Koreans

Muism rarely appears in Korea as a religion competing on equal terms with Buddhism, Confucianism or Christianity for a household's whole allegiance. It runs underneath them instead, addressed for the specific, practical business that the other systems leave less room for: a stalled business, an unexplained illness, a marriage that will not settle, a spirit that has not been sent off properly.

A Korean household across the twentieth century might keep an ancestral rite in the Confucian manner, attend a Buddhist temple or a Christian church on the calendar those traditions set, and still call a mudang, a shamanic practitioner overwhelmingly though not exclusively female, when a problem resisted both. The mudang's central rite is the gut, an elaborate ceremony of music, dance, offerings and possession trance in which she is entered by one or more of a large population of gods, nature spirits and ancestors, speaking and acting as them to diagnose the trouble and negotiate its resolution. The office is typically entered either through hereditary transmission within shaman families, concentrated historically in the south, or through an unsought and often disorienting spiritual crisis known as the shaman sickness, sinbyeong, which initiation into the role is understood to resolve. Laurel Kendall's ethnography of Korean shamanism situates this practice inside real, ongoing household and business life rather than as folklore, which is the frame the atlas follows here: Muism is not a survival being studied, it is a working system some Koreans still call on.

Where Muism deals in a large and loosely bounded population of spirits, one layer of it is unusually concrete: the named gods who live in a specific part of the traditional Korean house and answer for a specific part of its family's fortune. Seongju resides in the taeju, the central roof beam, and ranks as the senior spirit of the household, honored above all when a new house is built or a family moves in, since the raising of that beam is the moment the god is understood to take up residence. Jowang keeps the kitchen, watching over the family's food, health and daily fortune from a small bowl of water set on the kitchen shelf and changed fresh each morning, a modest, continuous devotion rather than an occasional rite.

Samshin Halmoni, Grandmother Samshin, governs conception, pregnancy and safe delivery and continues to watch over a child through its earliest and most vulnerable years, honored with offerings of rice and seaweed soup, the same foods traditionally given to a new mother, at a small shelf set aside for her near the birth room.

Outside the house proper stands Sanshin, the mountain spirit, pictured as an elderly bearded sage with a tiger and tied to a specific named mountain rather than to any single household, whose shrines are a near universal feature of Korean Buddhist temple compounds as well as of independent mountain shrines, evidence of how thoroughly Buddhism and the older mountain cult settled into the same ground rather than displacing one another.