Korean mythology
Korean mythology is the group of myths told by historical and modern Koreans. There are two types: the written, literary mythology in traditional histories, mostly about the founding monarchs of various historical kingdoms, and the much larger and more diverse oral mythology, mostly narratives sung by shamans or priestesses in rituals invoking the gods and which are still considered sacred today.
The historicized state-foundation myths representing the bulk of the literary mythology are preserved in Hanja literary works such as Samguk sagi and Samguk yusa. One state's foundation myth, that of the first Korean kingdom of Gojoseon by legendary king Dangun, has become the founding myth of the whole Korean nation. State-foundation myths are further divided into northern, such as that of the kingdom of Goguryeo and its founder Jumong, where the founder is the son of a celestial male figure and an earthly female figure, and southern, such as that of the kingdom of Silla and its founder Hyeokgeose, where the founder begins as an object descended from the heavens, and himself marries an earthly woman. Other literary myths include the origin myths of family lineages recorded in genealogies.
The narratives of Korean shamanism, the country's indigenous religion, feature a diverse array of both gods and humans. They are recited in ritual contexts both to please the gods and to entertain the human worshippers. As oral literature, the shamanic narrative is regularly revised with each performance, although a certain degree of consistency is required; new narratives have appeared since the 1960s. It has frequently been at odds with the official ideologies of Korean society, and its mythology is often characterized as subversive of traditional norms such as patriarchy.
The shamanic mythology is divided into five regional traditions, with each region having original narratives, as well as distinctive versions of pan-Korean narratives. The mythological tradition of southern Jeju Island is especially divergent. The two narratives found in all but one region respectively are the Jeseok bon-puri, featuring a girl who in most versions is impregnated by a supernaturally potent Buddhist priest—who was probably originally a sky god—and gives birth to triplets who themselves become gods; and the Princess Bari, about a princess who is abandoned by her father for being a girl and who later resurrects her dead parents with the flower of life.
Introduction
Korean mythology comprises two distinct corpora of literature. The first is the literary mythology recorded in the traditional Korean histories, such as the thirteenth-century work Samguk yusa. The myths contained in these volumes are heavily historicized, to the point that it is often difficult to differentiate between historical fact and mythology. The primary literary myths are the state-foundation myths, which recount the story of how a particular kingdom or dynasty was founded, although the category also includes other supernatural stories found in the historical chronicles as well as the origin myths of non-royal lineages.The second corpus is the modern oral mythology, which is "incomparably" richer than the literary tradition in both sheer quantity of material and the diversity of themes and content. The oral mythology primarily consists of the shamanic narratives, which are sung by Korean shamans during gut, religious ceremonies in which shamans invoke the gods. While also mythological in content, these narratives are very different in function and content from the literary myths. The state-foundation myths are preserved only in writing, deprived of their original ritual context, and have existed in written form for centuries. By contrast, the shamanic narratives are oral literature that is "living mythology," sacred religious truth to the participants of the gut. They began to be published only in 1930, centuries after the first attestation of the literary myths. Unlike the historicized accounts of the literary myths, shamans's songs feature elements such as the primordial history of the world, the ascent of human individuals to divinity, and divine retribution upon impious mortals.
The academic study of Korean mythology began with the literary myths, with historians such as Choe Nam-seon and Yi Pyong-do pioneering the first studies of state-foundation myths. But research into the much richer oral corpus was minimal until the 1960s, when the study of the shamanic narratives was spearheaded by scholars such as Kim Yeol-gyu, who applied structuralist, comparative, and myth-ritual approaches to the songs, Hyeon Yong-jun, who published a vast encyclopedia of Jeju ritual and mythology, and Seo Daeseok, who established the literary study of the shamanic narratives and whose comprehensive work on the Jeseok bon-puri narrative proved a model for future researchers. Recent trends in the study of Korean mythology since the 1990s include a greater focus on comparisons with neighboring mythologies, new research into the hitherto neglected village-shrine myths that involve the patron god of one specific village, and feminist interpretations. Bella Myong-wol Dalton-Fenkl and renowned folklorist Heinz Insu Fenkl wrote Korean Myths, published by Thames and Hudson in 2024, that provides a comprehensive introduction to Korean Mythology.
The oral mythology is always religious, and must be distinguished from the broader corpus of Korean folklore, which might be secular. For instance, the Woncheon'gang bon-puri, a Jeju shamanic narrative about a girl who goes in search for her parents and becomes a goddess, is either descended from or ancestral to a very similar mainland Korean folktale called the Fortune Quest. But because the Woncheon'gang bon-puri is a sacred story about a goddess, unlike the Fortune Quest, the former is a myth and the latter is not. Some Korean myths are mythicized folktales, while many Korean folktales are desacralized myths.
Literary mythology
State-foundation myths
State-foundation myths narrate the life of the first ruler of a new Korean kingdom or dynasty. They include the founder's supernatural birth, the story of how the founder came to create his kingdom, and his miraculous death or departure. They are often interpreted as euhemerized accounts of actual events that happened during the kingdom's founding.The oldest surviving accounts of the founding myths of the ancient Korean kingdoms—such as Gojoseon, Goguryeo, and Silla—are transcribed in Classical Chinese in Korean texts compiled during or after the twelfth century. Such texts include Samguk sagi, Samguk yusa, Jewang ungi, Eungje siju, and Tongguk t'onggam. These texts were compiled on the basis of earlier sources that are now lost. Several ancient Chinese texts are also important contemporaneous sources for myths; these include not only the official dynastic histories such as the third-century Records of the Three Kingdoms and the sixth-century Book of Wei, but also more general texts such as the Lunheng, written in 80 CE. In the case of Goguryeo, there are also five Chinese-language stelae narrating the kingdom's foundation myth from the perspective of the Goguryeo people themselves. The oldest of the five is the Gwanggaeto Stele, erected in 414 CE.
The founding myth of the Goryeo dynasty, which ruled Korea from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, is recorded in Goryeo-sa, the official dynastic history published in the fifteenth century. Yongbieocheon'ga, a poem published around the same time as Goryeo-sa by the succeeding Joseon dynasty, is sometimes seen as the Joseon foundation myth, but it is debated whether Yongbieocheon'ga should be seen as having a narrative at all. As the Joseon were the final Korean dynasty, there are no newer founding myths.
State foundation myths were once also narrated orally, perhaps by shamans. The poet Yi Gyu-bo mentions that both written and spoken forms of the Goguryeo foundation myth were known during his lifetime, even though the kingdom itself had fallen more than five centuries earlier. The modern Jeseok bon-puri shamanic narrative has many structural parallels to the Goguryeo myth and may be a direct descendant of the ancient tale.
The ancient state-foundation myths are classified into two major types, northern and southern, though both share the central motif of a king associated with the heavens. In the northern kingdoms of Gojoseon, Buyeo, and Goguryeo, the founding monarch is born from the coupling of a celestial male figure and an earthly woman. In the southern kingdoms of Silla and Geumgwan Gaya, the king is generated from a physical object that descends from heaven, and then marries an earthly woman himself. In the northern myths, the demigod king succeeds his heavenly father or creates a new kingdom himself. In the south, the celestial being is crowned by the consensus of local chieftains.
Northern kingdoms
Gojoseon
The foundation myth of Gojoseon, the earliest Korean kingdom, is first recorded in two nearly contemporaneous works: Samguk yusa, a history compiled by the Buddhist monk Iryeon around the late 1270s, and Jewang ungi, a Chinese-language epic poem written in 1287.Iryeon's account is as follows. Hwanung, a younger son of the sky god Hwanin, desires to rule the human world. Hwanin sees that his son could "broadly benefit the human world," and gives him three unspecified treasures to take with him to earth. Hwanung descends beneath a sacred tree on Mount Taebaek, where he and his three thousand followers found the "Sacred City." With the gods of wind, rain, and cloud, Hwanin supervises various human affairs.
A bear and a tiger then ask that Hwanung turn them into humans. The god gives the animals twenty pieces of garlic and a clump of sacred mugwort, and tells them that they will become humans if they eat them and do not see sunlight for a hundred days. The two animals then fast, and the bear becomes a woman on the twenty-first day. The tiger fails to fast and remains an animal. The bear-turned-woman prays for a child at the sacred tree, and Hwanung grants her wish by becoming a human to marry her. She gives birth to a boy named Dangun Wanggeom, who founds the kingdom of Gojoseon at the site of Pyongyang. Dangun rules for fifteen centuries, then departs from the kingdom when the Chinese King Wu of Zhou sends Jizi to rule over Korea. The king ultimately becomes a mountain god.
The Dangun myth is of the northern type, featuring the founder's birth from a celestial father and an earthly mother. It is often interpreted as a mythicized account of interactions between three clans whose totemic symbols or mythological ancestors were a sky god, a bear, and a tiger respectively. The tiger-associated clan was somehow eliminated, but the bear clan joined the dominant sky god clan in the establishment of the Gojoseon polity. Folklorist James H. Grayson draws connections to the Japanese foundation myth. Ninigi-no-Mikoto descends to earth with three treasures as well, and the first Japanese emperor Jinmu is a younger son like Hwanung. Grayson also notes Siberian myths where a bear is the mother of a tribal ancestor.
Dangun appears to have been worshipped only locally in the Pyongyang area until the thirteenth century, when intellectuals attempted to bolster the legitimacy of the Korean state, then imperiled by Mongol invasion and domination, by establishing him as the ancestor of all Korean polities. By the twentieth century he had become accepted as the mythical founder of the Korean nation and plays an important role in the ideologies of both North and South Korea.