(348) New Year's traditional customs

By Janet Shin

The year of the red rooster (丁酉) has truly begun and most of us are actually back to our daily lives after the year end and New Year’s holidays. Now it’s time to refresh our routines and be ready for the new coming energy.

In accordance with the lunar calendar or 24 divisions of the year, we carry out some traditional seasonal customs around the Lunar New Year holiday until the first full moon day, Daeboreum. Many of these are associated with saju on top of agricultural rituals. Knowing more will be helpful to make a happy New Year and to avoid misfortune.

Sharing words of New Year’s blessing is common to all global countries. It is practiced along with a bow to our ancestors while all family members and relatives are gathered at the grandparents’ home. The best-known Lunar New Year game is yut-nori played with four wooden sticks, called yut. It is also known as a way of divination.

Anxiety and uncertainty have been crucial aspects of life since ancient times and they are the reason why and how games, competitions and divinations were originated. People believed that once they performed the rituals well and won the games, they would be blessed by the gods. Significance lies in outmaneuvering the competition and victory implies the salvation of the tribe participating in the contests. They imparted a sacred significance to the ideas of victory, happiness and luck.

They also considered that by casting wooden sticks, seashells or bones they would get instructions of divine providence. It shows the divinatory use of such tools that is still practiced nowadays. Casting yut, which is similar to rolling dice or casting other tools, played an important role to betoken the New Year’s luck since ancient days and this became a source of today’s fortune-telling such as rock-paper-scissors, drawing lots and tossing coins.

Unexpected and undetermined situations are tested by these kinds of games, though they do not assess the contradiction between folly and wisdom, truth and falsehood or good and evil. However they are still played by rules and with seriousness so that all the participants should obey the consequences because they are believed as the will of the gods, that of destiny and the scales of justice. They are even compared to religious ceremonies or ancestral rites in some cultures.

Other than this, many believe in samjae, or three years of misfortune. Believers try to behave carefully or carry some talisman to dispel misfortune. People born in the years of the tiger (birth years 1950, 1962, 1974, 1986), horse (birth years 1942, 1954, 1966, 1978, 1990), dog (birth years, 1946, 1958, 1970, 1982) are in this samjae in 2017. Samjae for these three zodiac animal years will end next year (2018).

Information : Are you interested in learning more about the ancient Chinese teachings, the “Four Pillars of Destiny” and oriental ways of fortune telling or fortune tellers? Janet teaches Saju for the public at Seoul National University of Education. For further information, visit Janet’s website at www.sajufortuneteller.modoo.at or her blog, https://blog.naver.com/janet_shin.You can also contact her at 010-5414-7461 or email janetshin.kor@gmail.com

The writer is the author of “Life’s Secrets”.