Shaman

It not easy to be in sinbyong, to be sick and possessed. Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night with strange nightmares. Sometimes you are afraid that your power will hurt others, another times you succumb to the temptation of using your power to gain notoriety and fame. And it doesn’t ends there; I also experienced a lot of physical pain during about three years. I remembered my hand and feet feeling cold most of the time. I also used to suffer from diarrhea, which could come and go about any time and anywhere, I used to faint and get dizzy. The spirit that possessed me was so strong that I even had pain in my joints, and my heart suddenly could start running so fast that I even thought I was never going to make to the next step. So, all these dangers have to be overcome. I have to empty myself from mundane things and focus on the light. Once I was full of light and energy, full of spirit and spirit myself, and I was not afraid of death or getting sick anymore, then I realized that I had the power of healing. You need a lot of support from your family, you have to go trough a lot of sacrifices, to suffer and get stronger, looking at the ways the universe works, dealing with all those estrange forces.

I charge a fee for my healing. I was born with an uncommon sensibility to things around me. The men in the village didn’t want to get involved in the responsibilities that comes from been a shaman, they were too young and want it to go to the city and explore life. I dreamed about living in the city too, but I heard that it was even harder for girls there than for guys. A cousin of mine came back from the city about six months ago, running away from a gang that forced her to prostitution, she was lucky. Well, with so few choices left, I decided to hear the shaman’s advice and became a mudang.

You asked me before and I already told you that I get a fee for my services. But is not enough to make me rich. If it wasn’t for the government taxes, maybe I would be fairly wealthy, but I’m not.  My uncle Shu told me once that the government started taxing shamans sometime after it failed to eradicate shamanism in Korea. He told me that the Yi Dinasty, which lasted from 1392 to 1910, started the policy of eradicating shamanism totally and replaced it by neo-Confucianism. Neo-Confucianism is too rational, doesn’t believe in spirits or anything like that and people need religion, that’s why Neo-Confucianism didn’t work and shamanism persisted. One day the government woke up realizing that its policies were not going to eradicate shamanism but merely drive it underground and decide to tax us but at the same time made us register as shamans and ascribed us outcasts .

            So it is not easy for us. But despite of that we are still growing in number, especially the number of women who are shamans is growing even more since most of the men are leaving to work in the cities. Although the Yi Dinasty ended in 1910, we are still persecuted and ostracized today.

When my family first realized that I was sinbyong, they feared that if I become a shaman they would be out-casted by the government. But what am-I, and the other sinbyong women like me, going to do? If you resist becoming a shaman the spirits either could kill you or bring miss-fortune to your family. And if you die somebody else in your family will be sinbyong instead and will have to become a shaman. So, once you are sinbyong the best thing to do is follow the path traced by the spirit and become a shaman. Never-mind that the others will call you crazy or unmoral or whatever, you got it to do what you got to do.

I have a lot of requests. People come to me asking for help in many ways. They either need me because they want to talk and make peace with their ancestors, or they want to know about the appropriate day to bury a relative or get married. Other times they want to know about the real personality and intentions of their would be husbands and wives, or they want to help with their children careers and jobs. Some how I’m a sort of functionary, dealing with spiritual transactions, another times I’m like modern psychiatrist, trying to restore balance and peace in the minds and souls of my patients.

            Turns out that my family is helping me these days. They too realized that it was inevitable that I will be a shaman. All the miss-fortunes of my life happened for a reason: My ex-husband suicide, my inability to find a steady job, my children death. These days I’m dating what seems to be a good and mature guy. He is a recovered alcoholic but he says that he found peace with me. I talk to his ancestors every week and ask them to keep him away from alcohol. I also feed and give presents to his ancestors to keep them quiet. The effect on him is so good that even my mother in law is so happy that she is helping me with my spiritual work, taking care of the daily house activities. Even my own family, though they resent being called outcasts, is happy, my nieces and nephew are doing well at school and it is because of my talking to the spirits, or so they said. And who knows, maybe some day I will have children again.

Based on Kim Harvey, Youngsook. Possession Sickness and Women Shamans in Korea. In Nancy Auer Falk and Rita M. Gross Unspoken Worlds, Women Religious Lifes. Wardsworth/Thomson Learning, 3^rd Edition. Canada. 2001.