The Korean Naerim-gut Initiation Tradition

Record summary

Naerim-gut is the initiation rite through which a Korean mudang becomes a practicing shaman, often following a period of distinctive illness, visions, dreams, or perceived spirit calling. Early twentieth-century Korean and Japanese ethnographic descriptions treated these experiences variously as possession, spirit vocation, illness, or superstition. The tradition is valuable for comparison because the same symptoms can be classified differently by ritual specialists, relatives, colonial officials, and physicians. The rite is well established, but individual accounts dated before 1946 require source-level checking because many descriptions were collected later or through colonial intermediaries.