Three Blue Flags: Good or Bad?
(A male shaman presents the five flags at the port ceremony, 2013.)
Its been a breathless week in Korea, and all of it unplanned. Thanks to old friends, we’ve been busy every minute.
I thought the high point of the week would be a public shaman ritual to bless the old port of Seoul, a wonderful, joyous event that I attended last year. It was scheduled on our first day in Seoul. But, sadly, it was postponed this year because of the tragic ferry sinking a couple of weeks ago that cost 300 lives, most of them high school students. The country is in mourning, and people are angry with the government for failing to provide better for the safety of the passengers.
Instead, on our first day we visited Dr. Yang at his amazing Museum of Shamanism. Dr. Yang got his PhD. in folklore at the University of Indiana, and was trained as a shaman as a young man. For decades he has collected shaman items — paintings of the spirits, costumes, drums and musical instruments, shrine decorations, and more. The museum is set up like a series of altars, and I was moved when I saw that each altar had a bowl with money in it, because when shamans and their followers come to visit the museum they pray at the altars and leave offerings of money. I have often felt in museums how sad it is to see religious objects encased in plexiglass or framed under glass and stripped of their power, trapped like a tiger in the zoo. Dr. Yang has struck a refreshing balance between education and reverence.
Dr. Yang demonstrated the use of the fortune-telling flags, half-joking, half-serious. They are a set of five large flags on sticks, one each in red, yellow, blue, black, and white. I’ve done the flags before during shaman rituals: the shaman offers you the flags, but they’re rolled up together, and you choose by grasping the end of one stick. I’ve gotten red or yellow, which are propitious colors, but this time I got blue. Dr. Yang gave me second chance, but again it was blue. And a third time, blue. I could tell it was’t good, so I asked, “What does blue mean?” He replied carefully, “It means you need to negotiate with the spirits.” That’s a nice way to say, “You’ve got a problem.”
Thinking it over, I decided that maybe it wasn’t really such a bad result. After all, don’t we all have problems? In Mongolia, our guide is going to bring us to meet 3 or 4 shamans. I’ve been thinking that if I don’t want a mere tourist show of drumming and chanting, I need to come to each shaman asking for help. Shamans are perceptive people, and they’ll know if I’m not in earnest. And so, my problems will be my asset. I’ll ask for help and see what happens. The flags just confirmed that this is the right approach: with the shamans’ help, I need to negotiate with the spirits. Maybe my three blue flags weren’t such a bad thing after all.
