Richard D. McBride II

religion―Korea 57 B.C.E.―935 C.E. shamanism ancestor worship ritual mountain worship

Religion in ancient Korea is typically classified as “Shamanism.” The oldest literary documents—the accounts found in Chinese dynastic histories—describing the religious and ritual activities of the tribal peoples who would eventually coalesce into the “Korean people,” however, never use the term “shaman” (Kor. mu, Ch. wu) to describe the ritual and religious specialists, and yet they depict many kinds of beliefs and practices that we would call “religious.” This paper problematizes the concepts of shaman and Shamanism as they are deployed in scholarship and provides greater clarity on the nature of ancient Korean religion by describing instead four interrelated categories of practices evident in the literary sources, both Korean and Chinese, and in the archaeological record. These categories are (1) the worship of objects worthy of veneration, (2) ancestor worship and the reverence of founder-kings, (3) calendrical rituals, and (4) the activities of shamans. Many of these categories overlap, but what is important is that the evidence suggests that social elites and tribal and village leaders were responsible to approach the gods and could officiate in rituals for their propitiation: not shamans. Shamans, of course, existed, but there is little evidence to suggest that they ever enjoyed a pre-eminent position in ancient Korean society, unless we say that all tribal and village elites were shamans. Ancient Korean religion is complex, and yet it shares much with other East Asian peoples. While “indigenous Korean religion” is certainly better than “Shamanism” as a descriptive term, it is not readily apparent to non-specialists and ignores the rich academic vocabulary available in the English language. After all, describing the characteristics of ancient Korean religion may be preferable to deploying a single term.