The Journey Begins

It’s hard to say when it all started.

I remember hiking across the plain to a long mountain. It was 1971, our second year in Korea. We lived in a small village called Hak-song-gol, “Crane-Pine Valley,” and we had been looking at this jagged mountain on our eastern horizon for months. We climbed its northern slope, and came upon a cottage of mud brick with a thatched roof, like most Korean country houses in those days, but it was strangely isolated. A young woman peered out the door at us, and we greeted her, but without a word she turned her back and hurried inside. We followed the trail past the cottage and around the side of an outcropping to a ledge of bare, flat earth.

I didn’t know what to make of the place. A few tall poles stood, with strips of cloth tied to them, fluttering in the breeze. Bowls with bits of food were arranged on a flat rock before a cleft in the cliff. Before we could snap a picture or get a closer look, a middle-aged woman came hurrying after us. Were we missionaries, she wanted to know. No, we were English teachers in the town on the plain below. She glared at us, not friendly, so we moved on and followed the mountain’s long crestline from north to south. In those days, firewood was precious, and the slopes were bare, providing unobstructed views of the farmland below, our village, and the western range of far, blue hills.

It was only later that I understood what I had seen that day. The woman was a shaman, and the ledge with the poles and offerings was her shrine where she reached out to the spirits. In those days, shamans kept out of sight for fear of persecution by local officials and the growing ranks of converts to foreign religions. No wonder the woman looked at my husband and me, two nosy foreigners, so suspiciously!

There was something about the woman that I couldn’t put from my mind. She radiated a kind of energy. It was a little scary, but it drew me. I would have liked to talk with her and try to understand what that energy was. A couple of years later, we brought a friend back to photograph the rock carvings and formations we had found on the mountain, and, sadly, the cottage was empty and the altar bare.

If I could go back to that mountain now, I would find it heavily forested. Nowadays South Korea’s mountains are green, thanks to a government reforestation program that started in the 1960’s. With the trees the wildlife have come back—deer and foxes, if not tigers, and the slopes echo with bird-calls. Maybe a new shaman has rebuilt the cottage and the altar, and people from the villages below make the climb to seek her help with their troubles and fears.

After that day, my journey carried me to Seoul, where I lived and translated publications on Korean folkways. There, I received the gift of a book containing the Korean story of the first shaman, the one who made a shamanic quest to the Other World and brought back the secrets of healing. An anthropologist in the 1930’s recorded it when a shaman sang the story for him. It was beautiful, and so I translated it. I loved the story’s hero, a young woman who bravely challenged the patriarchal society she was born into, and who risked everything to reach her goal. But for years other things occupied my thoughts—graduate school, work, children, and more work.

Then, a day came when my kids were in high school and I had time to myself. It was 2001, thirty years after my first sighting of a shaman shrine. I wanted to write, and I had several stories in mind, but the first shaman’s tale would give me no rest until I found a way to share it. So I began to piece it together. The recorded version was powerful, but brief. To bring the story to life as a novel, I needed to research old Korea, to develop a setting and more characters, to put flesh to the story’s bones. So, thirteen years ago, I started my new journey, writing the 10,000 Spirits trilogy. 

What does a Korean shaman look like? I found pictures of them from the old days in Buddhist temples, like the shaman dancing with her drum in the painting above. This one was painted on a high ceiling panel, some time in the 19th Century. But the old pictures weren’t enough. I went back to Korea to meet modern shamans and see them at work. (More about that in my next blog!)

This fall, we’ll see volume 1, The River and the Pine, thanks to my wonderful publisher, Water Street Press. Next year, volume 2, Guardian, will come out. I’m working on volume 3, and it will take us from Korea into Mongolia—that is, Mongolia roughly 2,000 years ago. And so, this summer I’ll make another journey, this time to Korea and through northern Mongolia by jeep and by horse, for the month of June.

I hope you’ll travel with me: you can follow my blog and travel pictures here.