who gather shellfish from the cold sea without breathing apparatus. Photo karendotcom127, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The sea is dangerous, and the women’s religion answers the danger. Before a dive they pray to the spirits of the sea for safety and for a good catch; the divers’ own rite, the jamsugut, asks the sea-gods and the Dragon King for protection and for plenty, and it is the diving women, more than anyone, who sustain the worship of the dragon-king and the sea-spirits on which the whole island’s livelihood is staked. The culture of the Jeju haenyeo was itself inscribed by UNESCO in 2016 — the diving, the knowledge of the tides and the seabed, and the rites that go with them, recognized together as one tradition. The knowledge passes the way the bon-puri pass: in families, between the older divers and the younger, in the cooperatives and the haenyeo schools, by doing and being shown.

The wound and the keeping

The island’s modern memory carries a shadow that its rites have had to learn to hold. On the third of April, 1948, and through the suppression that followed into the next year, the island was torn by violence: in the counterinsurgency that swept the villages, tens of thousands of islanders were killed — by the official accounting of the truth commission that reported in 2003, more than fourteen thousand named dead, the great majority at the hands of the security forces, with other estimates running far higher, perhaps a tenth of the island’s people in all. The events of April Third were, for nearly half a century after, all but unspeakable. To write of them could bring arrest. The dead were mourned in silence, or in the only language the island had for the unmournable — the shaman’s rite for the wronged dead, chanted where the public word was forbidden. Only with the return of democracy did the silence lift; a head of state apologized in the island’s name in 2003, and a peace park now holds the record of the names. The island’s rites, which had carried the grief through the years of the ban, carry the remembrance still.

That long suppression of the dead is of a piece with a longer suppression of the island’s faith. The Confucian officials of Joseon despised the shrines; the colonial decades and then the modernizing drives of the later twentieth century, the campaigns that set out to clear the countryside of what they called superstition, pulled many shrines down and pressed the rites to the margins. What is striking is how much survived it. Much of what is now known in detail of the island’s religion was first set down by ethnographers — the Japanese scholars of the colonial period, and the Korean and foreign scholars who came after to record the gut and to write down the bon-puri the simbang had only ever sung — and through their work, and through the islanders who kept practicing whatever the era thought of it, the tradition came intact into the age that would honor it.

The honor, when it came, was considerable: the UNESCO listings of 2009 and 2016, the heritage designations, the museums, the recognition of Jeju’s body of myth as the richest treasury of living shamanic narrative in Korea. The island is a tourist destination now, its gods written up in guidebooks, its divers photographed by visitors. But the bonhyangdang still stand in the villages, the simbang still chant the origin-songs over the rites, the haenyeo still go down whistling into the cold and still pray before they dive — and the giant still lies along the island, the mountain for her pillow, eighteen thousand gods keeping the place she made.

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