Almost all Koreans are believers in shamanism. This is true even for those who attend church, temples, or cathedrals, and even for atheists. It may sound puzzling to say that atheists believe in shamanism, but in fact, atheists are the most deeply immersed in it.
For a long time, Korean people have prayed to all sorts of things in the universe. While walking down the street, they pray to piles of stones, throwing coins into ponds, praying under the moonlight with bowls of water, calling shamans to pray, praying to ancestral spirits before ancestral rites tables, touching the noses of stone grandfathers (Dol Hareubang) and praying, praying to all sorts of Buddha statues, and even praying to the Chinese General Guan Yu statue. They prayed and prayed.
Then, when Catholicism and Protestantism came in, they began to pray to statues of the Virgin Mary and to the cross, as if some powerful Western gods had arrived. If their prayers to God were not answered, they would visit shamans again to get amulets and visit fortune-tellers to get their grandchildren’s names.
For the Korean people, whether it was the Creator, minor gods, or ghosts, it was never important from the beginning. The only important thing was that the god who granted their wishes was a powerful god. So, there were many so-called shinbyeong (spirit sickness) patients possessed by spirits, and it was not difficult to see shinnealim gut (initiation rituals for shamans) in every village. According to recent statistics, the shaman population of Korea is 700,000. Even if they receive only ten clients a day, 7 million people in our country see fortune-tellers every day. It is even said that pastors go to fortune-tellers when building churches.
In the case of atheists, there is one thing in common: the god who grants their wishes is a powerful god, and that god is either “themselves” or “scientists.” A common habit found in these people is that they believe that everything in the world can be explained by “money,” and they regard the pleasures given by material things as heaven. In the end, they can be said to be believers who worship the “god of money.” So, they often say all sorts of strange things, such as money having eyes or some people having a fate to attract money. They are not interested in the Creator, of course, and even when they see countless things in the world that cannot be explained by science, they pretend not to have seen them, deceiving themselves that science will eventually explain everything. And then they dedicate everything in their lives, even their souls, to the things that the god of money demands. So, the god of money is much more dangerous than mountain spirits, child spirits, general spirits, or dragon king spirits.
However, the example that most clearly shows the shamanistic spirit of the Korean people is, without a doubt, “Chineu-nim” (Chicken God). Unable to overcome the habit of deifying anything that pleases them, now even chicken has become a god. In addition, they often attach “God” before the names of their favorite celebrities or attach “neu-nim” (a highly honorific suffix) after their names to worship them as gods. This is a unique case that exists only in Korea, and it is difficult to find its origin even in Western countries where they often say “Oh my God.”
These deep-rooted shamanistic and animistic instincts of the Korean people have almost devastating side effects. The Sadaejuui (serving the great) that served China has now expanded to Chinese factions, American factions, and European factions, and a civil war is in progress. Not to mention the behavior of shouting “000 is the answer!” and starting to serve any politician who says pleasing things. This has expanded to the grassroots level of life, and if they think they can get even a tiny bit of profit, they grab anyone and stand in line to serve them. If you take a step back and look at it, you might think that there is no other ethnicity as lowly and despicable as this.
While we were doing that, various philosophies, sciences, mathematics, and literature flourished in Western cultures that worshiped only one Creator, and furthermore, free democratic rule-of-law states originated based on natural rights and the laws of the Bible. Because they did not worship different gods in every neighborhood or switch between different gods, the efficiency of communication was also high, and above all, adherence to principles could be established. Until the late 19th century, when the West was building skyscrapers, our people were only deeply agonizing in thatched-roof houses with mud walls over whether to serve China or Russia, and they did not have any principles. Where there are no principles, there is no truth.
If we cannot escape this shamanistic ethnicity, there is no future for the country or for individual citizens. There will only be endless conflict, serving the great, and inferiority complexes. Spirit sickness is a bonus. Recently, a 23-year-old figure skater received a shinnealim (initiation ritual) to cure her spirit sickness and became a shaman. It seems that this was covered on television, and they produced and broadcasted a program where celebrities were sent to see fortune-tellers. At this rate, the era of 1 million shamans will surely come, and the day when they put up a statue of Jesus in a shaman’s house and perform knife-dancing rituals seems not far off. That will truly be a global event.
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