PUJONG, HAN, AND WHOLENESS IN KOREAN SHAMANISTIC RITES

[punuri]

PUJONG, HAN, AND WHOLENESS IN
KOREAN SHAMANISTIC RITES
Daniel A. Kister*1)
In Korean Shamanism, as in other religions, worship of supernatural powers
goes part and parcel with a preoccupation with the limitations, frustrations, and
evil that cloud human life and that make times of crisis dangerous and
threatening. If worship were just a matter of achieving oneness with the gods and
spirits, there would be no shamanistic rites. Korean shamanistic rituals, or kut, are
the actions of persons who turn to the gods in times of crisis and risk because
they are so clearly aware of the danger inherent in such times. In this paper, I
shall show how kut reflect the preoccupation of the kut community with the
limitations and dangers of life and how they embody the kut community’s notions
of evil and aspects of its total world view.
Defilement (Pujong, 不淨)
Korean kut present the evil of life in terms of defilement, or pujong (不淨), on
＊Sogang University

the one hand and han (恨) on the other. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur, in The
Symbolism of Evil, finds that at the most primal level, human beings have
commonly perceived evil in terms of a defiling physical stain, a “quasimaterial
something” that infects oppressively from without (1967:25). This perception
manifests itself in Korean Shamanism in taboos concerning freedom from sexual
activity, menstruation, or the eating of dog meat or pork before participating in a
kut. An initial rite of purification by water or fire (부정 거리) commonly
precedes the main action of a kut. Shaman initiates may bathe as a part of the
procedures of an initiation rite (내림굿), and village representatives may do so as
a part of the procedures of a village rite. Village representatives are chosen from
healthy, married men of households with “no recent birth, no menstruation, no
bloody wounds, and no recent death” (Ch’oe K. 1989:375). In Chejudo and
Chollado kut for the dead, the ritual cleansing of the road to the other world (질
침, 질다끔) is thought to purify the deceased automatically by the mere physical
performance of magical, symbolic rites.
Initial purification rites commonly present pujong as the kind of “quasimaterial
something” that infects from without that Ricoeur speaks of. One chant from a
Seoul-area kut speaks of:
Defilement got while sitting, defilement got standing,
Defilement got into the eyes, defilement in the ears,
Defilement by touch, defilement of the lips,
Defilement that hovers at the back of the head
like a powerful white butterfly.
앉어서 본 부정 서서 들은 부정 눈 드른 부정에 귀 들은 부정이요.
손으루 맨진 부정 입으루 왼긴 부정 머리 끝에두 백나비 센나비 주정이요.
(Kim 1971:I.13)

PUJONG, HAN, AND WHOLENESS IN KOREAN SHAMANISTIC RITES 3
As the chant continues, it implies a specific source of pollution:
There’s defilement when mourners let down their hair at a
funeral,
Defilement when wailing pours out like the Milky Way,
Up on the mountain, a mountain stream, down in the fields,
an earth-flowing stream,
Defilement with the slaughter of four-footed animals.
은하수 곡성두 부정이요
산에 올라서 산 머구리(개구리) 들에 내려서 땅 머구리
늬(네) 발 가진 짐상(짐승)에 살상(殺生)두 부정이요. (Kim 1971:I.13)
The chant goes on to associate defilement with unsettled spirits, and it ends
with an invocation to get rid of defilement in language which suggests that
pollution itself is some sort of spirit:
There are unsettled ghosts, besmirched with defilement, in the train of persons
frequenting the XX household on shady dealings.
Please clear away the defilement left on the floor, all that remains, with firm
dispatch.
OO가중에 벌로 품은 처수(處事)루서 수 많은 인간이 넘나들 제
따러 든 부정에 묻어 든 영정이요.
마루 넘어 오든 부정 재 넘어 오든 부정
신실이 적석이 물리쳐 줍소사. (Kim 1971:I.13-14)
Another such chant from around Seoul speaks of pujong as arising from
childbirth, menstruation, and burns suffered in the kitchen (Kim 1979:III.155). Still
another chant specifies who the unsettled ghosts are that must be cleared out:

The disturbed spirits of those who suffered sudden death down in the fields,
The spirits of those who fell into water and drowned,
. . . . . . . . . .
The spirits of those killed by gunfire,
. . . . . . . . . .
Disturbed spirits hovering around dead shamans, deceased blind
persons, dead physicians(?).
들루는 내려서 객살은 영산
물으는 빠져서 수살은 양산
. . . . . . . . . . .
총에 맞아서 가시든 영산
. . . . . . . . . . .
만신 죽어 가드는 영산
장님 죽어 가드는 영산에
의원 죽어서 가드는 영산. (Kim 1976:II.259-260)
Also to be cleared away or kept at a distance are:
The bane emanating from boys who died as children,
Bane from the bloom of youth cut off by early death,
Bane from the dotage of those who die in old age.
아이는 죽어서 동자는 상문
젊은이 죽어서 청춘 상문
노인네 죽어서 망녕든 상문. (Kim 1976:II.260)
A chant from Hwanghaedo gives pollution cosmic associations:
North, south, east, west, the Southwest Pujong,

PUJONG, HAN, AND WHOLENESS IN KOREAN SHAMANISTIC RITES 5
The Dragon King of the Four Seas, the Dragon King Pujong.
동남북서에 서남님 부정에
사해용왕 용왕님 부정. (Kim 1976:II.290)
Purification rites aim to get rid of pollution, but this Hwanghaedo chant invites
“myriad Honored Pollution Spirits to come and play around (만 부정님 놀너 오
시구)” (Kim 1976:II.290). The chant initially address these spirits with the
grammatical honorific “nim (님)”; but at the end, it uses an ambiguous
grammatical combination that is both honorific and derogatory at the same time:
“Honored Pujongnim, pack off! (영부정씨정님 다그놀고 가)” (Kim 1976:II.292).
It may seem incomprehensible that defilement can be regarded as a spirit, even
an honored spirit. It may seem strange, too, that defiling spirits can be invited to
enjoy themselves while they are at the same time being chased away. In the kut
world view, however, gods and spirits are everywhere. Spirits of the dead are
given more attention than the gods, and neither gods nor spirits are completely
good or evil. In such a world, it is understandable that even defilement has its
myriad spirits; and it is natural that these spirits, too, have an ambiguity about
them. In ordinary daily affairs, moreover, Koreans, ingrained though they are in
Confucian respect, may honor and entertain a person in authority to get in his
good graces while inwardly desiring to get rid of him.
Much of the kut community’s preoccupation with defilement can be elucidated
in terms of ideas expounded by Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger. Douglas
stresses the relationship between defilement and disintegration on the one hand
and between holiness and wholeness on the other (1966:53, 58-72, 95-96; Ch’oe
K. 1989: 371-383). Fear marks many persons’ childhood memories of kut. It is
possible to see the community’s preoccupation with pollution as rising out of the
fear that Douglas stresses of disintegration through contact with ambiguous

transitional states such as birth and death. In the Korean shamanistic mentality,
birth defiles; and so does death. The Chollado kut for the dead is itself called
Ssitkim-kut (씻김굿), or Rite of Cleansing. The kut community’s preoccupation
with birth, death, and illness may well spring from a recognition of the danger
that contact with these risky, unpredictable states of family crisis brings. The
community’s ambiguous attitude toward the Pujong Spirits may reflect the
ambiguity of the states that spawn them.
If contact with unpredictable states of crisis threatens disintegration, contact
with what is holy necessitates personal wholeness. Thus, as Douglas recognizes,
even the primal concern with evil as physical pollution can have an ethical thrust
toward human wholeness. In this light, the kut community’s preoccupation with
uncleanness can be seen as giving evidence of its desire to enter into the sacred
kut rites with a purity of body and heart that is marked by wholeness and
harmony. Korean shamans, or mudang, speak of the primary necessity of interior
purity of heart. When village representatives bathe in the course of a village kut
or a mudang initiate takes a ritual bath in the course of an initiatory kut (내림
굿), they no doubt do so to present themselves before the holy gods in a state of
inner wholeness. In the solemn procession to the Village Shrine of the
Pyolshin-kut (별신굿) of the town of Unsan, those carrying food all hold pieces
of paper in their mouths. They are said to do this to insure the food’s cleanliness
(Im 1983:105). At the same time, however, they appear to express a sign of a
desire for inner purity and wholehearted devotion as they enter the holy realm of
contact with the god. In the course of a Seoul initiatory kut, the officiating
mudang does a solemn dance in honor of the Big Dipper Spirit (칠성신) or
Chesok Spirit (제석, 帝釋). She does so dressed in a white Buddhist garment and
holding a piece of paper in her mouth, in this case, too, as a sign of purity and
devotion.
Douglas’ schema illuminates much kut activity, but it does not explain all the

PUJONG, HAN, AND WHOLENESS IN KOREAN SHAMANISTIC RITES 7
ambiguities of this activity or the ambiguities of the world view that it embodies.
It does not explain the fact that in Korean Shamanism defilement is itself
sometimes referred to as a god or spirit. Douglas’ explanation may lead us,
moreover, to overlook the fact that it is precisely in unpredictable times of crisis,
prone as such times are to the danger of defilement, that the Korean kut
community most actively seeks the aid of the gods and spirits and finds itself
closest to them. Indeed, as Kim Taegon has stressed, kut seek contact with the
gods precisely in states of chaos (1981:150 ff.). In the spectrum of Korean
culture, Shamanism stands at the opposite pole from Confucianism, with its
reverence for hierarchical order and reasoned harmony. Korean Shamanism revels
in the dangers and risks of life that Douglas says spawns pollution. Precisely in
times of danger and risk, the Korean kut community seeks harmony, wholeness,
and its own particular brand of holiness.
The Release of Han (恨)
Returning once more to the thought of Paul Ricoeur, we find ideas that
elucidate another aspect of the kut community’s reaction to the evil of life--its
preoccupation with han (恨). Ricoeur finds that as mankind’s perceptions of evil
evolve, the ethical thrust implicit in avoiding defilement takes on specific forms
and manifests itself in specific images. He finds that our perceptions of evil
become interiorized and that we become aware of evil as a sinfulness that binds
from within. At this stage, the primal fear of pollution does not disappear; but
evil comes to be associated with “a violated relation” and finds expression‎ in
symbols of “seizure, possession, enslavement” (1967:74, 48). Kut concretize this
awareness of evil as something that binds from within in two forms of kut
activity, the one mimetic and the other symbolic.

Mimetic interaction between the living and ancestral spirits of the dead
occupies a large part of the activity of a Seoul area kut. As manifested in this
dramatic interaction, defilement consists in violated family relationships. Natural
affection has become tainted with the bitterness of han (恨), and bonds of love
have become a form of fearful enslavement for both the living and the dead. The
purifying thrust of the purification rite (부정 거리) that begins a kut gets
concretized as the dramatic interaction between the living and the dead through
the mudang’s believed mediumship provides an opportunity for the cleansing of
han-filled frustrations and regrets, release from the bonds of tangled personal
relationships, and the restoration of family wholeness. The psycho-dramatic
confrontation between the tainted parties, living and dead, thus imbues the thrust
toward purification that begins a kut with specific content. It brings out in the
open the source of pollution in tainted relationships and provides concrete means
of cathartic release.
Release from the bondage of deeply rooted feelings of han was the object of a
dramatic ritual encounter held in a Seoul-area kut for the deceased mother of six
offspring, ranging in age from their mid-thirties to the mid-fifties. The mother had
died less than a month before. At the beginning of the kut, she embraced her
offspring through the mudang and exchanged words of greetings. In life, the
relations between the mother and the first daughter-in-law had been strained; so
the mother had ceased living in the first son’s household. In the course of the
kut, the mother’s spirit was thought to speak through the mediumship of the
daughter-in-law as she held a branch of oak standing in water that symbolized the
deceased. The branch began to shake, and the daughter-in-law shrieked out.
The daughter-in-law then went on for a quarter of an hour in a trance,
speaking sometimes in the mother’s voice, sometimes in her own. At one point,
referring to the first son’s bad health, the mother cried out, again and again,
“What’s to be done?” The words were believed to be those of the mother, but

PUJONG, HAN, AND WHOLENESS IN KOREAN SHAMANISTIC RITES 9
they seemed colored by the daughter-in-law’s own intense feelings of grief, regret,
anxiety, and han. In the end, the daughter-in-law confessed to the mother that she
was sorry; and the mother promised to give assistance from the grave. The
daughter-in-law came out of her trance; and the purifying ritual-drama was
finished. The whole experience was traumatic for the daughter-in-law and
frightening for all present. But it gave the daughter-in-law a unique opportunity to
seek reconciliation with her mother-in-law and free herself and her family from a
heavy burden of han.
Essential to the cathartic dynamics of this kind of kut is belief in the concrete,
immediate presence of the dead person’s soul. In a culture like that of Korea, in
which human relationships depend greatly on physical presence and on the
affirmation provided by concrete physical signs, any expression‎ of concern
between the living and the dead, or men and the gods, would seem to demand
physical contact. In the Seoul rite in question, it would seem psychologically
impossible for the daughter-in-law ever to free herself from the han that had been
burdening her life without a concrete sign of reconciliation on the part of the
deceased mother. If, moreover, the dead are governed by the same modes of
action as the living, it would seem impossible for the mother ever to be at peace
if the daughter-in-law did not concretely express her desire for reconciliation.
It is commonly thought that the dynamics of shamanistic ritual are rooted in
the shaman’s trance or in entranced possession by a god or spirit. Sometimes, as
in the dramatic activity just seen, the shaman or a member of the family
sponsoring the kut is indeed believed to serve as a possessed spiritmedium. But
even in such a case, it seems truer to say that the dynamics of a Korean kut are
rooted more in the mudang’s performance and in the expectancies of the kut
community than in an heightened state of trance. It is not any special state of
consciousness on the part of the mudang that moves those present to accept what
they see or hear in the person of the mudang as a god or ancestral spirit. It is

the imaginative force and dramatic vividness of her representation of the god or
spirit. A shaman is said to be one who can control and manipulate the spirits
(Eliade 1964:8, 16). In the case of the Korean mudang, however, it seems closer
to the truth to say that she manipulates the imagination and expectations of kut
participants.
As was noted above, kut concretize an awareness of evil as something that
binds from within in symbolic as well as mimetic activity. Turning from the kind
of dramatic mimetic activity just seen to imaginative manipulation of a more
purely symbolic nature, we find that mudang commonly have kut participants
imagine evil symbolically as loop knots that they ritually shake free from a long
white cloth. In the Kop’uri (고푸리, Knot-loosening Rite) of a Chollado
Ssitkimkut (씻김굿) for the dead, the loop knots (ko) symbolize the bitterness
(ko, 苦) that life leaves knotted in a person’s heart. They represent the knotted
frustrations and tangled personal relationships that constitute han. Dressed in
pure-white mourning garments, the mudang releases the loop knots in slow,
graceful, dancelike movements. Enhanced by the sorrow of the accompanying
chant, the dance creates a ritual image charged with awe, grief, and a sense of
peaceful release. Defilement reveals itself as sinful binding, and cleansing as
release. Unritualized, death would merely tie the final knot of han. Ritually
transformed by the Kop’uri, however, death becomes hopedfor release.
According to Ricoeur, mankind’s most fully developed sense of evil entails an
awareness that we ourselves bind ourselves in sin, that we are indeed guilty. At
this stage, people continue to use symbols of infection and binding to express an
awareness of evil; but they supplement them with juridical and penal symbols
(1967:101 ff.). Kut for the dead employ juridical and penal symbols, but they
borrow these from Buddhism and do not always take them seriously. There is a
suggestion of punishment for wickedness or reward for a life of good deeds when
a kut includes the divination of a dead soul’s rebirth in the next life. The soul of

PUJONG, HAN, AND WHOLENESS IN KOREAN SHAMANISTIC RITES 11
a wicked person is divined as being reborn as a snake or beast of burden; that of
a good person is divined as becoming a butterfly or bird. This ritual lacks,
however, the gut-level appeal of the Kop’uri. In the course of a Seoul kut, the
Emissary from the Ten Kings of the Buddhist World of Darkness (명부 십대왕)
comes to snatch away the soul of the deceased to a realm of judgment and
punishment for sin where all fears of what lies beyond the grave seem eminently
realizable. Frightening though he is, however, the Emissary Spirit (사자) may
appear as quite a clown. Mouth grotesquely stuffed with rice cake and arms
flailing a long white cloth, he tries to lasso the soul of the deceased, symbolized
by white papers attached to paper-craft flowers on the table of offerings. As
family members fend him off in mock battle, the episode temporarily shatters
sorrow and solemnity with farcical banter and gleeful laughter. The humor helps
objectify and heal the grief of the family; but it dissipates serious fears about sin,
punishment, or the judgment of the gods.
On the whole, anxiety about guilt and punishment is much less integral to the
kut community’s understanding of the evil of life than anxiety about pollution or
han. In the view of life embodied in Korean shamanistic rituals, han binds,
whether or not one is guilty; and the Kop’uri achieves release, whether or not
one repents. As one mudang has explained, properly performed rites eventually
free all but the most notorious sinners from the danger of lasting punishment.
Death Rites and Wholeness
Kut reflect a Korean cultural tendency to shy away from clear distinctions
about areas of human experience that are perhaps better respected for their
mystery. As we have just seen, kut for the dead offer no clear fear of what
might await the soul in the afterlife. They also promise no well-defined vision of

hope. Nonetheless, the vision of evil and suffering embodied in Korean kut for
the dead is positive. It is open to the possibility of purifying freedom from evil
and to the “happy ending” that traditional Korean literature is commonly said to
demand.
Ricoeur singles out the myth of the fall from paradise among the various
mythic explanations of the origin of evil as that which best expresses the ultimate
thrust of the notion of defilement. According to the implications of this symbolic
notion, infection presumes a more fundamental soundness, and a blemish
presupposes original purity. According to the terms of the lost paradise myth,
evil is not symmetrical with the good, wickedness is not
something that replaces the goodness of a man: it is the
staining, the darkening, the disfiguring of an innocence, a
light, and a beauty that remain. However radical evil may be,
it cannot be as primordial as goodness" (1967:156).
Although Korean kut do not, to my knowledge, make reference to myths of
paradise and its loss, they imply a world view that sees human existence as
subject to the full terms of such myths. No matter how deeply entangled pujong
and han may be, the Kop’uri releases it. In the kut community’s world, life is
impure, dangerous, and a tangled burden. At the same time, however, life is open
to purification, release, harmony, and wholeness. Kut are rooted in a keen Korean
sense that life is ever haunted by han, but joyous, nonetheless, and indisputably
worth living.
Kut for the dead achieve their climax in moving rituals that reinforce this
world view. These rituals have very little to do with controlling the spirits, but
much to do with manipulating the imagination of those present. As I have
described elsewhere (Kister 1997:107 ff.), the climactic rituals of kut for the dead

PUJONG, HAN, AND WHOLENESS IN KOREAN SHAMANISTIC RITES 13
manipulate the imagination in a combination of simple mimetic imitation and
memorable, often sublime, symbolic gestures. Varying from region to region, these
climactic rituals celebrate the final event of the life of a deceased family member
in the achievement of freedom and peace. They transform the pollution of life’s
ultimate threat of disintegration in death into an event of wholeness and beauty.
Following the Kop’uri in a Chollado Ssitkim-kut is a rite called Chiltakkum
(질닦음), or “Cleansing of the Road.” In this rite, a long white cloth is stretched
out lengthwise to become the watery path to the “other shore” (彼岸, nirvana).
Several whiteclothed mudang send the deceased to the other world, rhythmically
chanting as they slowly pass along the cloth white paper symbols of the deceased
in a graceful ritual dance. This rite, together with the Kop’uri, transforms the
pollution of death, with all its uncertainties and fears, into a moment of
wholeness, beauty, and peace.
The final rite of a Seoul kut for the dead (진오귀굿) does the same. The
movement of the deceased to his or her final end is prefigured from the very
beginning of the kut by symbolic props in the background. There are pictures of
the Ten Kings of the World of Darkness and a paper-crafted flower-bedecked
“gate of thorns” (가시문) to the other world. As the climax of the kut
approaches, the mudang chants the myth of the archetypical mudang god, the
Abandoned Princess (바리 공주). She does so seated at her hour-glass drum,
dressed in the Princess’ elegant robes. Once she has concluded the tale, she
ritually fulfills the Princess’ role of psychopomp. Still dressed in her royal robes,
she activates the ambivalent symbol of the flower-covered gate of thorns in the
background as she leads the deceased to the “good place” in a slow-paced dance
around the tables of offerings and before the flower-covered gate. To the
purifying power of the dramatic interaction with the deceased played out earlier in
the kut, she now adds this aesthetically moving symbolic action. She thus
transforms death, in all its ambiguity and unpredictablity, into an event of dignity

and peace.
In an East Coast Ogwi-kut (오귀굿, 오구굿) for one who has drowned at sea,
the symbolic props prefiguring the deceased’s destined end are colorful Buddhistic
paper lanterns, a paper boat that the deceased takes to reach the “other shore,”
and a long white cloth that symbolizes the watery path or bridge to the other
shore. In one form, the climax of this kut consists in two ritual actions that
activate the symbolic props in the background.
The first action centers on a large, colored paper lantern that appears to
symbolize a heavenly mansion for the dead man’s soul. The shaman raises the
lantern high above the altar and, dancing a slow, mournful dance, tells the
deceased, “Now ride the lantern and ascend to the skies.”
The second action focuses on the cloth symbolizing the path over water to the
other shore and on a staff tipped with paper flowers which represents the
deceased. The mudang stretches out the cloth and sadly tells the deceased, “Now
we must load the boat and you must go.” As an assistant takes down the paper
flowers, lanterns, and decorations from the table of offerings, the mudang does a
slowmotion dance with two of the small paper lanterns, imaginatively loading
them onto the boat. An assistant then passes the paper boat and small paper
lanterns slowly over the length of the cloth. Saying for the final time, “Now let’s
go,” the shaman uses the staff to slowly, but firmly and with dignified grace,
split the cloth. Ambiguously fusing the searing pain of absolute separation in
death with an image of the flowering of existence, this technically simple, but
aesthetically moving, dramatic image invites those present to experience the
painful separation of death as the beautiful flourishing of life’s fulfillment.
Douglas cites the customary self-sacrificial death of an aged priestly
“spearmaster” of the African Dinka as an example of death pollution transformed

PUJONG, HAN, AND WHOLENESS IN KOREAN SHAMANISTIC RITES 15
into something good. When an old spearmaster asks that his death be prepared,
he is reverently carried to his grave, and lying in it says his
last words to his grieving sons before his natural death is
anticipated. By his free, deliberate decision he robs death of
the uncertainty of its time and place of coming. His own willing
death, ritually framed by the grave itself, is a communal victory
for all his people. (1966:178)
What the ritualized moral stance of the Dinka spearmaster achieves for his
community, the ritual aesthetics of kut for the dead accomplish for the kut
community. Depending more on dramatic and aesthetic means than on ecstatic
trance or mediumship, Korean mudang ritually transform the ambiguity,
uncertainty, danger, and defilement of death into an event of beauty, peace,
wholeness, and freedom made holy by contact with the gods.
Eliade maintains that spring rites celebrated in various parts of the world do
not simply mark the beginning of a new yearly cycle. They embody an archetypal
endeavor of the community to start the year off by returning ritually to a state of
harmony with self, nature, and the gods (1964:99, 117). They embody an
endeavor to recover what Eliade calls a paradisiacal state of wholeness, harmony,
and freedom “uncontaminated by time and becoming” (1954:89). The Chollado
Kop’uri, the dance before the flower-covered “gate of thorns” in the Seoul kut,
and the splitting of the cloth with the flower-tipped staff in the East Coast
Ogwi-kut all have a dramatic and aesthetic vitality that imbues death itself with
something of this paradisaic wholeness.

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PUJONG, HAN, AND WHOLENESS IN KOREAN SHAMANISTIC RITES 17
한국 무속 세계의 부정과 한, 그리고 온전성
Daniel A. Kister
개요
한국 무속에서 신에 대한 숭배는 인간의 삶을 어둡게 하는 한계에 대한 인
식, 좌절에 대한 인식과 재난에 대한 인식에 기인한다. 굿은 부정(不淨)과 한
(恨)의 관점에서 악에 대한 인식을 의미한다. 이 글에서, 본인은 어떻게 굿이
굿 공동체에 부정과 한에 대한 인식을 반영하는지와 어떻게 이것이 세계관의
여러 면을 형성하는지를 보이고자한다.
굿 공동체의 부정에 대한 관심은 Mary Douglas가 Purity and Danger라는 책
에서 강조한 공포에서 나온다. 공포는 출생, 질병과 죽음과 같은 애매한 변화
의 상태를 겪으면서 생기는 분열에 대한 두려움이다. 이런 상태와의 접촉이
분열을 위협하는가 하면, 신성함과의 접촉은 개인적인 온전성을 필요로 한다.
그래서 Douglas가 깨달았듯이, 부정이라는 재난에 대한 걱정은 일치에 대한
도덕적인 지향을 의미한다.
굿은 보통 부정거리로 시작하고 전라도에서 죽은 이를 위한 굿은 그 자체
가 씻김굿이라고 한다. 많은 굿에서 나타나는 산 이와 죽은 이의 극적인 상호
작용에서, 부정은 한으로 상처는 불경스런 가족 관계들로 이루어져 있다. 그
래서 부정거리의 지향은 무당의 중개로 산 이와 죽은 이 사이의 사이코 드라
마 같은 상호작용으로 구체화되고, 그런 드라마는 한의 정화와 가족의 온전성
회복을 위한 기회를 제공한다.
인생의 위험과 좌절과 악에 맞닥뜨렸을 때 생기는 공포와 걱정은 대부분의
굿의 역동성의 토대를 이룬다. 그럼에도 불구하고 굿 공동체의 악에 대한 인
식은 정화하는 자유, 일치와 조화의 가능성으로 열려있다. 이것은 죽은 이들

을 위한 굿의 절정에 이르는 의식에서 가장 선명하게 나타난다. 예를 들어 서
울의 진오귀굿의 마지막 거리에서 바리공주를 연기하는 무당은 죽은 이를
“좋은 곳”으로 인도한다. 그때 바리공주는 제단주위와 종이꽃으로 덮인 가지
문 (저세상으로 통하는 문) 앞에서 느린 걸음으로 아름다운 춤을 춘다. 무당
은 위에서 말한 굿에 등장하는 사이코 드라마의 정화력에 이 미학적인 상징
행위의 정화력을 더한다. 이러한 의식은 죽은 가족의 일생에서 위엄과 개화하
는 완성의 순간인 최후를 기린다. 이것은 죽음에서 모든 것이 흩어져 버릴
지도 모른다는 궁극적인 위협에서 나오는 부정을 온전성과 미의 순간으로
옮긴다.