Korean Muism

The specialist at the centre of Korean Muism is the mudang, usually a woman, and the tradition's central event is the gut, a ritual that can run from a few hours to several days.

There are two broad routes into the role, and the distinction is basic to how Korean practice is organised. The kangsinmu is chosen by the spirits, typically through sinbyeong, a wasting illness, dreams, hallucinations and disturbance that resists medical treatment and is diagnosed as a spirit demanding acceptance. It resolves when the person accepts, is initiated by an established mudang who becomes her spiritual mother, and receives a guardian spirit through whom she works. This type predominates in the centre and north of the peninsula. The seseummu inherits the role through family, ordinarily through the female line, and is trained rather than called; this type was concentrated in the south and southwest and is now much reduced in number.

A gut is not a service attended by a congregation but a commissioned performance for a client household, held for a specific purpose: to cure illness, to secure a business or a fishing fleet, to settle a dispute in the family, to send a dead relative safely on, or to bring general good fortune. It proceeds through a sequence of numbered segments, each addressing a different spirit, with an ensemble of drums, gongs and reed pipe, costume changes, dancing, offered food and wine, and sung invocation.

The point at which the spirit is present speaks through the mudang, giving diagnosis, complaint, demand and reassurance, and frequently scolding the family, is called gongsu. Family members answer back, bargain, weep and laugh. The tone is not solemn: gut are noisy, often funny, and openly emotional, and their therapeutic effect on a household in trouble is one of the things Korean scholarship has emphasised most.

Muism has no canon and no fixed pantheon, and the population of spirits a mudang deals with is drawn from wherever Korean history has left figures with power.

At the top sits a sky power, Hananim or Haneullim, distant and rarely petitioned directly, a name later taken over by Korean Christianity for its own God, which has caused lasting terminological confusion. Below and much more active are the spirits actually addressed in ritual: household gods with defined stations, including the house lord in the main beam, the birth grandmother Samsin who is responsible for conception and children, the kitchen god, and the earth spirit of the site; mountain spirits, sansin, whose small shrines stand behind many Buddhist temples; dragon kings of sea and river, important in fishing villages; and gods of disease and smallpox.

A large category comes from history. Generals, kings and figures who died violently or with grievance can become powerful spirits, and are among the most commonly invoked; the General and the Boy and other stock figures appear in the standard segments of a gut. Ancestors appear too, and here Muism sits alongside Confucian ancestral rites rather than replacing them: the Confucian rite honours the correctly settled ancestor, while the gut deals with the one who is not settled.

That last point explains the emotional core of much Korean ritual. Han, a hard-to-translate sense of accumulated unresolved grievance, and the associated idea that the dead who died wrongly or unmarried or without descendants remain stuck, generate a specific ritual response: the mudang gives the dead a voice, lets the grievance be spoken to the living, and unties it. The jinogigut performed for the newly dead in the Seoul tradition is built entirely around that.

The system is expandable. New spirits enter as new powers appear, and mudang in the twentieth century added figures from recent history to their repertoires.

Muism has been the low-status stratum of Korean religion for most of recorded Korean history, and it has outlasted everything brought in above it.

Under the Joseon dynasty from 1392, Confucian officials treated mudang as improper and socially base. They were assigned outcaste status, taxed, at times expelled from the capital, and their rites classed as licentious cult, while at the same time being called on privately by court and yangban households, which is the persistent pattern in Korean attitudes toward them. Buddhism, itself under Confucian pressure, absorbed a good deal of the material instead, which is why mountain spirit shrines stand in temple grounds today.

Twentieth-century pressure came from three directions. Japanese colonial authorities regulated and policed the practice. Protestant and Catholic Christianity, growing very rapidly in South Korea, identified it as idolatry and demon worship, and Christian activists have destroyed shrines and images in incidents that continue into the present. And the Saemaul Undong from 1970, Park Chung-hee's rural modernisation campaign, targeted mudang directly as feudal superstition obstructing development, with village-level enforcement, propaganda and the removal of shrine trees and ritual sites.

The reversal is one of the more striking turns in modern Korean cultural policy. From the 1960s onward, under the cultural properties system, particular regional gut were designated as Important Intangible Cultural Heritage and named practitioners as holders, giving state stipends and protection to the same practices other arms of the state were suppressing. The reframing was as folk art and performance rather than as religion, which preserved the form while sidestepping the question of belief, and academic study by folklorists ran in parallel.

Practice today is substantial and largely urban. Estimates of the number of working mudang in South Korea run into the tens of thousands, though there is no register and the figures are soft; shamanic consultation, divination and fortune-telling are an ordinary part of South Korean life, used by people who also attend a church or a temple. Muism is also claimed as a native Korean tradition in nationalist and feminist scholarship, and appears steadily in Korean film, television and contemporary art.