Quaint Korea

by Louise Jordan Miln

The expression of Korean superstition is picturesque. The more picturesque a superstition is the more impregnable it is.

Korean demon-worship is positively fascinating. Superstition has not always been the power in Korea that it is now. In Korea religion and superstition have played a long game of see-saw. The Koreans outgrew their early superstitions, discarded them, and embraced a highly civilized and civilizing form of religion; then they discarded that religion. Now, the average human mind must believe in something outside of its own material ken, beyond its own demonstrating. Quod erat demonstrandum forms no part of the rituals and the creeds of most religions, so when the time came that Buddha and his coterie of well-bred and fairly rational deities had practically been banished from Korea, the Koreans fell back on their old superstitions, and to-day superstition and its ridiculous rites are more rife in Korea than in any other civilized country.

There are three classes of supernatural beings in whom the people of Korea believe—the demons who work all manner of evil, the beneficent spirits whose practice it is to do good occasionally, and who semi-occasionally combat the evil spirits, and an intermediate class of spirits who dwell, as a rule, on the mountains, and neither work good nor evil, but who, in themselves and in their lives, are the subjects of much charming folk-lore. The Korean—the Korean of the populace—the superstitious Korean attributes all his ills to demons. He, being a Korean, cannot conceive that Nature can be malignant, nor can he conceive that he is ever punished for breaking laws of whose very existence he is ignorant. So he peoples the air, the sea, and the rocks with devils of earthquake, devils of pestilence, devils of lightning, devils of hurricane, and a thousand other devils of blight and of sorrow. Having determined that they cause all his troubles, he then sets about doing the best he can to propitiate the spirits of evil. Korean demons are supposed to be very small, and I have never heard of one to whom much physical strength was attributed; and almost always when it comes to a face-to-face contest between one of them and a powerful man (and such contests occur very often in Korean myths), the demon has the worst of it. Still, the majority of the Korean populace live in unceasing terror and dread of these demons. Korean methods of circumventing them are delightful, and delightfully simple. I have already spoken of the beasts that sit on guard on many Korean roofs. They are supposed to be the most efficacious combatants of the Korean devils; but the privilege of having them is rather monopolized by royalty and by the high favourites of the royal family. On lintels of the houses of well-to-do Koreans are usually hung two oblong pieces of coloured paper upon which are drawn in black, or two oblong pieces of white paper on which are drawn in colours, terrible enough portraits of two famous old generals. One of these warriors was a Chinaman, the other was a Korean, and both are renowned in the legends of the peninsula as having waged highly successful warfare against several evil spirits of Chosön, and their portraits are supposed to protect the houses, outside of which they hang, from the invasion of the imps of mischief and of misery. Korean devils, for some unfathomable reason, are supposed to be far more powerful indoors than out, and so the Koreans are at special pains to exclude their devilships from Korean interiors. The Korean householder, who is debarred by poverty or by his own social inferiority both from using the roof-scarecrows, and from hanging counterfeit presentments of the two old warriors on his portals, fastens a strip of cloth and some wisps of rice straw outside his door. He fastens the rice straw there in the hope that the devil about to enter may be hungry, and stop to gorge himself and then go away. He fastens the bit of cloth (which must be torn from some old garment of his own), because the Koreans have the nice taste to consider their devils extremely stupid, and so believe that any devil who is confronted with a fragment of a man’s garment will mistake it for the man himself, and, in view of how often men have defeated devils, fly and trouble that house no more.

The evil spirits of Korea are also frightened away by noise; noise so enormous, so metallic, so discordant, so altogether diabolical, that it is no wonder the devils rush from it, rush on their wings of sulphurous flame, and the only wonder is that any human person or persons can endure to make it. This practice of frightening with noise the evil ones of heaven (for mark you, the peoples of the Far East, unlike the Greeks, have no belief in Hades) is common to China, to Siam, to Korea, and to Burmah. The devil-jails and the devil-trees, and the professional devil-catchers, of which I have spoken before, come in importance next to the roof-beasts, and then, I think, come the prayer-poles. A prayer-pole may be a straight, symmetrical, polished piece of wood, or it may be a carelessly cut branch of a tree. In either case it is stuck in the earth a few feet from the doorway, and on it are hung prayers to the good spirits, and bits of rag, and bits of refreshment to allure and deceive the evil spirits. Sometimes a bell is hung on the top of the branch to attract the attention of both the cursers and the blessers of the land.

The good spirits that inhabit the big kingdom of Korean credulity are unfortunately lazy, and have to be rather urgently supplicated when their good services are needed. When their good services are not needed they are left, to do the Koreans justice, beautifully alone. But when the evil-doers who dwell in the Korean heaven get altogether unmanageable, the good spirits are called upon with dance and with song, with counting of rosaries and with ringing of bells, to wage war against their wicked brethren. Often the Korean angels, being Korean, go to sleep, forget to wake up, and neglect to send rain. The sending of rain is one of their few active offices. If it does not rain in Korea the rice does not grow in Korea, and then, indeed, are the Korean devils to pay. When drought falls upon Korea all Korea prays. The superstitious and the rational kneel down together, and if their united invocations fail to pierce the slumber of their well-meaning deities, then the king goes beyond the city’s walls, and entering into a temple, or a sort of rustic palace that is kept in readiness for the purpose, throws himself upon the ground, and prays that his people may be blessed with rain. The rain may fall the next day, it may fall the next moon; but whenever it falls the loyal Koreans attribute it altogether to the intercession of their king. It is only when drought falls upon the land that the ordinary Korean is allowed to pray directly to most of the Korean gods. But every Korean has a household spirit—a good guardian angel of his own hearthside—to whom he may pray as often as he likes. And best beloved, most god-like, most fit to be worshipped, most fit to be prayed to, most fit to be loved of the Korean gods, and of all the Korean spirits, is one called “the blesser of little children.” He is the favourite vassal of the great spirit: the phrase “great spirit” is as often upon the tongue of a Korean as upon the tongue of a North American Indian. “The blesser of little children” has under his personal charge every home in Korea. He journeys from house to house scattering blessings upon the baby heads, and forbidding evil to approach the baby people.

The Koreans emphatically believe that Korea was originally peopled by spirits and by fairies, and this belief has developed a folk-lore that is delightful and interesting in the extreme, and that often reminds us of the Norwegian folk-lore.

“When a belief rational and pure enough to be called a religion disappears, the stronger minds among the community turn in self-reliance to a belief in nothing; the weaker, in despair, to a belief in anything. This happened here; and the anything to which they turned in this case was what had never quite died out, the old aboriginal demon-worship.”

And the stronger minds among the Korean community turned to the belief in nothing, which is so often called rationalism. But in Korea rationalism is tinged with, almost disguised by, that strange phenomenon of Asiatic mentality, of Asiatic belief, of Asiatic instinct called ancestor-worship.

Ancestor-worship in Korea, and ancestor-worship in China, are almost identical. The most thorough-going, the most uncompromising agnostic I ever knew was a Korean. The most thorough-going, the most uncompromising atheist I ever knew was a Chinaman, but both were staunch and uncorruptible ancestor-worshippers. Korean ancestor-worship is more than interesting, but it is merely a vassal of Chinese ancestor-worship. Like, and with Confucianism, it has come from China to Korea, and like and with Confucianism it is the mainstay of Korean morality. The worship of ancestors is an almost daily detail of Korean life. The observances of ancestor-worship are more rigidly carried out by the well-to-do Korean rationalist than by the poor superstitious Korean peasant. Death and burial mark the first, the greatest, and the most picturesque of the functions of ancestor-worship. Logically enough, the death and the interment of a child or of any unmarried person involves almost no expense, and demands no ceremonial. The infant (an unmarried man or woman of eighty is an infant in Korea) is wrapt about with the mats, the tiger skins, or the rugs upon which he died. These are wrapt about with rice straw, and the bundle is buried. That is the end of a Korean who leaves no descendants. When the father of a family dies his eldest son closes the eyes as the breath leaves the body, and the family (men and women gather together for once) let loose their hair, and shriek and sob, and, if possible, weep. So long as the dead remains in the house his relatives eat the food they like least, and as little of that as will sustain life. Indeed, the eldest son is supposed to eat nothing. Four days after the death, the members of the family redress their hair, and put on their first mourning. In Korea, as in all the Far East, mourning consists of coarse, unbleached fabrics that are commonly called, but are not quite, white. On this fourth day the family, friends, and acquaintances prostrate, prostrate, and prostrate themselves before the dead, and an exceptionally good dinner is laid beside him. Huge loaves of especially prepared bread also, and as many kinds of fruit as the market affords—the rarer, the more expensive, and the more hard to obtain, the better. A dinner is also prepared for the friends, but not for the family. About the body, and throughout the house, candles and incense burn, and wailing is incessant. The mourners and the professional wailers take turns in sleeping, and relieve each other in the audible grieving. Paper money, that is, imitation money, and long paper banners covered with the titles and the good qualities of the dead, are burned. With the poor, burial takes place five, or at the most nine days after death. With the rich the body remains unburied for at least three months. Korean coffins, like Chinese coffins, are, or are supposed to be, air-tight. But the Korean coffin is much smaller than the Chinese coffin, and the spaces left between the outlines of the coffin and the outlines of the body are, in Korea, filled up with the old clothing of the dead. If the dead had not enough clothing, pieces of linen or of silk are added to it. The rich Koreans usually employ a geomancer to indicate the most auspicious day for burial. The coffin is covered with beautiful brocaded silk, or with beautifully carved pieces of wood. Prayers are said almost continuously, from the hour of death until some time after the interment. The coffin is borne on a death-car, a unique Korean vehicle, or by men who are hired for a small sum and who do nothing else. Beside the coffin are carried the banners, recording the rank and the virtues of the dead, and the lanterns which in life he was entitled to use. His sons follow him, in Korean mourning, and Chinese-like, leaning heavily upon sticks. Acquaintances and friends bring up the rear, in sedan chairs and on horseback.

Korean graves are usually on hill sides, and are decorated at the utmost possible expense. Even the graves of the Korean poor are well tended, and covered with the gentle green grass, and with the soft flowers of spring, if no monument or temple is possible. But if it can be managed, a miniature temple is erected near the grave—a temple which is a shelter for those who come periodically to mourn the dead—and the grave is guarded with quaint stone images of men and other animals.