The Place of the Almanac in Korean Folk Religion

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The Place of the Almanac in Korean Folk Religion GRIFFIN DIX "The Oriental does get his religions most dreadfully mixedat times»l In rural Korea, there are two traditions of religion—Confucianism and shamanism—that coexist with a miscellaneous collection of practices such as the village Mountain Spirit offering and geomancy. If one focuses on isolated rituals, this odd, disjointed collection of "religions " seems disorganized and ad hoc. Peasant religion is surely practical religion and in rural Korea the shaman (mudang, usually a woman) has curing rituals or seances (kut), the male lineage member has his obligation of ancestor worship and keeping the spirits happy, the village has its Mountain Spirit offering for protection, and a household has recourse to geomancy for good fortune. People seem to take up whatever practice they need at the time and at first glance do not seem concerned about how one of these sets of rituals might relate to the others. There is certainly diversity of knowledge and faith in these religious practices, as well as diversity in ritual responsibilities. But underlying the diversity are areas of common assumption and belief. In the village in South Ch'ungch'ong Province that I studied in 1973-75, for example, most people accepted the almanac's cosmology and used the almanac whenever their situation dictated it. But they also tapped some of the same cosmológica! ideas about the natural spirit-filled cosmos and consequent social practices and dangers to interpret and perform ancestor worship and to cure illnesses through the shaman's kut. Rural Korean religion is not totally unified, nor do all its aspects 1. Charles Allen Clark, Religions of Old Korea (Seoul: The Christian Literary Society, 1961), p. 199. 47 48Journal ofKorean Studies fit neatly within a closed system. Nevertheless, its various parts influence each other, and a fundamental cosmology has influenced each of them to the extent that an acceptance of one part seems usually to imply at least the tacit acceptance of the others. Each has its proper place and corresponds naturally with some aspect of cosmicspiritual reality. There is a system, but it is far froman all-encompassing, neatly closed, and well-ordered system. It should also be said at the outset that the rural Korean is not dominated by these beliefs any more than the modern American Christian or believer in astrology is dominated by his beliefs. This article concentrates on religious thought in rural Korea, but there is no assumption that this is always the dominant mode of thought or that the rural Korean is less rational than anyone else. Although the almanac seems at first to be one more religious tidbit, an isolated little booklet for choosing the date for important events, it is also a source for some of the cosmological ideas that have made rural Korean religion a system. THE COSMOLOGY The logical basis for connecting time with direction and with a person resides mainly in the "cycle of sixty," a set of sixty Chinese characters composed of two subsets, the Ten Heavenly Stems (sipch'ongan ) and the Twelve Earthly Branches (sib'ijiji), which are listed consecutively alongside each other. The Ten Heavenly Stems listed six times and the Twelve Earthly Branches listed five times produce a cycle of sixty pairs, each of which is composed of one of the twelve and one of the ten. The sixty-first pair óf characters is the same as the first pair, and the cycle is repeated. Every year, month, day, and hour is designated with one pair of the sixty. Time, direction, and the birth time of an individual can be related, using the same characters, and are believed in conjunction to indicate one's fate. Each person has eight characters, two each for his birth year, month, day, and hour, which can be used to relate him to time and direction. Each of the characters also has a meaning that can be used to relate it to various other systems. The cycle of sixty can be related to the Five Elements, the Um (yin) and yang theory, the eight sets of trigrams, and other cycles used in calculation. It is the basis of cosmology and is...

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