Kdrama Fortune Tellers Are Always Right
Every genre of Korean TV has room for folk religion and shamanism. No wonder — those roots go deep, even for the nonreligious.
I am a Cancer sun, Gemini moon and Sagittarius rising. I was born in the Year of the Wood Rat. I have had my full astrological chart read at least twice, and though I enjoyed it, I don’t remember any of the insights. Everything I’ve really learned about astrology, I know from newspaper horoscopes and disposable placemats. I do own more than the usual number of tarot decks, but I’ve fallen out of the habit of actually using them. This is the full extent of my mystical practice.
Though I’m a lifelong atheist who stems from a particularly non-ecstatic branch of Ashkenazi Jews, I’ve always been numinous-curious. Imagine my delight when I started to notice something in kdramas: When a character consults a fortune teller, no matter how mundane or profound the concern, the fortune teller always nails it. He but mostly she could be scammy, scary, off-putting, awkward, sleazy, snide, kindly or professional, yet above all else, she never misses the mark.
It’s delicious dramatic tension, usually resolved well after the consultation. We see it in Goblin, as Sunny tries to discern the identity of her true love and whether they can have a happy ending. We see it in The Matchmakers, as the preternaturally able matchmakers known as Ssangyeonsulsa go through the same tribulations as shamans. We see it in You Raise Me Up, a dramedy about erectile dysfunction, as the down-and-out male lead consults his trans best friend about whether he’ll pass the civil service exam. (You can watch that in the first five minutes of the episode below. I look forward to your reactions; it’s a doozy.)
South Koreans report the second-highest rate worldwide of adults who disaffiliate with the religion they were raised in, and while nearly half identify with organized religion in some way, only 16 percent say it’s important in their lives. All that has nothing to do with saju (fortune telling) and shamanism — they’re thriving. By 2018, the fortune-telling industry was already nearing a valuation of $4 billion, including a bustling app marketplace. Face-readers complain that the ubiquity of cosmetic surgery interferes with their practice but have adapted workarounds. Even in North Korea, these traditions persist underground.
Folk religion in Korea has time on its side; recognizable rituals that continue today are found in Chinese accounts from at least the third century CE, like picking out auspicious dates or names, calculating marital compatibility through horoscopes and analyzing energy flows in physical spaces. Adherence isn’t a matter of the young urbane versus credulous bumpkins either. Shamanism has featured in high-profile political scandals, such as 2016’s “female Rasputin” incident. One South Korean president relocated his parents’ graves after four failed attempts at high office, once a geomancer concluded that the original site was bringing him misfortune. Not even breakneck modernization has dislodged this outlook from its place in people’s lives.
Pick a card (the right card)
Lucky Romance is an odd-couple romcom pairing an aggressively rational video game creator with a part-time designer and programmer who relies on superstition to guide her every decision. In addition to casting scary vampire Lee Soo-hyuk as a bubbly professional tennis star named Gary Choi, it offers a decent survey of saju as an integrated and ordinary part of life for believers. Shim Bo-nui (Hwang Jung-eum) keeps salt at her desk to fend off evil. She buys talismans to paste onto surfaces or slip into pockets for protection or desired outcomes. To break a years-long streak of unhappy turns, she seeks out a man born in the Year of the Tiger, on advice that she (gulp) sleep with him.
While Bo-nui is an extreme example, saju garners enough pop-culture fondness to support a long-running show called Ask Us Anything Fortune Teller. Two comedians meet with ordinary people and celebrities to advise them on family matters, life choices, money concerns, career moves and all kinds of everyday, material and relational problems. It’s easy to see how fortune tellers fill a niche in the past and the present — a communal need for a neutral third party.
“There’s a lot of psychology in it,” says history professor Kyung-moon Hwang of the University of Southern California. “These psychics tell fortunes, but they also help you get rid of stress and anxiety. You might be ailing and you can’t figure out how to cure yourself, so you go to the fortune teller, hoping they can heal you… Many people leave these sessions feeling relieved.”
There’s a straightforward transactional face to it too: “Koreans believe if we don’t pay some fee after a fortune teller’s service, the luck will disappear,” one writer advises American servicemembers. This is as true for a street stall as a richly decorated shrine, neither of which invalidates the other. Sometimes a fortune teller deals with spirit or spiritual matters, but knottier issues may require a different expertise.
Every shaman can tell fortunes, but not every fortune teller is a shaman.
Let’s talk transcendence
Saju can be a simple encounter with a tarot reader, or in North Korea, a rice-grain divination. Fortune tellers give you options to pursue at your discretion. When you want someone to intercede with the universe on your behalf, that’s when you call a shaman — a mudang if she’s a woman, a less-common paksu if he’s a man.
It’s an ancient practice with a deep-rooted genealogy. Sageuks (period kdramas) tend to focus on exchange or contact with just a few other cultures: Chinese dignitaries or traders, Japanese or Manchurian invaders. Shamans in Korea share connections much farther afield, with beliefs and practices closely related to Ainu and Siberian peoples.
These aren’t marginal traditions. Many segments of South Korea’s officially designated intangible cultural heritage have common ancestors in shamanism, including major streams of folk music and folk dance. The founding myth of Korean peoplehood involves a tiger and a bear who wish to become human; it is the bear, a totemic figure in shamanisms across northern and northeast Asia, who succeeds and becomes Ungnyeo, mother of the first prince of ancient Gojoseon.
While there’s plenty of regional variation, including whether the tradition is hereditary (often passed down by mothers-in-law) or god-descended (chosen by an external force), the basics of becoming a mudang in Korea are widely consistent. First, she experiences terrible suffering, such as personal loss, spiritual affliction or an acute illness. Once she’s accepted her role and is initiated as a shaman, she trains to understand and stand as equals with the spirit world. Sometimes mudangs burn out and revert to simply selling supplies or telling fortunes, but for many practitioners, it’s not something you leave behind.
“To become a shaman, you must experience extreme pain. Not just anyone can take it, every imaginable humiliation down to the depths of hard living. Just short of the point of death, the gods come.” –“Auntie Cho” to anthropologist Laurel Kendall
At the core of Korean shamanism are spirit possession and mediumship. These aren’t precisely equivalent. “Unlike the conventional view that sees shamans as mere ‘vessels’ to be used by spirits,” writes blogger TrashPanda, “Korean mudang consider themselves ‘master[s] of spirits’ who can convince, soothe and persuade gods for their purposes. With this power, they are able to tell fortunes, cure sickness and mediate between the living and the dead.”
The mechanism for this power is a set of ceremonies called the kut, which follow sequences of dance, song, prayer and pantomime called kori. This generates an ecstatic trance during which a god or other spirit then speaks and acts through the mudang. The scholar Choi Kil-sung describes the kut as a building-up and knocking-down of order, which creates the conditions for gods to communicate with us. “In fact,” he asserts, rather provocatively, “processes which lead to episodes of anti-structural disorder — through drinking and fighting as well as dancing — are not confined to religious ritual in Korea, but are widely used in all sorts of social relations to create a state of anarchic sociality where new social relations can be established.”
Social function, story function
Kdrama shamans come in so many flavors, antique and modern. She’s comic in Oh My Ghostess, unsettling in See You in My 19th Life, scheming in Mr. Queen, pathetic in Behind Your Touch, formidable in Lovers of the Red Sky, lonely in Destined With You. In Bulgasal: Immortal Souls, the shaman’s life is warped and often ruined by the demands of her path through several lifetimes. The slight but visually entertaining horror flick Dr. Cheon and the Lost Talisman follows a grifter as he encounters a real job for the first time. It’s entirely worth it for the sequence in which Jisoo from Blackpink possesses a skittish Park Jeong-min to scornfully deliver some backstory, transforming him from an anxious huckster to a charismatic deity.
Both saju and shamanism are elements of what anthropologists call nonofficial religion, concerned not with holiness or salvation but pragmatic objectives “such as counseling, healing, emotional security, protection from misfortune and realization of material wishes.” There is no pope of fortune telling or hierarchy of mudangs, aside from what one earns through results, relationships and respect. (That said, there are professional associations; a 2022 estimate from the culture ministry suggests that South Korea is home to between 300,000 and 400,000 shamans and fortune tellers.)
Despite being so intimately attuned to culture, tradition and cosmology, the kdrama shaman will always be an outsider. You have to be, to have perspective and insist on deep change. Rather than stories of institutions and chasing power, I love trickster tales, subversion, rejecting the premise altogether. One show I’m inhaling right now is The Forbidden Marriage, about an itinerant scam artist who convinces the king that she can channel the spirit of his dead wife. What becomes clear immediately is that only she is willing to treat the young, grieving ruler as a person with human needs. Only the boundary-breaker can actually save the kingdom.
Korean shamanism predates Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, though it has absorbed elements of all these and more. It survived in large part because its main practitioners — women and the marginalized — were not regarded as a threat. The practice resonates with people from all around the world; young Koreans are putting their stamp on shamanism as well. It’s messy, unnerving, confrontational and cathartic (see the photojournalism of Dirk Schlottmann here and here for a glimpse). Any story, any person, any society can grow hidebound. Amazing, how some of the oldest traditions work so well to break us out. ✶
Who’s your favorite kdrama shaman or fortune teller? Let me know in the comments or on Bluesky. I love recs and growing my teetering to-watch list.
Thanks for reading Excited Mark! If you’d like to support my work, please share, toss a few bucks at my Ko-Fi or become a subscriber, free or paid. I’m also available for hire as a fact-checker, editor and journalist — visit my RealName.com for clips, services and more.
