Mudang and baksu — Korea's shamans, how they are called and how they train

Who are the mudang and baksu?

If you have watched a Korean drama in which a woman in bright robes shakes a bundle of bells and speaks in a voice that is not quite her own, you have already met a mudang. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture defines a mudang as a religious specialist who serves the gods and devotes herself to leading the ritual called gut. During a gut she invites a god to the room, passes the wishes of the family to that god, and then relays the god's reply back to the people. In other words she is a go-between, standing in the narrow space between the human world and the world of the spirits.

The word mudang covers both women and men, but in practice most shamans in Korea have been women. A male shaman is called a baksu, or baksu mudang. Baksu is not a rank or a type of skill, only a word that marks gender. People in central and northern Korea often attached a surname or a place name to it, so you might hear of a Kim baksu or a baksu from a particular town. Some scholars trace the word to the Chinese-derived terms for a learned man or a diviner, while others link it to male shamans of northern Asian peoples. One detail that surprises many newcomers is that a baksu often wears women's clothes and speaks in a softer voice while performing. Researchers read this as a sign that, in Korean shamanism, the body that receives the gods was traditionally imagined as female.

A quick note on vocabulary. In everyday English people say shaman, but inside Korea the terms matter. Mudang is the neutral and most widely used word. Mansin is an honorific for a senior woman shaman, literally something like a person of ten thousand gods. Some mudang prefer to be called by other titles such as bosal or beopsa, borrowed from Buddhism, which you will often see on fortune-telling shop signs. This page uses mudang as the general term and uses the others where they belong.

A brief history

The oldest record of the profession appears in two classic histories, the Samguk Sagi and the Samguk Yusa. They tell us that the second king of Silla, King Namhae, bore the title Chachaung. According to the explanation attached to the story, chachaung was a dialect word for shaman, and people feared and revered such a person because the shaman served the spirits and presided over the rites. The detail suggests that in the earliest kingdoms the roles of ritual leader and ruler overlapped.

By the Goryeo era the shaman was a familiar figure in both palace and village. Chronicles often mention officials gathering shamans to hold rain-calling rites during a drought. The poet Yi Gyu-bo wrote a long poem called Nomupyeon, Song of an Old Shaman, which gives a vivid picture of a possessed mudang leaping and chanting, and which resembles central Korean gut surprisingly closely even today.

During the Joseon dynasty, when Confucianism became the state ideology, shamans were pushed outside the capital walls and in some periods were made to pay a special tax. Even so, demand for gut never disappeared in palaces or in private homes. The same was true through the colonial period and the rapid modernization that followed, when campaigns against so-called superstition tried to end such practices. Shamanism survived because it was tied to family life: illness, bereavement, a new house, a safe voyage.

Becoming a spirit-called shaman is itself a rite of passage. A person who has suffered the illness described below visits an established mudang, who performs the naerim-gut, the initiation ritual in which the god is received. From then on, the senior shaman is called the spirit mother (sin-eomeoni), or spirit father for a baksu, and the student becomes a spirit daughter or son. The apprentice typically follows the teacher for around three years, learning the order of the ritual, the sung narratives (muga), the dances and how to lay out an offering table. Only afterwards does she lead a gut on her own. These master-and-student lines are how regional traditions have been kept alive.

Hereditary families train their children differently. A child grows up at the edge of the ritual floor, absorbing rhythms and songs by ear. Marriages were often arranged within shaman families, so skills were handed down inside the household over many generations.

Two paths: gangsin-mu and seseup-mu

There are two classic ways to become a mudang. The first is through a religious experience called sinbyeong, spirit illness, after which the person receives the god in a naerim-gut. These shamans are called gangsin-mu, literally spirit-descended shamans. The second is by inheriting the position and the skills from one's family; these are seseup-mu, hereditary shamans. The two paths are summarized below.

Tools of the mudang and words of the gut

Objects used in a gut are called mugu, shamanic implements. They call the gods, stand for the gods and ask for their will. For a spirit-descended shaman, the implements received at the initiation hold her personal god and are treated with great care.

• Bells (bangul): a cluster of small bells shaken to summon the gods and purify the space.
• Fan (buchae): often painted with a god's picture, used to welcome the spirit and to wave away bad energy. Bells and a fan together are the shaman's best-known pair.
• Spirit knives and trident (sinkal, samjichang): used to drive away troublesome spirits, and sometimes thrown so that the way they fall answers a question.
• Myeongdu: a round brass mirror engraved with the sun, the moon and the Big Dipper, hung in the shrine as the body of the personal god.
• Costumes (mubok): each god has its own robe. A general spirit wears a long military coat and hat, while Jeseok, a god of fortune and longevity, appears with a pointed cap and a Buddhist-style robe.
• Gongsu: the words spoken by a god through the mudang's mouth. This is the heart of a spirit-descended shaman's gut, and families may weep and laugh together when an ancestor's message arrives.

Regional names and traditions

Each region has its own word for a shaman and its own flavor of ritual. In Seoul, Gyeonggi and Hwanghae a woman shaman is respectfully called mansin. In Honam, the southwest, hereditary shamans are called dangol (also written danggol). A dangol looked after a fixed territory, the dangol-pan, and took charge of rites for families inside it. The men in a dangol household worked as musicians, tightrope walkers and entertainers, and they are considered important roots of pansori and Korean folk music. On Jeju Island the shaman is called simbang. The role is largely hereditary, but spirit experience is also valued, so scholars sometimes place Jeju between the two main types.

On the east coast, hereditary shaman families work as a pair: the woman is the mudang and her husband is the yangjung (or hwaraengi), the male musician-priest. Hwanghae-do gut is famed for dazzling costumes and the dramatic feat of standing barefoot on sharpened blades (jakdu-tagi). After the division of Korea, shamans who moved south to Incheon and Seoul carried that tradition with them. So one word, mudang, actually covers several distinct streams of music, dance and belief.

Things worth knowing

The spirit illness of a future gangsin-mu is said to last on average around eight years and sometimes up to thirty. It may include fatigue, insomnia, strange dreams and a sense of being drawn to ritual. Many of these symptoms overlap with real conditions such as depression, sleep problems and panic, which need medical care. If you or someone close has been unwell for a long time, seeing a doctor first is the safest choice. Spiritual interpretations are a personal choice that can follow.

Many mudang carry on the ritual sincerely and are important keepers of folk tradition. Unfortunately, there are also cases where an anxious person is warned of misfortune and pressed for large payments for a gut or a talisman. If that happens, do not decide on the spot. Give yourself at least a day, and if you have already suffered a loss, gather records and consult a consumer or police service.

The mudang today

Today you can meet the mudang in two very different settings. One is as a bearer of traditional performing arts. Holders and trained successors of nationally designated Intangible Cultural Heritage gut perform in public events and teach the sung narratives, dances and music to a new generation. The other is as a religious practitioner in an urban shrine who offers spirit divination and performs gut for clients. Signboards using Buddhist words such as bosal or beopsa are common.

As mudang appear as heroes in dramas, films and webtoons, curiosity has grown, especially among younger Koreans. Whether or not you believe in shamanism, the gut and muga handed down by mudang reveal a deep layer of Korean culture. Approach it with respect, enjoy it as culture and for self-reflection, and make big decisions about health, money and family with real-world information and professional advice.

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