Spirits of the Age

By Andrei Lankov

A new shop is opened somewhere in Seoul _ and a very special ritual is held. The mudan, the female shaman (and most Korean shamans are female these days) practices an age-old ritual, doing her best to please the quarrelsome and angry spirits. Her message to the spirits is simple: “Let the crowds of customers go through the dors of this shop day and night. Let its owner avoid the dangers of fraud and economic downturns”. Scenes like this have become common in South Korean cities over last couple of decades. Shamanism, the oldest religion of Korea, has made a powerful comeback.

The shamans have been around for millennia. Their rituals go back to the time before the teachings of Confucius and Buddha, let alone Christ, and they were taken up by Koreans’ ancestors. . However, for centuries shamanism survived on the margins of Korean society. In the Chos?n era (1392-1910) shamans were often despised as propagators of superstitions. The Confucian gentlemen believed that the shamanist rituals were probably suitable for the lower orders or women, but not for an educated man of good upbringing.

If anything, the situation of shamans deteriorated with the advent of the 20th century. Korean elites discarded Confucianism, but embraced Christianity instead. The colonial authorities also believed that they should “uproot the superstitions”.

The hostility to shamans united the forces which otherwise were mortal enemies. In North Korea, one of the few available plays (allegedly penned by Kim Il Sung himself) tells how the ‘progressive’ guerrilla fighters in the 1930s destroyed a village shrine, an embodiment of ‘reactionary superstition’. In the 1950s all shrines in North Korea were indeed destroyed by the communist authorities. Nowadays in North Korea former shamans and their descendants belong to one of the ‘hostile groups’; they are not allowed to live in major cities or send their children to good schools. In South Korea, President Pak Chong-hee, the mortal enemy of Kim Il Sung, executed a fairly similar policy, albeit using less violent methods. During his rule, village shrines were targeted by the government-sponsored ‘New Village Movement’. They were seen as the embodiment of superstition ? like those in the North.

However, the 1980s witnessed the quiet revival of Korean shamanism. The ‘superstitions’ of yesterday were nicely re-packaged as ‘national traditions’ of nowadays. There were at least two major forces which saved the long-despised culture of shamans.

The first one was the leftist nationalist movement of minjung which developed and gained influence in the 1980s. The ideologues of this movement badly needed some kind of traditional spirituality which could be claimed as the essence of ‘Koreanness’. Shamanism fitted their agenda nicely. It was not compromised by long-standing relations with the rich and powerful, unlike Confucianism or Christianity. And it was authentically Korean, not a cultural import from some distant land.

Perhaps, the then recent persecutions by President Pak helped boost shamanism’s popularity among the young leftists who hated everything Pak loved and loved everything he hated. After all, “my enemy’s enemy is my ally”. The leftists obviously did not know (or did not care) that the allegedly ‘progressive’ North Korean regime treated its shamans even harsher.

The public was showered with stories about the hidden philosophical depths to be discovered in the shamanic teachings and countless romanticized descriptions of their activities and lifestyle. Shamanic rituals, known as kut, soon came to occupy a prominent place in all festivals organized by the minjung supporters (and, gosh, these people love festivals!).

But there is another force behind the recent revival of shamanism. This is ‘materialistic shamanism’, which has been the subject of recent studies by a prominent American anthropologist Laurel Kendall. She noticed a fact which the eulogists for shamanism chose to overlook: in the last two decades a majority of the shamanist rituals are ordered and paid for by small or middle-level businessmen and their families. These people are by no means members of the suffering masses; actually, their income is good even by the standards of the comfortable middle class. This is understandable: a kut is quite expensive these days, well beyond the means of the average salaried worker or farmer.

It’s easy to understand the reasons for this enthusiasm. Small business is always vulnerable, and this is especially true in a country like Korea with its wild market fluctuations. These people might have handsome incomes, but they are afraid to lose everything, and they are ready to employ all means possible to avoid such a fate. Shamans say that spirits will probably help them to acquire or keep their wealth? Well, it makes perfect sense to give them a try! Thus, the ``medium rich’’ have their houses, cars, and even company buses and office rooms exorcised and ritually cleansed. For a good fee, of course! Somebody has to pay for the shamans’ nice jewellery and the whisky for the spirits. These days, you know, no self-respecting spirit would drink cheap soju…

Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul.