Yang Soon-im says she began communicating with the spirits of mountains and ancient warriors more than 50 years ago, when she was only seven.
But it was decades after that, when her son miraculously survived a knife wound, that she decided she had no choice but to become the spirits' full-time channel with the living - a mudang, or shaman.
"I found her sitting on the roof chanting at 4am," her husband, Choi Jong-sam, 62, said of that day about 25 years ago. "She was puffing away at four packs of cigarettes. She said her mountain gods had saved our son in a sort of bargain. I slapped her face to help her get her wits back.
"Then her eyes blazed like those of a wild dog about to bite a man."
The deal Yang said she struck with her spirits eventually paid off in other ways.
Now 60, she is one of the most sought-after shamans in Seoul - a leading member of a profession that has survived centuries of ridicule and persecution and is now enjoying a seemingly incongruous revival in one of the world's most technologically advanced countries.
There are an estimated 300 shamanistic temples within an hour of Seoul's bustling city center, and in them, shamans perform their clamorous ceremonies every day. They offer pigs to placate the gods. They dance with toy guns to comfort the spirit of a dead child. They intimidate evil spirits by walking barefoot on knife blades.
high spirits
"We used to do our rituals in hiding," said Yang, who performs two or three rites on a busy day. "Our customers kept it secret from even their own relatives. Now we have no shame performing in public. I can hardly take three days off a month."
Korean shamanism is rooted in ancient indigenous beliefs shared by many folk religions in northeast Asia. Most mudangs are women who say they discovered their ability to serve as a mediator between the human and spirit worlds after emerging from a critical illness. They believe that the air is thick with spirits, including those of dead relatives, a fox in the hills behind a village, an old tree or even a stove. These spirits interact with people and influence their fortunes.
So when tradition-minded Koreans are inexplicably sick or have a run of bad luck in business or a daughter who cannot find a husband, they consult a shaman.
"If I contact the spirit of a man who died of stomach cancer, I get stomach pains for days," said Kim Hong-kyung, 33, who has conducted rituals with Yang. "If I deal with the spirit of a woman who died during labor, my belly balloons like a pregnant woman's."
In an election year like this one, the most famous shamans are fully booked. Politicians, whether Christian or Buddhist, flock to them, asking, for instance, whether relocating their ancestors' remains to a more propitious site might ensure victory.
"Look around," said Kim Myung-soon, 41, a mudang who, in a recent ritual, decapitated a chicken with her bare hands. "So much of nature has been ruined. Spirits of trees and rocks are displaced and haunt humans because they have nowhere else to go. No wonder the country is a mess."
Shamans were demonized by Christian missionaries and driven underground during Japanese colonial rule. The military governments that came after the Korean War disparaged shamans as charlatans and often banished them from villages, burning their shrines. But today, even many who regard shamanism as superstition acknowledge it to be an important repository of Korean culture, because the rituals have preserved traditional costumes, music and dance forms. Recent governments have documented and promoted the rituals as "intangible cultural assets."
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