เครื่องรางบูจอก (ยันต์กระดาษเกาหลี)Bujeok부적

Bujeok descend from fulu, the Daoist talismanic script of China — the same stock that produced Japan's ofuda. Fulu are described by their own scholars as deliberately hard to read: Yang Zhaohua notes that the earliest Taoist talismans were simple and legible and that later ones became cryptic to signal their divinity, and Ge Zhaoguang of Fudan University calls their unreadability a linguistic archaism designed so that only qualified clergy can produce them. A bujeok inherits that logic in Hanja.

Who draws one matters more than what is on it. Mudang — the majority of them women — are the specialists of Musok, and they hand these out to the people who attended a gut, the large rite that is their central work, at the end of it. Korean vernacular religion also runs ritual specialists who divine and make amulets without performing gut at all.

The practice has been under pressure for six hundred years and is still here. Under the Joseon dynasty Confucian elites taxed and prosecuted the mudang: they were one of eight outcast groups expelled from the capital, the Gyeonggukdaejeon prescribed a hundred public lashes for anyone who supported them, a mudang was beheaded in 1398, and the Jeju governor Yi Hyŏngsang purged the island's simbang in 1702, destroying 129 shrines. The ritual taxes ran until the Kabo reforms of 1895. In 1896 police arrested mudang, pulled down shrines and burnt their equipment. Suppression continued in the mid-twentieth century through Syngman Rhee's New Life Movement and Park Chung Hee's Saemaul Undong, with a surge of police action against mudang in the 1970s.

Then it turned. From the late 1970s the mudang were re-read as carriers of Korean cultural identity, several were tied to the minjung pro-democracy movement, and from the 1980s the South Korean government designated certain mudang Human Cultural Treasures. By 2009 ten regional gut styles were on the national intangible heritage register, and one of them — the Yŏngdŭng gut of Ch'ilmŏri Shrine on Jeju — went onto UNESCO's Representative List that year. Disapproval has not gone away: the anthropologist Chongho Kim's account and the survey this record draws on both record that mudang are still widely regarded in South Korea as charlatans, Christians especially.

Drawn by a mudang, in figures built from Hanja. Distributed to those present at the end of a gut, or made on commission. Then either sealed into a small brocade bag and kept on the body, or pasted up on the inside wall of a house. This project has read no published account of the drawing itself — what is used, in what order, with what said over it — and prints none.

South Korea holds over 200,000 mudang as of the survey this record draws on, and practitioners work abroad as well. Mudang have advertised on the internet since the 1990s and have been steadily visible on South Korean television since the 2010s, which has improved their standing. Paper talismans are sold in tourist and antique districts too, Insadong among them.