A gut is best understood as a banquet with an order of precedence. The spirits of the Korean pantheon, mountain gods, generals, the smallpox spirit, house gods, restless ancestors, are invited in sequence, each in its own kori: the mudang changes into the costume of the arriving spirit, the hourglass drum and gongs strike up its rhythms, and through dance that quickens into trembling the spirit descends and speaks. What it says is the rite's working core. Through the mudang's mouth the gods scold the family for neglect, name the grievance behind an illness or a run of ruin, bargain over the offerings heaped on the tables, and finally bless; the dead, given voice, say what they could not say in life, and the living answer, so that a gut for a troubled household is also, visibly, family therapy conducted in the vocabulary of the sacred.
Money is pinned to costumes, rice cakes and a sacrificed pig load the altars, and comic passages, a greedy spirit haggling, a drag performance, keep the long ceremony breathing, for a gut entertains the gods precisely by entertaining the people. The repertoire is regional and functional: healing gut, gut for opening a business, the ssitgim-gut that washes the dead soul's grief and unknots its path symbolically with a rolled straw mat and cloth bridge, and the great village gut that renews the community's contract with its guardians. Everything is done by performance, nothing by text: Muism's scripture is the gut itself.