Korean mythology

The tradition & historical record

Korean mythology (Korean: 한국 신화; Hanja: 韓國神話) is the group of myths told by historical and modern Koreans. There are two types: the written, literary mythology in traditional histories, mostly about the founding monarchs of various historical kingdoms, and the much larger and more diverse oral mythology, mostly narratives sung by shamans or priestesses (mansin) in rituals invoking the gods and which are still considered sacred today. The historicized state-foundation myths representing the bulk of the literary mythology are preserved in Hanja literary works such as Samguk sagi and Samguk yusa. One state's foundation myth, that of the first Korean kingdom of Gojoseon by legendary king Dangun, has become the founding myth of the whole Korean nation. State-foundation myths are further divided into northern, such as that of the kingdom of Goguryeo and its founder Jumong, where the founder is the son of a celestial male figure and an earthly female figure, and southern, such as that of the kingdom of Silla and its founder Hyeokgeose, where the founder begins as an object descended from the heavens, and himself marries an earthly woman. Other literary myths include the origin myths of family lineages recorded in genealogies. The narratives of Korean shamanism, the country's indigenous religion, feature a diverse array of both gods and humans. They are recited in ritual contexts both to please the gods and to entertain the human worshippers. ¹

Korean mythology comprises two distinct corpora of literature. The first is the literary mythology (문헌신화; 文獻神話, munheon sinhwa) recorded in the traditional Korean histories, such as the thirteenth-century work Samguk yusa. The myths contained in these volumes are heavily historicized, to the point that it is often difficult to differentiate between historical fact and mythology. The primary literary myths are the state-foundation myths (건국신화; 建國神話, geon'guk sinhwa), which recount the story of how a particular kingdom or dynasty was founded, although the category also includes other supernatural stories found in the historical chronicles as well as the origin myths of non-royal lineages. ¹

The second corpus is the modern oral mythology (구비신화; 口碑神話, gubi sinhwa), which is "incomparably" richer than the literary tradition in both sheer quantity of material and the diversity of themes and content. The oral mythology primarily consists of the shamanic narratives (서사무가; 徐事巫歌, seosa muga), which are sung by Korean shamans during gut, religious ceremonies in which shamans invoke the gods. While also mythological in content, these narratives are very different in function and content from the literary myths. The state-foundation myths are preserved only in writing, deprived of their original ritual context, and have existed in written form for centuries. By contrast, the shamanic narratives are oral literature that is "living mythology," sacred religious truth to the participants of the gut. They began to be published only in 1930, centuries after the first attestation of the literary myths. ¹

State-foundation myths narrate the life of the first ruler of a new Korean kingdom or dynasty. They include the founder's supernatural birth, the story of how the founder came to create his kingdom, and his miraculous death or departure. They are often interpreted as euhemerized accounts of actual events that happened during the kingdom's founding. The oldest surviving accounts of the founding myths of the ancient Korean kingdoms—such as Gojoseon, Goguryeo, and Silla—are transcribed in Classical Chinese in Korean texts compiled during or after the twelfth century. Such texts include Samguk sagi, Samguk yusa, Jewang ungi, Eungje siju, and Tongguk t'onggam. These texts were compiled on the basis of earlier sources that are now lost. Several ancient Chinese texts are also important contemporaneous sources for myths; these include not only the official dynastic histories such as the third-century Records of the Three Kingdoms and the sixth-century Book of Wei, but also more general texts such as the Lunheng, written in 80 CE. In the case of Goguryeo, there are also five Chinese-language stelae narrating the kingdom's foundation myth from the perspective of the Goguryeo people themselves. The oldest of the five is the Gwanggaeto Stele, erected in 414 CE. The founding myth of the Goryeo dynasty, which ruled Korea from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, is recorded in Goryeo-sa, the official dynastic history published in the fifteenth century. Yongbieocheon'ga, a poem published around the same time as Goryeo-sa by the succeeding Joseon dynasty, is sometimes seen as the Joseon foundation myth, but it is debated whether Yongbieocheon'ga should be seen as having a narrative at all. ¹

The foundation myth of Gojoseon, the earliest Korean kingdom, is first recorded in two nearly contemporaneous works: Samguk yusa, a history compiled by the Buddhist monk Iryeon around the late 1270s, and Jewang ungi, a Chinese-language epic poem written in 1287. Iryeon's account is as follows. Hwanung, a younger son of the sky god Hwanin (who the monk identifies with the Buddhist god Indra), desires to rule the human world. Hwanin sees that his son could "broadly benefit the human world," and gives him three unspecified treasures to take with him to earth. Hwanung descends beneath a sacred tree on Mount Taebaek (lit. 'great white mountain'), where he and his three thousand followers found the "Sacred City." With the gods of wind, rain, and cloud, Hwanin supervises various human affairs. A bear and a tiger then ask that Hwanung turn them into humans. The god gives the animals twenty pieces of garlic and a clump of sacred mugwort, and tells them that they will become humans if they eat them and do not see sunlight for a hundred days. The two animals then fast, and the bear becomes a woman on the twenty-first day. The tiger fails to fast and remains an animal. The bear-turned-woman prays for a child at the sacred tree, and Hwanung grants her wish by becoming a human to marry her. She gives birth to a boy named Dangun Wanggeom, who founds the kingdom of Gojoseon at the site of Pyongyang. Dangun rules for fifteen centuries, then departs from the kingdom when the Chinese King Wu of Zhou sends Jizi to rule over Korea. The king ultimately becomes a mountain god. The Dangun myth is of the northern type, featuring the founder's birth from a celestial father (Hwanung) and an earthly mother (the bear). ¹

The foundation myth of the northern kingdom of Goguryeo is recorded in detail in both the Samguk sagi, the oldest surviving work of Korean history, compiled in 1145, and the Dongmyeongwang-pyeon, a Chinese-language epic poem written by the poet Yi Gyu-bo in 1193. Yi's work is much longer and more detailed than the Samguk sagi, but much of this may be due to the poet's own literary embellishment. The Dongmyeongwang-pyeon myth is summarized below. ¹

Haeburu, ruler of the kingdom of Buyeo, is childless. ¹

The ancient… ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Korean mythology”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Korean mythology is mythology that existed in the Korean Peninsula from ancient times, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 7 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²