ITD Update 08/07/07

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" It's Their Destiny "

 

News items on Asian animal abuse

 

8th July 2007

Blood sacrifices a Korean " tradition "

 

Dear Friends

 

Torturing dogs to death for meat, boiling cats

alive for quack " medicines " , and now animal sacrifices are regarded by the

South Korean government as “intangible cultural assets.” Is there any limit

to the aberrations that animal abusers will try to excuse as a part of their

cultural heritage?

 

The following report is from the New York

Times, 7th July 2007

(http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/07/world/asia/07korea.html?pagewanted=1 & _r=1)

 

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Shamanism Enjoys Revival in Techno-Savvy South

Korea

By CHOE SANG-HUN

 

SEOUL, South Korea — Yang Soon-im says she

began communicating with the spirits of mountains and ancient warriors more

than 50 years ago, when she was only 7. But it was decades after that, when

her son miraculously survived a knife wound, that she decided she had no

choice but to become the spirits’ full-time channel with the living — a

mudang, or shaman.

 

“I found her sitting on the roof chanting at 4

a.m.,” her husband, Choi Jong-sam, 62, said of that day about 25 years ago.

“She was puffing away at four packs of cigarettes. She said her mountain

gods had saved our son in a sort of bargain. I slapped her face to help her

get her wits back.

“Then her eyes blazed like those of a wild dog

about to bite a man.”

 

The deal Ms. Yang struck with her spirits

eventually paid off in other ways. Now 60, she is one of the most

sought-after shamans in Seoul — a leading member of a profession that has

survived centuries of ridicule and persecution and is now enjoying a

seemingly incongruous revival in one of the world’s most technologically

advanced countries.

 

There are an estimated 300 shamanistic temples

within an hour of Seoul’s bustling city center, and in them, shamans perform

their clamorous ceremonies every day. They offer pigs to placate the gods.

They dance with toy guns to comfort the spirit of a dead child. They

intimidate evil spirits by walking barefoot on knife blades.

 

“We used to do our rituals in hiding,” said

Ms. Yang, who performs two or three rites on a busy day. “Our customers kept

it secret from even their own relatives. Now we have no shame performing in

public. I can hardly take three days off a month.”

 

Korean shamanism is rooted in ancient

indigenous beliefs shared by many folk religions in northeast Asia. Most

mudangs are women who say they discovered their ability to serve as a

mediator between the human and spirit worlds after emerging from a critical

illness. They believe that the air is thick with spirits, including those of

dead relatives, a fox in the hills behind a village, an old tree or even a

stove. These spirits interact with people and influence their fortunes.

 

So when tradition-minded Koreans are

inexplicably sick or have a run of bad luck in business or a daughter who

cannot find a husband, they consult a shaman.

 

“If I contact the spirit of a man who died of

stomach cancer, I get stomach pains for days,” said Kim Hong-kyung, 33, who

has conducted rituals with Ms. Yang. “If I deal with the spirit of a woman

who died during labor, my belly balloons like a pregnant woman’s.”

 

In an election year like this one, the most

famous shamans are fully booked. Politicians, whether Christian or Buddhist,

flock to them, asking, for instance, whether relocating their ancestors’

remains to a more propitious site might ensure victory.

 

“Look around,” said Kim Myung-soon, 41, a

mudang who, in a recent ritual, decapitated a chicken with her bare hands.

“So much of nature has been ruined. Spirits of trees and rocks are displaced

and haunt humans because they have nowhere else to go. No wonder the country

is a mess.”

 

Shamans were demonized by Christian

missionaries and driven underground during Japanese colonial rule. The

military governments that came after the Korean War disparaged them as

charlatans and often banished them from villages, burning their shrines. But

today, even many who regard shamanism as superstition acknowledge it to be

an important repository of Korean culture, because the rituals have

preserved traditional costumes, music and dance forms. Recent governments

have documented and promoted the rituals as “intangible cultural assets.”

 

There are an estimated 300,000 shamans, or one

for every 160 South Koreans, according to the Korea Worshipers Association,

which represents shamans. They are fiercely independent, following different

gods, sharing no one body of scriptures. And they are highly adaptable. When

the Internet boom hit South Korea, shamans were among the first to set up

commercial Web sites, offering online fortune-telling. Many younger shamans

maintain Web logs.

 

“In our latest survey, we found 273 categories

of gods venerated by Korean shamans. If you look into the subcategories, you

find 10,000 deities,” said Hong Tea-han, a professor at Chung-Ang University

in Seoul who researches shamanism. “Korean shamanism is a great melting pot.

It never rejected anything but embraced everything, making endless

compromises with other religions and social changes. That explains why it

has survived thousands of years.”

 

There are shamans who venerate Jesus, the

Virgin Mary, even Park Chung-hee, the late South Korean military strongman.

Under the pro-American military governments of the 1970s, there were shamans

who took Gen. Douglas MacArthur as their deity. When MacArthur’s spirit

possessed them, they donned sunglasses, puffed on a pipe and uttered sounds

that some clients took for English.

 

“Until perhaps 10 or 15 years ago, we had

quite a few shamans who prayed before the MacArthur statue here,” said

Aegibosal, a shaman in Inchon, the port city where MacArthur’s troops landed

in 1950. “You don’t see any of them any more.”

 

Shamanism’s eclecticism has influenced Korean

attitudes toward religion, helping make South Korea one of the world’s most

pluralistic countries — a place where Buddhism, Confucianism and

Christianity coexist peacefully and often overlap, said Yang Jong-sung, a

senior curator at the National Folklore Museum of Korea.

 

“Korean shamanism is very, very materialistic

and this-worldly, as Koreans tend to be,” the curator said. “I don’t think a

Christian pastor can succeed here if he only talks about heaven and does not

hint at health and material prosperity.”

 

In a recent ritual, Ms. Yang and two

associates spent hours carefully stacking their altar with fruits, dried

fish and rice cakes. They decorated their room with portraits of gods and

unpacked a suitcase full of brightly colored costumes they changed into at

different stages of the rite.

 

Their customer, a 51-year-old nurse, wanted

the shamans’ help in getting a divorce from her unfaithful husband. Instead,

for 5 million won, or $5,400, the shamans promised to help them reconcile.

 

Ms. Yang’s diagnosis: the husband had turned

into a “horsefly that sucks bone marrow out of your spine,” because the

couple had been cursed by a baby she had aborted, an uncle who committed

suicide and a well her family had filled years before.

 

Ms. Yang and the nurse embraced and sobbed

when the nurse’s dead mother, whom she had not mentioned to the shamans,

spoke through Ms. Yang. Then Ms. Yang’s younger associate, Chung Joon-ha,

42, a former army sergeant, danced with knives and a lump of raw pork in his

mouth, his eyes rolling back into their sockets.

 

“We are like a hospital,” he later said. “We

do surgery on people’s bad luck.”

 

 

 

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