Korean

Korean folk religion is populated rather than governed. There are a great many spirits, they are attached to places, households, functions and histories, and no one of them presides over the rest in the way a sovereign deity presides elsewhere.

The mountain spirit, honoured in small halls at Buddhist temples across the country, is among the most widespread. The seven stars, the household guardians, the spirits of the gate and the kitchen and the site, and the dragon king of the waters all hold recognised places. The arrangement is functional and local: what matters is which spirit has jurisdiction over the trouble at hand.

The pantheon absorbs. Buddhist figures, Daoist immortals and Confucian moral categories all appear inside it without displacing what was there, and the mountain spirit halls attached to Buddhist temples are the clearest architectural expression of that comfort with overlap.

The most distinctive feature is how readily historical people enter it. Generals, loyal ministers, wronged officials and princes who died badly are enshrined and addressed, and the tradition continues to add them. A death that was violent, unjust or unresolved is precisely the kind that produces a spirit with power.

The practitioners who deal with all of this are the mudang, who conduct the gut, the ritual in which spirits are hosted, addressed, entertained and asked. The office is entered by call or by inheritance, depending on the region.

The oldest narrative material about Korean deities comes from a Buddhist monk's compilation of the thirteenth century, the Samguk Yusa, which gathered legends, foundation myths and miracle accounts left out of the official dynastic history. The story of Hwanung descending to found a kingdom, and of the bear who became a woman, reaches modern readers through it. It was written centuries after the events it reports and by an author with commitments of his own.

For most of the intervening period, the tradition was documented by people who disapproved of it. The Confucian state of the Joseon dynasty treated folk practice as disorder and its records concern suppression. Christian missionaries added another hostile archive. Japanese colonial authorities conducted extensive ethnographic surveys of Korean folk religion for administrative purposes, and that material is detailed, is still used, and was gathered as part of governing an occupied country.

The tradition itself transmits orally and in performance. The gut is not scripted, its chants are learned in apprenticeship, and it varies substantially by region.

Since the later twentieth century, Korean folklore scholarship has taken the subject seriously on its own terms, and several ritual forms have been designated as intangible cultural heritage, which preserves them and also fixes and formalises performances that were previously fluid.