She is newly initiated as a mudang, or shaman, and is
expected to lead a big ritual - a gut - to win the favor of
gods and spirits. And she is sick and has lost her voice. Her grandmother, a
well-known mudang or manshin herself - asks what she dreamed
on the last night of the lunar month.
She remembers riding a red horse. A swing swayed
in front of her. She climbed on to it and the swing carried her to a mountain
where she saw a twisted pine. She jumped off the swing and climbed the tree.
Grandma gets her to clarify that the swing went forward, then assures her this
is a good dream, "foretelling immense blessings. Wait and see." The
young manshin's voice comes back and the ritual is a success. [1]
This is one of the many dream incidents reported in a
memoir by well-known Korean shaman Kim Keum-Hwa titled I Have Come on a
Lonely Path. Her dreams helped to bring her through appalling hardship -
poverty, near-starvation, domestic abuse, police brutality - and to follow her
calling as “a mediator between humans and gods”.
Early in life, she was compelled to learn a mode of lucid
dreaming in order to survive horrifying nightmares. Far from riding a red
horse, she felt herself in danger of being trampled under the hooves of red
horses that rushed at her from the sky, along with tigers and other menacing
beings. Again and again, she woke exhausted and dripping with sweat. She
managed to tell herself that because she was dreaming, she could choose to
respond to these night invasions in some other way than fleeing in terror. When
she faced her invaders, they welcomed her to their sky. She flew with them,
played with them traveled with them to other worlds. ."I would mingle and
play with the people in my dreams, ride clouds and cross streams in a Milly Way
mist, and traverse completely different worlds. When I awakened after
wholeheartedly playing in my dream, my head stopped aching and my heart felt
more at ease.”
The ecstatic sky journey, central to the shaman's calling
and practice in many cultures - and seen by Eliade as universal [2] - is not
featured in most accounts of Korean shamanism. In Korea the mudang is typically
made in one of two ways: either the ritual tools and skills are passed down through
the family or the shaman-to-be is claimed by the spirits in Shinbyeong, the
notorious shaman sickness. Kim Keum-Hwa's vocation was announced in both ways. She
came from a family of female shamans, and her near-death experiences in
childhood lead one mudang to say that her only cure would be the purple headscarf,
a badge of a senior shaman. During a full moon ritual when she was still a
girl she felt she was going to be hit by stars pouring from the sky. She ran
towards a creek, fainted, and the gods entered her body - a wild and typical case
of initiation by possession or what her family liked to call "embodiment".
In her first years as a mudang, she barely escaped
starvation performing rituals of propitiation and exorcism. She tried to get
evil spirits out of her mother’s body by feeding her grains of rice -
one for each year of her age - and getting her to spit them out. She then
forced the rice into the beak of a chicken that was sacrificed and buried with her
mother's old clothes. .
Life became easier when Kim Keum-Hwa was awarded well-publicized
prizes, and prize money, as a champion traditional dancer, welcomed onstage in
the United States as well as her own country. This did not save her from a
disastrous marriage and family tragedies.
Throughout her life, however, she had her dreams as counselors.
She often dreamed the future. She dreamed the exact location of the body of a
man who had drowned himself in a river. She communicated with the ancestors in dreams
and conveyed their wishes and messages to their survivors.
A mudang, she tells us, is "a person who must embrace all
the han and tears of others. Because I have been deeply hurt and
suffered in this human life, I can understand others' pain and heal their
suffering."
She also declares that "mudangs dream much more than
the average person. They not only dream during their sleep but also witness
dream-like visions during their waking hours....The dreams of manshins are
special - dreams that can feel like reality, while the reality of a manshin can
unfold like a dream."
The gift of her dreams might be specific information like the
best date for a ritual or a diagnosis for a patient. "Sometimes the
spirits inform me of certain events in advance through dreams." Sometimes
the gift of a dream is pure energy. In a big dream, she is teetering on the
edge of an abyss but finds the courage to jump. Her leap of faith takes her to
a lush landscape an she rises from sleep surging with confidence that caries
her through the challenges presented by a series of difficult clients the next
day.
She describes how dreams helped her and those close to her
through the passage from life to death. Before her mother died, she appeared in
a dream, waving her thin hand at the dreamer, and said, "Do not
follow". This led Keum-Hwa to give her mother special care, and to pray for
her safe and easy passage. Her dream told her she must let go. One night, Keum Hwa
was inspired to call to her mother, across a distance, "Fly away like a crane, like a butterfly". In the morning she received word that her mother
had passed.
Coda: Dreaming Beyond the Veil
Summarizing his careful study of the long history of Korean
Muism - Korean shamanism - eminent Korean scholar Tongshik Ryu
observed that "the religious structure of shamanism is in the creation of
a new world and new human lives...By negations of secular ego and history human
beings return to a primordial mythic world to dream a new creation through free
meeting with the spirits. For the restoration of the mythic world the negation
of the realistic world is absolutely necessary, i.e. death is required.
Shamanism learned the skillful art of death in drink, song and dance." [3]
In Kim Keum-Hwa's memoir we are
present at many meetings with the spirits and we see the central role of
"drink, song and dance" in the folk rituals that survive in the
cities and still employ - at least part-time - an estimated 200,000 mudangs in
South Korea. We are taken further. In the rituals the spirits are called
through the veil. In dreams, the dreamer penetrates the veil and meets them on
their own ground.
In Kim's history of her dream life we see again and again how in dreaming supernormal faculties - precognition, clairvoyance, telepathy - are entirely normal. We see how dreams can diagnose and prescribe for specific conditions. And how dreaming is a field of interaction between the living and the dead, and between the human and the more than human.
References
2 Mircea Eliade. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974.
3. Ryu, Tongshik. The History and Structure of Korean Shamanism trans. Jong-il Moon. Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 2012.
Illustration: RM + AI
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