Lessons with Gum Gang: Prayer

One of the major aspects of my time with Gum Gang was looking at the importance of prayer to his and his clients’ lifestyle. Even many different people followed different faiths, from Buddhism to ancestor worship to Christianity, everyone who visited Gum Gang’s home took the time to pray. During this time Gum Gang taught me the many values of prayer to how we think, how we interact with each other and how we choose what is important to us.

Below is another excerpt from the e-book I am currently working on, detailing Gum Gang’s methods and advice for prayer. Prayer is different for each person, but this can form a solid base for anyone who feels that, in the hustle and bustle of modern life, they may have forgotten how to pray.

Shamanism in the Modern Era

A pig ready to be balanced on a pitchfork, offered to the Gods, then eaten by all

             I stand amidst a rural garden, listening to constant drumming and chanting, surrounded by close friends and strangers from distant cities.  I traveled to a small town outside of Seoul to witness a Korean shaman’s ritual, but I did not only find superstitious elders and a rural population.  Instead, at this ritual in the middle of nowhere I found CEOs, politicians, artists and scholars, all in attendance out of respect for this Korean shaman and the necessity of this ritual to their lives.  Here I saw that the Kut (the Korean traditional shamanist ritual) remains alive as an integral part of modern Korean life.

             A Mudang is a profession and lifestyle that can take 2 minutes or 2 weeks to explain, and even in my extensive time working with Korean performance I have not fully grasped it.  At its core, a Mudang is someone who becomes possessed by what they call a “ghost” or a “god,” using the Mudang’s body as a translator between the material world and what Mudang call the “spirit world.”  This results in a period where the Mudang becomes possessed by their ghost and enters what anthropologist Michael Harner calls the SSC – a shifted state of consciousness.  During this shift, the Mudang’s ghost may tell fortunes and give advice on the future, perform a Kut (which ranges from dancing on knives to the slaughtering of a pig), or simply enter a clever banter with the client, remarking on their dress or demeanor.