Yeongdeung Halmeoni: The Wind Goddess Who Visits Korea Each Spring

Who is Yeongdeung Halmeoni?

Yeongdeung Halmeoni is a goddess of wind in Korean folk religion. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture describes her as a wind deity who descends from the sky on the first day of the second lunar month and brings safety at sea and abundance. She is known by many names: Yeongdeung Halmang on Jeju, Yeongdong Halmaeng or Yeongdong Halmanne in other regions, and sometimes Granny Second-Month.

Unlike the household gods who stay in a home all year, she is a visiting spirit. She arrives, stays roughly until the middle of the month, and goes back. The second lunar month falls between winter and spring, when winds are sharp and the weather unsteady. Fishers found it dangerous and farmers used it to prepare the year's fields, so people explained these changeable days as the visit of a goddess. This page presents the belief as traditional culture, not as a prediction of anything.

Her legend: a daughter brings wind, a daughter-in-law brings rain

The best-known detail concerns the people she brings with her. According to the encyclopedia, if Yeongdeung arrives with her daughter, the wind blows, and if she arrives with her daughter-in-law, it rains. Some regions tell it the other way round. A humorous explanation goes that the wind lifts the daughter's pretty skirt, while the rain soaks the disliked daughter-in-law's skirt. It is a wink about family life hidden inside a weather story.

On Jeju the goddess is said to come from beyond the sea. She enters through the small island of Udo on the first day of the month and walks around it, eating the shellfish on the shore and scattering the seeds of seaweed, abalone and conch in the water before she leaves. When shellfish are empty in the second month, people used to say Yeongdeung had already been by. If the weather turned cold they said, 'Yeongdeung has come in good clothes', and if it rained, 'Yeongdeung has come in a rain cape.'

The belief is old. The geography text Sinjeung Dongguk Yeoji Seungnam records that on the first day of the second month people in Jeju's Gwideok and Gimnyeong villages raised twelve wooden poles to welcome the god, and in Aewol people decorated a horse-head raft and performed a horse dance to please the deity, ending the festival on the fifteenth. It also mentions that sailing was avoided during the month.

Rites and symbols

On Jeju the rite is called Yeongdeung-gut and is held village by village. A welcoming ritual on the first day of the month, Yeongdeung hwanyeongje, receives the goddess, and a farewell ritual, Yeongdeung songbyeolje, sends her off somewhere between the twelfth and fifteenth day. Some villages hold a single one-day rite instead. Women's groups, especially the haenyeo (women divers) association, prepare the rice cakes and offerings the day before, and several shamans (simbang) gather at the shrine to pray for the whole village and for individual households. The finale is a small boat of straw or wood loaded with offerings and floated out to sea as a send-off.

In Yeongnam and along the southern coast, many families welcomed her at home. At dawn on the first day they set out clear water and food in the kitchen or on the jar terrace, and many hung strips of hanji paper or five-colored cloth on a bamboo branch as the goddess's seat. While she was believed to stay, they changed the offering water each morning, and on the day she left they burned a paper offering and called out each family member's name in blessing.

• Yeongdeung hwanyeongje: the village ritual on day 1 that welcomes the goddess
• Yeongdeung songbyeolje: the farewell ritual around days 12 to 15
• Baebangseon: the small boat of offerings set adrift at the end of the rite
• Bamboo shindae: a branch with paper or cloth that served as her seat in southeastern homes

Taboos and everyday customs

While Yeongdeung stayed, people observed a set of taboos. On Jeju, fishing boats did not go out until she had left, and laundry was not washed. One tradition says that starching laundry during this time would breed maggots in the house. Many haenyeo rested from diving for the period and put their effort into preparing the rite, which can also be read as giving the sea a rest while the goddess sows it with seed.

These rules match what people could see. The second lunar month usually brings cold spring winds and rough water, and clothes dry poorly in damp wind. The taboos look like practical wisdom wearing the language of belief: do not push your boat out in bad weather, slow down the household work, and prepare for spring. In Yeongnam some families also avoided funeral houses and visiting others unnecessarily during these days.

Regional differences

The encyclopedia explains that the Yeongdeung of the mainland and of Jeju belong to one family of belief but differ in character. On the mainland, Yeongdong is generally a wind deity of farming and fishing, honored by individuals and households. On Jeju, Yeongdeung Halmang is above all a guardian of fishing and of what haenyeo gather, honored by the whole village.

Even within Jeju, dates and the order of the ritual vary from village to village. The most famous is the Chilmeoridang Yeongdeung-gut in Geonip-dong in Jeju City. It was designated a national intangible heritage in 1980 and inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. It shows fishers and divers praying together for a rich and safe sea, which the heritage listing values as a community culture of caring for shared waters.

Where it fits in the second-month calendar

The first day of the second lunar month carries other customs too. Farm households marked it as Meoseumnal, a day when farmhands were treated to food before the field season began, and some regions made rice cakes and ate as many as their age. The grand round of first-month events ends at the full moon, and then the real work on sea and field begins. Welcoming the goddess of weather at that threshold and asking for a safe year was a natural step.

Seen this way, Yeongdeung is a guardian of the turning point between seasons. In the roaring spring wind, people judged when to go to sea and when to sow, and their patience and caution survive in the story of a grandmother who arrives with her daughter and daughter-in-law.

The haenyeo connection

For Jeju's haenyeo, Yeongdeung is one of the nearest spirits. Haenyeo dive on a single breath to gather conch, abalone and seaweed, and a change in tide or weather could mean the difference between life and death. Each year the village haenyeo association took the lead in preparing the rite and prayed to Yeongdeung and the Dragon King for safety and a good harvest. They prepared the rice cakes and offerings themselves.

Villages also had a seaside shrine that divers visited at the start of the season or after hard events. Alongside it passed down knowledge of tides and wind and rules for diving together while watching each other. Jeju haenyeo culture was inscribed on the UNESCO list in 2016, and its communal rituals are part of what makes that culture notable.

What remains today

Older people still call the cold wind around the second lunar month Yeongdeung-baram, 'Yeongdeung wind', and say things like 'Granny Yeongdeung's wind is blowing.' On Jeju the Chilmeoridang rite and others are held each year in the second lunar month, and visitors can often watch with explanations, which makes it a good way to understand Jeju shamanism and haenyeo culture together.

As a living custom it shows how a community turns weather, work and worry into a shared story. It is not a promise about luck but a window into how coastal people lived. For readers of Korean culture it is one of the clearest examples of a spirit tied to a season.

Kindred spirits