Teoju: The Korean Spirit That Guards the Ground of the Home

Who is Teoju?

The name Teoju means "master of the site." The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture defines Teoju as a household god in folk belief who protects the plot of the house, and it explains that he mainly rules the area inside the home's fence. It is a neat division of labor. In the old picture of the home, the building belonged to Seongju, the house god who lived in the great beam, while the ground the building sat on, along with the yard and the back garden, belonged to Teoju.

Gods of the earth are generally called Jisin (地神). The encyclopedia's entry on Jisin describes Teoju as the earth spirit in the form in which a single household worships it. The village as a whole had its own earth spirit, and each home had its own Teoju. Because people believed the fortune of a plot flowed into the people living on it, Teoju came to be seen as the keeper of the family's luck, above all its luck with wealth. In the ritual of a gut, a shamanic ceremony, he is honored with the title Teoju-daegam, a respectful form of address for a powerful spirit.

This page introduces a living folk tradition as cultural history. It does not claim that a spirit actually affects any home, and it is meant as a window into how earlier generations felt about land, grain and the places they lived.

Origins and legends

There is no single long epic that stars Teoju alone, but stories about the gods of the earth are scattered through many shamanic songs. In a Seongju-puri sung in southern Gyeonggi province, the carpenter Hwangu-yang becomes Seongju, and his wife becomes Jisin. The husband who builds the house and the wife who guards the land under it make a pair, so the story can be read as a myth of Seongju and Teoju sharing the home between them. In a version from Dongnae in Busan, the son and daughter of Seongjo become the earth gods Ojiji and Obang Jisin.

The place where Teoju's character shows most clearly is the daegam-geori, a section of the gut in Seoul and Gyeonggi. The shaman balances a steaming-pot lid on her head, drinks rice wine, and wanders through the inner yard and the back garden. The encyclopedia explains that this shows the daegam spirit walking around the territory he looks after. The song sung at this point, the Daegam-taryeong, includes lines about a "greedy daegam" and a "covetous daegam." Listeners understood this as meaning that a spirit who wants a lot will pile up a lot of wealth in the house. It is a frank and humorous way to speak about the wish for prosperity, and the scene is often one of the liveliest in the ritual, with the audience laughing and bargaining with the shaman. The daegam play is a prayer, but it is also a stage show.

How Teoju was honored: the teojuggari

Teoju's body, in the sense of the object where the spirit lives, is the teojuggari. Behind the house, or close to the jangdokdae, the raised stone platform for fermenting jars, families set a small jar and filled it with rice or unhusked grain. Over it they placed a juchori, a cone of braided straw that shed rain and dew. From a distance it looked like a miniature thatched roof standing at the edge of the jar terrace.

The grain in the jar was changed every autumn when the new rice came in. Some families simply swapped it. Others invited a shaman and did it as part of a ritual. Whenever the household held an annual gosa or a gut, a small table was set for the teojuggari too, and some homes made small offerings to it at ordinary times. The old grain was often cooked and eaten by the family, as was done with the rice from the Seongju jar, since leftover offerings were not considered something to throw away.

• Teojuggari: a straw cap and a grain jar, behind the house or beside the jangdokdae
• Juchori: a cone of braided straw; it resembles the one used for Eopgari, the shrine of the wealth spirit
• Grain: rice or unhusked rice, replaced every autumn with the new harvest
• Offerings: siru (steamed rice cake), rice wine and a bowl of clean water drawn at dawn

Customs and taboos

Because Teoju belongs to the ground, many taboos concerned working the soil. The best known is dongti (動土), the idea that digging the earth carelessly or moving a big stone or tree would anger the spirit of the place and cause trouble. So before building a house, digging a well or repairing a wall, people chose an auspicious day and gave the spirit a small notice by performing a short gosa. The groundbreaking ceremony that many Korean construction projects still hold today belongs to the same family of customs.

People were also careful around the teojuggari itself. Children were kept from playing there, and when the straw cap wore out it was not thrown away carelessly but replaced with a freshly braided one. During the first full moon of the lunar year, village percussion bands went from house to house in a custom called jisin-balpgi, "treading on the earth spirit," to calm and cheer the gods of the ground. The jar terrace and the back garden, where Teoju lived, were always on the route.

Regional differences

Teojuggari were seen most often in central Korea: Seoul, Gyeonggi and Chungcheong. In Honam, the southwest, some places call the spirit of the jar terrace Cheolryung (or Cheonryong) and hold a rite for the jars there. In Yeongnam, the southeast, one finds names like teoju-danji or jisin-danji, which center on the jar itself. The names and shapes differ, but almost everywhere the pattern is the same: a container of grain in the rear of the home, close to the jars.

On Jeju Island there is a similar shrine called Bat-chilseong or chilseong-nul. Five grains are placed in a roof tile or jar behind the house and covered with thatching grass. Its look and position resemble the teojuggari, but on Jeju it is honored as Chilseong, a snake spirit, which is a real difference. The idea that land, grain and wealth are guarded behind the home appears under different divine names in different places. Teojuggari lasted longer in farm households than in gentry homes and longer in the countryside than in towns, and they declined quickly after the 1970s as thatched houses disappeared and housing changed. Today you can see reconstructions at folk villages and folk museums.

Traces in modern life: teojudaegam

The most famous legacy of Teoju belief is the word teojudaegam. It started as an honorific for the spirit guarding a house site, but today it means a person who has stayed in one place or one field for a long time and knows everything about it. "The teojudaegam of this neighborhood" or "the teojudaegam of the company" are friendly everyday expressions, a little like "the old hand" or "the resident expert" in English.

Other habits come from the same feeling that land has a keeper. People choose a son-eomneun-nal, a day thought free of mischievous spirits, for moving into a new home. Feng shui (pungsu) considers the energy of a site, and builders hold a ceremony before breaking ground. When someone moves into a new neighborhood, handing out rice cakes to the neighbors as a greeting can be read as courtesy toward the people who were there first.

Apartments have no back garden or jar terrace, but families who keep a few jars on the balcony and make soy sauce every year often still keep the area around them clean and avoid stepping on them. It is a small continuation of the old attitude toward earth and grain.

Choosing and firming the ground

Teoju belief is hard to separate from the process of building a home. People once chose a site with a mountain behind and open land in front, looking for good drainage and shelter, which are the basic tests of feng shui. Once the plot was fixed, villagers gathered to tamp the ground hard in a work song called jigyeong-dagi. A heavy stone was lifted and dropped together by many hands holding ropes, and the jigyeong-sori they sang contained blessings such as "We build a house on this ground; may it bring good fortune for generations."

On the packed earth the ridge-beam ceremony welcomed Seongju, and when the house was finished the teojuggari was set up behind it for Teoju. Pounding the ground was real construction that made the structure strong, and it was also a ritual announcing to the spirit of the place that people were about to live there. Feeding the neighbors who had worked beside you with food and wine naturally turned the day into a village feast.

Spirits to read about together