A shaman sings during the annual festival at Geumseongdang in northwestern Seoul, October 7.

A majestic old Korean house sits amid the cookie-cutter high-rises of Eunpyeong New Town in the northwestern edge of Seoul. The single-story building was founded as a shrine to Prince Geumseong (1426-57), King Sejong’s sixth son, and sponsored by the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910). Known as Geumseongdang, it is the only remaining shrine out of three that used to be found around the capital. The other two vanished sometime during the last century.

Geumseongdang is also a shamanism museum and functions as a venue for various public events, including shamanistic rituals. The annual Geomseongdangje ceremony was held this year on October 7 – the first time without restrictions since the COVID-19 pandemic started. The courtyard was filled with Korean shamans and traditional musicians, and the event attracted quite a crowd, which included visiting members of Korea’s traditional arts community, scholars and dozens of curious spectators. 

Among them was Aaron Wadsworth, an American professor at Seokyeong University and an active spiritualist, who has been attending shaman rituals in Korea since 2001. He helped some of the other foreign attendees understand what they were seeing. 

“This ritual is to honor the spirit, because Geumseong was a very honorable spirit, but it also honors the mountain spirit at the site,” he explained. “That mountain is actually where the Joseon government workers were buried – not the royalty but the Joseon civic officials and bureaucrats that facilitated the function of government.”

The participating Korean shamans were young and old, with the youngest probably in their 20s. While shamans are commonly referred to as mudang in Korean, Wadsworth recommended avoiding that term as it can be deemed offensive. He said Korean shamans prefer to be called manshin (literally 10,000 spirits).

The shamans sang traditional songs and danced in a full day’s program of rituals of prayer to the mountain spirit, asking for blessings and good fortune. One woman sang while shooting arrows from a bow – aimed far away from any living targets. Before each performance, the shaman put on layer upon layer of richly colored silk robes, often to the point of being barely able to move their arms. Each robe ostensibly representing a different spirit possessing the shaman. As they belt out lyrics, or dance or laugh maniacally, they’re said to be channeling those spirits.

Some of the shamans also performed various other feats which the rapt audience might describe as miracles. One set a bowl of rice on the ground and placed the shaft of a tall trident atop it, vertical with the three points toward the sky. A cow’s head was then impaled on the spikes. While the gruesome display was left freestanding, audience members came forward to place banknotes on the cow’s head. 

“Like all shaman rituals, there’s an element of catharsis,” Wadsworth said. “Part of the role of the shaman in a society is to help the people to experience and express and move past the feelings that they just don’t want to directly confront in their own lives.”

In another performance, a shaman grabbed hold of a tree branch that started pulsating wildly with the music – allegedly the convulsions of a spirit stirred by the ceremony. Wadsworth explained that this branch represents the rural Korean tradition of villages having a sacred tree. But in a city like Seoul, this tradition has been broken, so a branch is used as a stand-in. 

All these performances took place before a massive altar stacked high with various foods, including fruit, rice cakes and even meat from the carcasses used in the rituals. As the meat started to smell and was no longer needed in the ceremony, butchers took it away and began cutting it up to be eaten later. Those who stayed until the end were presented with some of the ritual foods to take home. This practice of sharing food with the attendees dates back centuries to when Korea was an agrarian society, and famines were a common fear. 

Shamanism has been practiced wherever indigenous people have managed to retain their customs. There are broad similarities to shamanistic traditions found throughout the world, as seen in the various items exhibited in the Shamanism Museum, which include shaman robes from Nepal and Mongolia. 

“Shamanism is one of the world’s oldest religions if not the world’s oldest religion. It’s universal. In each culture, a lot of their shamanism is defined by the symbols they use, the language they use and also the terrain they live in,” explained Wadsworth, who also helped craft the English signs for the museum exhibits.

These conditions have shaped shamanism to take a different form in every culture where it has arisen, and Korean shamanism has its own distinct customs and traditions, as displayed in events such as Geomseongdangje.

Even though shamanism isn’t as prominently visible in Korea anymore – especially after facing elimination through 20th century “modernization” drives – it remains an important and powerful part of the Korean character. With the country filled with between 300,000 and 400,000 shamans, tarot readers and fortunetellers, who practice saju (a kind of Korean astrology) and other beliefs, it is still a part of public consciousness.

“In Korea, in particular, fundamentally shamanism is the root of Korean traditional culture,” Wadsworth said. “It’s the root of Korean traditional music, Korean traditional medicine, Korean traditional dance, Korea’s traditional worldview. Koreans today follow modern religions and may feel that shamanism is backwards or evil, but they still believe in it. It is on a fundamental level the root of Korean culture.”

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