Korean Shamanism and Everyday Magic with Mudang Mi

Well, I'm really excited to dig in, in particular to Mu-gyo, 'cause like I said, I really don't know much about it.

In the diaspora, we have such limited access to this knowledge and wisdom, because I think a lot of it is not translated into English or other languages.

Can you help us understand your beautiful practice and this tradition?

I would say Mu-gyo is the indigenous Korean folk religion.

There are some back and forth, especially in academia, whether or not that is a more respectful way to call it versus Mu-sok-shin-an, which is like folk tradition and belief and customs.

So there has been some back and forth about that, but I prefer Mu-gyo.

Mu-gyo is animist, polytheist, and full of ancestral veneration and worship.

The way that mudang function, a lot of our pantheons are deified ancestors, so essentially deities that are very personal for us.

And why deified ancestors became so big, in my mind, is that they are ones who actually lived human lives before, so they understand and empathize much more [laughs] about the grief and the sorrow and the plights that we might be facing in modern life, versus let's say, like purely cosmologically divine deity being.

They have never come across or lived that experience.

So some of them do tend to be a little more standoffish and not as understanding, like if we come to them about the same thing as our deified ancestors.

I am an Akashic Record reader, and in my training, we connect with the masters, teachers, and loved ones of the person that we're reading for, and I completely understand what you're saying, because the teachers and loved ones are beings that have been in human form before.

The teachers typically tend to be like ascended masters, like Jesus or Yogananda or Buddha.

But the masters, like to your point, are beings that have never incarnated on Earth before, and they don't have that empathy and understanding of how hard it can be here.

Mm.

So it makes a lot of sense to have work with ancestors who understand the human condition can be very hard.

And when you're working with these deities, they're your ancestors, or are they the ancestors of the person that you're working with?

So they actually are my ancestors, my specific ancestors.

Additional note to that is they're not all deified ancestors.

Some of them are celestial heavenly, some of them are essentially great teachers in the past history, as well as our actual ancestors that were deified.

And then you used the word mudang.

Can you tell us what that means?

I translate mudang to shaman priest, because what we have to do essentially fills both the roles of what academic scholars understand shamans to be across the world, and priestly, because we do have to officiate rituals and ceremonies.

Is this still a common practice in Korea today?

It is still very common as a practice in Korea today, yes.