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Symbolism - Korean mystic shamanism – Costume: Knots and ties
Identifier
027143
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Korean Shamanist Ritual - Symbols and Dramas of Transformation - Daniel Kister
Turning to activity of a more purely symbolic nature, we find that kut commonly imagine evil symbolically as loop knots that a mudang ritually shakes free from a long white cloth.
In the Kop'uri (Knot- loosening Rite) of a Ssitkim-kut, the loop knots (ko) symbolize the bitterness (ko) that life leaves knotted in a person's heart. They represent the knotted frustrations and tangled personal relationships which, whether or not one is personally guilty, constitute han.
In the Kop'uri ritual, a mudang dressed in pure white releases the loop knots in slow, graceful, dance-like movements that, enhanced by the sorrow of the accompanying chant, create a ritual image charged with awe, grief, and a sense of peaceful release.
Unritualized, death would merely tie the final knot of han; but ritualized in the Kop'uri, death becomes hoped-for release.
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The elegant dance of the royally robed Abandoned Princess Spirit as she leads the deceased to peace before the flower-covered "gate of thorns" to the other world in a Seoul Chinogwi-kut makes death a sacred event of peace and beauty. The graceful release of loops knotted in a long white cloth in the ritual dance of a Southwest Ssitkim-kut presents death as a god-guarded event of peaceful release from life's binding pain and frustration. The solemn splitting of a long white cloth with a staff tipped with paper flowers in an East Coast Ogwi-kut transforms the painful rupture of death into a event of flowering fulfillment.
