Past Life Story

In the fifth year of King Injo, you were born the daughter of a shaman family. Your mother was a renowned shamaness in the village, and your maternal grandmother, and her mother before her, had all been shamanesses. Your fate was decided from your birth. Yet you yourself could not accept it for a long time. By five, you saw for the first time. What others could not see. A figure in white standing in the courtyard, a form weeping in the corner of the kitchen, a shadow shaking its head at the eaves. You were afraid. When you told your mother, she looked at you long and said, "My daughter must walk that path too." In your tenth year, you fell ill often. Without reason, fevers came; food would not enter. Your mother knew it was the spirit-sickness. She brought you to a great shamaness, and there you received the initiation rite. The spirits entered you. From that day your illness vanished, but your life had also changed. In your fifteenth year, you presided over your first ritual. A jinogigut for a family's deceased mother. You saw the soul of that mother. You spoke to the family the words she had not been able to say in life. The family wept, and you wept with them. That day you understood. A shaman is a bridge between the gods and humans, but also a bridge between the living and the dead. At twenty you established your own shrine. A small house in a remote village. People feared you, yet they came to you. The sick. Mothers searching for lost children. Those whose love had departed. Those whose fortune had blocked. You listened to their stories, and asked the spirits for their path. In your twenty-fifth year, you met a man. A commoner youth. He loved you, and you loved him. But his family would not accept the daughter of a shaman as their daughter-in-law. You knew once more a deeper loneliness. The path of a shaman was a path where one could not even have one's own love. Around thirty, you cured a great illness. The only daughter of a yangban household. All physicians had given her up, but with the help of the spirits, you saved that child. The yangban gave you great reward, and your name spread as far as Hanyang. Yet you did not change. Before you, the poor and the wealthy were the same human beings. In your fortieth year, while presiding over a great ritual, you saw your own death for the first time. The spirits had shown it to you. You did not fear it. You only accepted it with calm. To you, who had lived as a shaman, death was not something to fear, but another beginning. At fifty, you fasted for many days and prepared your final ritual. That ritual was for yourself. The villagers gathered, and you welcomed the spirits one last time. When the ritual ended, you lay down at the center of your shrine. And you departed quietly. Your last words were, "The spirit is at your side." Those words were spoken to a poor mother who had come to see you. Your shrine later became a small sanctuary, and the villagers worshipped you as a deity. The descendants of those you helped guard that sanctuary even now. You were one who lived between two worlds. You were lonely, but you received the love of the spirits and the gratitude of people. Your soul may even now be standing quietly beside someone who needs help.