Civilization

The Mudang

The shamans of Korea, ritual specialists and overwhelmingly women, who stand between the living and the gods and the dead and whose great rite, the gut, carries the indigenous Korean religion.

The sickness has no name a doctor will recognize. A woman in her middle years stops eating, hears voices in an empty room, dreams of an old man in court robes who will not leave her, wastes away while every examination comes back clean. She wanders toward a mountain shrine she has never visited and weeps there without knowing why. In the older understanding this is not an illness to be cured but a summons to be answered. The wasting is sinbyeong, the spirit sickness, and it lifts only when she stops resisting — when she submits to a rite in which the god who has been hunting her is at last allowed to descend and speak through her mouth. After that she is no longer sick. She is a mudang, a shaman, one of those who will spend the rest of her life standing where the living, the gods, and the dead all meet.

The way of the mu

The mudang are the ritual specialists of musok — the way of the mu, the indigenous religion of Korea, older on the peninsula than any of the faiths that came later from China and beyond. Whether musok is best called a religion in the full sense, with a settled doctrine and a clergy, or rather a vast and loosely bound practice-complex, is a question scholars still argue; it has no founder, no canon, no creed a believer must recite. What it has instead is the shaman and her rite, as the Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture documents at length. The practitioners are overwhelmingly women. A man who follows the calling is a baksu, sometimes baksu-mudang, and he is the rare exception; in the religious imagination of musok the office is womanly, and the mudang is its living center. On Jeju the specialist goes by a different name, simbang, and follows a tradition with its own cast of gods and its own way of recounting them.

The shaman’s world is densely populated. Above the household preside the great gods of nature and place — the mountain god who owns each ridge, the Seven Stars of the northern dipper who govern lifespan and children, the Dragon King of the waters. Below them crowd the spirits of the dead, the ancestors who must be fed and the unquiet ones who must be appeased, and the multitude of lesser powers attached to every gate and hearth and storeroom. The mudang does not so much believe in these beings as deal with them. They are real to her in the way that difficult relatives are real: present, demanding, capable of harm if slighted and of help if courted, and reachable through the proper ceremony. Much of what scholarship knows of this teeming pantheon was first written down by outsiders — the Japanese ethnographers Akiba Takashi and Akamatsu Chijo, who under colonial rule in the nineteen-thirties produced the first systematic survey of the tradition, and later by Korean folklorists such as Kim Tae-gon and by Western anthropologists, among them Laurel Kendall, whose fieldwork in a village she called Enduring Pine became one of the most read accounts of the mudang in any language.

A mudang performing a gut ritual, Hwanghae-style, rural Korea A mudang performing a gut, a phase of the rite associated with the war gods of the Hwanghae tradition; rural Korea, 2007. Photograph by ReSearcher, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Two callings

A mudang comes to her vocation in one of two great manners, and the difference between them runs to the root of what she is. The distinction has long been drawn along regional lines, and the model — north and center against south — holds broadly true while admitting many exceptions, the more so as the twentieth century scattered populations and blurred the old map.

In the north and the central peninsula, around the Han River and above it, the typical shaman is the kangsinmu, the god-descended. Hers is the path that begins in suffering. The sinbyeong takes her against her will; she does not choose the gods, the gods choose her, and they enforce the choice through the wasting sickness that no medicine touches. She is healed only by surrender, through the naerim-gut, the descent rite, in which an established shaman presides while the afflicted woman dances to exhaustion and the spirit at last comes down to settle in her. The rite is said to open the gate of her speech, so that thereafter a guardian spirit — often the very figure who hunted her in her illness — can speak through her on demand. The kangsinmu’s authority is borrowed authority. She is powerful because a god lives in her, and the proof of her calling is precisely that she did not seek it.

In the south, below the Han, the older pattern has been the sesumu, the hereditary shaman. Her power is not visited upon her but handed down. The office passes along a family line, most often from a senior woman to a daughter or a daughter-in-law, and with it passes a hard-won mastery of song, of drumming, of the long oral repertoire a great rite requires. The sesumu is not possessed; the gods do not ride her body as they ride the kangsinmu. She is a priestess by inheritance and a virtuoso by training, and her standing rests on craft and on right rather than on the drama of personal seizure. The two figures answer two different intuitions about where holy authority comes from — whether it descends on whom it will, or whether it is a thing one is born to and learns. Korea has kept both.

The gut

The mudang’s great work is the gut, the shamanic rite, and to watch one is to see the whole religion enacted at once. A gut is long — it may run through a night, or several nights, across many hours — and it is built as a sequence of discrete acts, each called a geori, each devoted to summoning and entertaining a particular god. The shaman moves through them in order, and as she passes from one god to the next she changes her costume, so that the rite is also a slow procession of bright robes: the blue and red of a general, the white of a Buddha, the colors that belong to each power she calls. The music never stops. The hourglass drum, the janggu, lays down the pulse, and over it the brass — the great gong and the small hand-cymbals — drives the tempo up until the air itself seems to thicken.

Into that sound the god descends. The shaman dances faster and faster, and at the height of it the spirit takes her: she trances, and the voice that comes out of her is no longer hers but the god’s, delivering the kongsu, the oracle, in which the deity scolds and comforts and bargains with the gathered household, naming what it wants and what it will give. Offerings are heaped on the tables — rice and rice-cakes, fruit, liquor, the carcass of a pig, paper flowers — for the gods are guests who must be feasted, and a stinted god is a dangerous one. The mood is not uniformly solemn. There is weeping where the dead are addressed, but there is also coarse joking, the god demanding more wine or better treatment, the crowd laughing and pressing money on the shaman who has become, for the moment, a deity who can be cajoled. The gut is at once worship, theater, counseling, and negotiation, and the mudang sustains all of it from inside the trance.

A mudang performing a rite to placate the spirits of the dead A mudang holding a gut to placate the restless dead so they will not trouble the living. Photograph by hplouffe, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

The offices the gut fills are practical before they are abstract. People send for a mudang for the reasons people have always had: a child who will not thrive, a business going under, a marriage souring, a death that has left the house uneasy. The shaman divines the cause — which god is angry, which ancestor neglected, which wandering spirit has attached itself — and the gut sets it right, healing, telling fortunes, securing the household’s luck for the season. But the office that stands above the others is the sending of the dead. When a person dies, especially when the death is sudden or violent or otherwise wrongful, the soul may not find its way and may linger to trouble the living. The mudang’s death rite — the jinogwi-gut in the Seoul tradition, the ssitgim-gut in the southwest, the names varying with the region — washes the soul of its grievances and its impurity and conducts it safely to the other world. It is among the most affecting things a shaman does, and it is the work in which her mythic charter is most directly present.

Princess Bari

That charter is the story of Bari-gongju, Princess Bari, the patron and mythic ancestor of the shamans, whose tale is sung as the bon-puri, the origin-song, in the rites for the dead. She was the seventh daughter of a king who wanted a son, and for the crime of being one more girl she was cast out at birth — Baridegi, the abandoned one, is her other name. Years later the king and queen fall mortally ill, and the only cure is the water of life, which lies in the land of the dead. The six daughters who were kept all refuse to go. Only the daughter who was thrown away agrees. Bari crosses into the underworld, and there she pays the terrible price the journey demands — long years of labor for its keeper, and the bearing of his sons — before she wins the water and carries it back to revive her parents. Offered half the kingdom in thanks, she refuses it. She asks instead to be given the dead, and she returns to the other world to guide the souls of the departed along the road she alone has walked.

So the first shaman, in the telling, is the rejected child who went where no one else would go and came back with power over death. When the mudang sings the bon-puri of Bari over a corpse, she is not merely reciting a legend; she is calling on the one who first made the passage, the guide who escorts the soul she is now sending. The story carries, lightly, the whole logic of the vocation — that the despised and cast-out should be precisely the one entrusted with the gravest of holy offices. It is hard not to read in it the condition of the mudang herself.

A despised office

For most of recorded Korean history the mudang was held in contempt by those who held the pens. Under the long Confucian order of the Joseon dynasty, with its scholar-officials and its ideal of male, literate, ancestral propriety, the shaman was an affront on several counts at once: a woman wielding authority, a body that gods entered, a rite of noise and trance and money far from the sober decorum the state prized. The mudang were ranked among the cheonmin, the base or vile people, the lowest order of society alongside butchers and slaves. They were taxed as a despised trade, periodically expelled from the capital and the walled towns, their rites forbidden within the city even as the same officials’ own wives and mothers quietly sent for them. The contempt and the patronage coexisted for centuries — the literate frame condemning the shaman in public while the household consulted her in private.

The harsher campaigns came later. The colonial period brought officials and Christian modernizers who filed musok under misin, superstition, a category invented to mark it for removal — though, in one of the era’s contradictions, it was also colonial-era ethnography that first recorded the tradition in scholarly detail, the suppressors and the catalogers sometimes the same hands. After liberation the pressure continued. The Saemaul, the New Community Movement of the nineteen-seventies, swept the modernizing energies of the developmental state into the countryside, and its anti-superstition drives pulled down village shrines and broke up rites in the name of progress. To the men who tore down the shrines, the mudang was the dead weight of a backward past. That she went on being summoned all the while — that the demand for her never actually disappeared — was the part the campaigns could not reach.

Munyeo sinmu, a shaman's sacred dance, by Sin Yun-bok (Hyewon) “Munyeo sinmu,” a mudang’s sacred dance, from the genre album of the painter Sin Yun-bok (Hyewon), early nineteenth century. Kansong Art Museum, Seoul; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The treasured remnant

Then the valuation turned over. From the late nineteen-seventies a new generation of folklorists, nationalists, and pro-democracy intellectuals looked at the same despised rite and saw something else: not the embarrassment of an unmodern country but its most authentic native inheritance, an art and a worldview that had survived every imported orthodoxy and every state that tried to stamp it out. The instrument of the reversal was the state’s own cultural machinery. Under the system of Important Intangible Cultural Property — the designation that names a living practice, and the masters who carry it, as national treasures to be preserved — the great regional guts began to be enrolled one after another. The Jindo Ssitgim-gut, the soul-cleansing rite of the southwestern island of Jindo, was designated Important Intangible Cultural Property No. 72 in 1980, as the Chonnam Tribune records; the village rite of the eastern coast, the Donghaean Byeolsin-gut, was designated No. 82 in the mid-eighties; the Seoul Saenam-gut, the metropolitan rite in which the song of Princess Bari is performed, was named No. 104 in 1996. A tradition the state had once driven from its cities the state now certified as a glory of the nation, and the same kind of rite that the Saemaul had torn down could be staged on a festival platform as cultural patrimony.

The recognition carries weight, and carries a strangeness with it. To be designated is to be preserved as heritage, fixed and exhibited, the rite performed as a thing the nation owns; it is a different existence from being summoned to a sickbed at two in the morning. The documented record — the designation numbers, the dated suppression campaigns, the careful ethnographies of Kendall and Kim — belongs to one register; what happens in a gut, where the gods descend and the dead are walked across, belongs to another, and the mudang has always lived in both. The profession is far from dead: well over a hundred thousand practitioners are reckoned to work in South Korea today, advertising now by website as readily as by word of mouth, and the sinbyeong still takes whom it takes, the spirit sickness still arriving in women who never asked for it. The Confucian official, the colonial modernizer, the cadre with the wrecking bar — each in turn was certain the shaman was a relic on her way out. Each in turn sent for her, or watched his household do it. The woman the gods had hunted into her calling outlasted all of them, and goes on standing, drum in hand, exactly where she always has — at the seam where the living lean toward the dead, and someone has to make the crossing.