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| Korean Shaman. Source: people.cohums.ohio-state.edu |
A month or so ago I got talking to a fellow
I know who had just come back from South Korea – he was a little drunk, which
was fortunate as it opened up a bridge of uninhibited communication between us via
which we landed on the fascinating topic of Shamanism. He told me he had been
to Shamanic ceremonies in Korea and proceeded to describe them. I can’t recall
his exact words but what really hooked me in was the fact that he was
describing Shamanism as a living tradition. I had recently been reading about the Shamanistic religions of the former nomads of northern Europe, but it
was all in the past tense. What he described was a continuing, unbroken
tradition practiced by people of our own times who are not wildly different
from ourselves – I can’t say I think of Koreans as exotic (there are a lot of
Koreans in Sydney). Following our fascinating conversation, I got my hands on
the most reputable book on Shamanism I could find. It is by Piers Vitebsky, who
is described as “an anthropologist and head of Social Sciences at the Scott
Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge”. Most of the information,
and all page citations with no other referencing, in this post are sourced from
this book, published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2001.
