The drums begin before the first rooster crows.
It starts as a low noise, as if something is being moved about under the floorboards. Then comes another beat and another, until the small house in Gangwon Province seems to breathe with the rhythm. In the middle of the room a woman in white makes her slow turn, her sleeves parting the incense smoke. Her bare feet touch the wooden floor over and over, not haphazardly but as though she is following a road only she can see.
She is speaking, but not exactly to the people in front of her.
A family sits near the altar. They have come because their father died three months earlier, suddenly, without warning, without a proper goodbye. On the table are fruits, rice cakes, candles, bowls of rice, dried fish, alcohol, and folded paper. An outsider might see it as a curious performance. To the family, it is something else. It is one more attempt to speak to a person who no longer answers.
This is one kind of gut, the traditional shamanic rite of Korea. The woman at its head is a mudang, a Korean shaman who stands between the world of the living and the world of spirits. It is a peculiar sight in modern Korea, a land of smartphones, high-speed trains, artificial intelligence, and some of the most advanced semiconductors in the world. And yet whether in a Seoul hall or a village home by the sea or up some mountain track, the drums of gut go on. The contradiction seemed too obvious to ignore. Why would such an old tradition survive in a country that seems to have outgrown it?
Gut is not easy to define because it is not a single ritual but a whole tradition. People call it fortune-telling or a ghost ritual, but it is much wider than that. Gut can be performed for the dead, for a sick person, for a family facing misfortune, for fishermen, for farmers, for a village, for a new business, even for a woman making her way to become a mudang. Some rituals are private and heavy with grief. Others are loud, public, and almost festival-like, filled with music, food, dance, and community. The word gut may sound small, but inside it are many ways Koreans have tried to live with death, luck, ancestors, nature, illness, and uncertainty.
Korean gut is often considered one of Korea’s oldest spiritual traditions. It existed long before Korea became the modern country people know today, and it lived beside Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, and modern science without being subsumed by any of them. Never having been the official religion, it didn’t need a central temple or scripture; it is found in oral traditions, ritual chants, and ceremonies passed from one generation to the next.
For centuries, gut was also pushed aside. Confucian elites often saw it as disorderly, improper, and too emotional. Under the Japanese colonists many practices were put down, and later the missionaries and the tide of industrialization deemed them backward. Even now there are those who will be embarrassed by gut and dismiss it as superstition. Yet many of the same people who laugh at it in public may still visit a mudang when illness, failure, grief, or fear becomes too difficult to handle alone. This is one of the ironic and complicated truths about gut: it has been mocked and needed at the same time.
One of the most moving kinds of gut is the ritual for the dead. On the island of Jindo in South Jeolla Province, there is a famous ritual called Ssitgimgut. The word Ssitgim means to wash or cleanse. One does not do it to restore the dead to life, but to clear away the spirit’s anger or remaining grudges so that the dead can be at peace and the living can get on with their lives.
At first, this idea may seem strange. If someone has died, what can actually be washed away? The fact of death cannot be changed. But grief does not end just because a funeral ends. Sometimes the living are left with things they never said, apologies they never made, anger they feel ashamed to admit, or questions that once weren’t answered. The Ssitgimgut provides an outlet for all of that.
In a ritual like this, the mudang may sing for the dead, call the spirit, speak in a voice that seems to belong to someone else, and guide the soul toward the next world. The family members will weep and bow, make their apologies and set out the dead’s favorite foods. They may laugh as well, since one does not remember the departed as nothing but a tragedy. They are remembered as people who once scolded, loved, laughed, and worried. This mixture of crying and laughing is one of the things that makes gut feel deeply Korean to me. It refuses to put life in neat little boxes of the sacred and the mundane. The father is mourned not only as a spirit, but as the man who once sat at the dinner table and forgot where he put his glasses, worried about money, repeating the same old story.
Not every gut has to do with death. Take Jeju Chilmeoridang Yeongdeunggut on Jeju Island, a rite of the sea held in the second lunar month to see off and welcome the wind goddess, Yeongdeung Halmang. For people in Jeju, wind is more than a matter of weather. It is believed to hold the power to determine whether fishermen return safely, whether haenyeo, Jeju’s traditional female free-divers, enter the water without fear, whether the sea gives enough food, and whether the year begins with hope or anxiety. During the ritual, they pray and do gut so that the sea will be calm, the nets full, and for the safe return of all who have put out from the shore.
This changed the way I understood gut. I had thought of it mostly as a ritual connected to ghosts or personal suffering. But Yeongdeunggut shows that the gut can also be a conversation with nature. Before weather apps and marine forecasts, people still had to face the sea. Even now, when science can explain tides and storms, it cannot completely remove the feeling of standing before something larger than yourself. In this way, gut does not replace knowledge. It gathers people in front of uncertainty.
The mudang herself is also more complicated than people often assume. Traditionally, becoming a mudang is not always described as a simple career choice. Some are believed to experience shinbyeong, or “spirit sickness,” before accepting their calling. This suffering may appear as illness, disturbing dreams, emotional collapse, or a sense that ordinary life can no longer continue. The person may only recover after receiving Naerimgut, an initiation ritual that formally accepts the role of a shaman.
Whether someone understands this spiritually or psychologically, the story itself is powerful. The mudang is often someone who has first been broken open herself. This makes her position in Korean society strange. People may visit her secretly and mock her publicly. They may call her fake, dangerous, or old-fashioned, but when ordinary language fails, they may still go to her. The mudang stands at the edge of respectability, yet that edge is exactly where many people go when life becomes too difficult to explain.
That is why, three months after the father’s death, the family in Gangwon Province found themselves sitting before a mudang.
In the Gangwon house, the mudang changed her robe. The white cloth was replaced by brighter colors. The drum grew faster. A window was opened to let in some air. The mother had not so much as shed a tear since the funeral. She had cooked, answered phone calls, received guests, and told everyone she was fine. But then the mudang’s voice took on the tone of the dead father giving them a gentle reprimand and the mother put her head down and let the tears come.
This is the moment that makes gut difficult to judge from the outside.
A person who only asks, “Are the spirits real?” may miss what is happening in the room. The father is not coming back in any physical sense; facts of death do not change. Yet something within the family has shifted. What had been frozen begins to move. The mother weeps. A son finally says the words he had kept to himself. Someone laughs at an old story the father used to tell. Little by little, the silence gives way to conversation.
It is not hard to see why some have put gut in the same category as therapy. There is a trained hand to steer it, music and repetition, a structure that is symbolic enough to let feelings out. But to call it merely “Korean therapy” is to make it sound too modern, too limited. Gut is older and more theatrical than therapy, stranger and more communal. It is not just a matter of the individual mind but of the village, the land and sea, the gods and one’s ancestors.
What gives gut its power is that you do not have to put your feelings into neat sentences. You can cry with the drums, make amends with an offering, or use a voice that is not quite your own to address the dead. In daily life, especially in Korean culture, people often control their emotions. They lower their voices, keep family shame inside, and endure what cannot be fixed. In gut, however, emotions are allowed to be loud. Sorrow finds a rhythm, guilt is put on a table of food, regret is shouted out. This may be why gut has survived even in modern Korea. It is not because Koreans failed to become rational. It is because rational life still leaves certain wounds untouched. Technology can tell us how a disease spreads, how a storm forms, or how a body dies. It can calculate, predict, and explain. But it does not always teach people how to sit with a loss that feels unbearable. It does not tell a mother what to do with the words she never said to her husband. It does not tell a fishing village how to gather its fear before the sea. It does not tell a person who feels broken how to turn that brokenness into a role in the community.
When the ritual was over in Gangwon Province, the mudang took off her headdress and the altar was broken down. The fruits and rice cakes are no longer offerings but food again. The smoke fades. The house becomes a house again. No miracle in the usual sense has occurred. The father has not returned. The family’s sadness has not disappeared. But the silence is not the same. Before the gut, their grief had been trapped inside each person separately. After the gut, it has entered the room. It has been seen, heard, fed, and shared.
Perhaps this is why the drums still sound.
Gut has survived not because it gives one clear answer, but because it creates a place where questions can be held. It has changed from village shrines to cultural heritage stages, from private homes to modern ritual halls, from feared superstition to a tradition studied, preserved, and sometimes performed for wider audiences. Yet at its center, it still carries the same human need: the need to speak to what cannot be seen, to give form to what cannot be fixed, and to gather people around what they cannot carry alone.
I think of the family from Gangwon Province watching the ghost of their father speak through the mouth of another. Are they misguided? Perhaps. Are they healed? Maybe. Their father did not come back. Their grief did not disappear. Yet when the drums stopped, they were speaking to one another again.
The beating ends. But the reason for the beating remains.
And as long as people need a way to live with death, uncertainty, memory, and hope, the drums will continue to sound.
By: Naeun Kim
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