Mengdu
These spirits are called the "mengdu ancestors", and are thought to intervene during rituals to help the current holder accurately ascertain the will of the gods.
They imprison her behind two doors with seventy-eight and forty-eight locks each and tell the family servant to feed her through a hole, so that she cannot leave the house while they are absent.
[8] The Buddhist priest of the Hwanggeum Temple learns of the great beauty of Noga-danpung-agissi and visits the house to ask for alms.
The priest accordingly gives them the first cheonmun, or divination discs, with the Chinese characters 天 "heaven", 地 "earth", and 門 "gate" inscribed.
They then ascend into the afterlife to become divine judges of the dead, wielding the sacred shamanic knives that they will use to bring justice to the scholars.
[19][24] Serpentine patterns are often etched on the blade, but what these symbolize are disputed by shamans, ranging from the dragons that the nobleman sees in his dream to a snake that the triplets encounter while serving the scholars.
[24][25] The part of the blade which tapers to meet the handle is called the "bridge of caution" (josim-dari) and stands for the difficult roads by which the girl and her servant cautiously make their way to the Hwanggeum Temple.
[24][26] The spiral marks on the handle symbolize the fingermarks that Noga-danpung-agissi leaves on her wrists after wringing them, either out of despair at her imprisonment or out of panic once she realizes she is pregnant.
The former symbolizes Noga-danpung-agissi's parents' initial decision to kill her with a straw-cutting machine, and is believed to presage unpreventable misfortune.
The latter represents her parents' decision to stab her with swords instead, and means that misfortune is impending but may be forestalled with the correct rituals for the gods.
[c][41] Although the divinatory implements have a number of functions—including serving as props during the reenactment of shamanic narratives—their primary purpose is similar to the knives in that they seek to divine the will of the gods.
[42] The most general divinatory method involves the shaman raising and overturning the sandae, then examining whether how many of the sangjan are upside-down and how many of the cheonmun face up on their inscribed side.
Jeon Ju-hee suggests that each mengdu corresponds to a task, with the bell that opens the gods' doors standing for communion and the knives that vanquish pestilence symbolizing healing.
The high-ranking shaman Yi Jung-chun knew of twenty-four past holders of his implements, including both kin and non-kin.
[54] When Jeju shamans throw their knives or overturn their sandae and look at the resulting configurations, they describe a spontaneous feeling inside their head which allows them to make the correct interpretation of the patterns.
[57] By contrast, newly fabricated mengdu not based on any preexisting set have no specific ancestors of their own, and are thought to be prone to inaccurate divination results.
[67] However, this is a recent phenomenon due to the ongoing decline in the number of people who want to be traditionally ordained priests, which means that there are often no family members who are willing to take on the mengdu.
In other cases, the final holder may appear in a dream to tell a descendant to dig out their mengdu, or a novice shaman may be led to the grave by divinely inspired intuition (sin'gi).
[82] As shamans now generally live in Western-style houses without rice granaries, they now tend to store their mengdu in cupboards, cabinets, or closets.
In modern households where the sacred tools are all stored in one large cabinet, the mengdu are placed in the uppermost compartment, together with candles, incense and incense burners, rice bowls, threads of cloth, fruits, a supplementary tool used in divination called barang, and any sacred objects that a shaman might personally possess.
[91] In one of the most important parts of this ceremony, the novice kneels before the altar of the gods while a senior shaman feeds him morsels of the sacrificial offerings, calling them a gift from the Mengdu triplets.
Once this is done, the senior shaman presses the sangjan and the cheonmun on the shoulders of the kneeling novice, saying that the triplet gods are stamping their seal on him.
These are held on the eighth, eighteenth, and twenty-eighth days of the ninth lunisolar month, roughly October, corresponding to the birthdays of the Mengdu triplets in the Chogong bon-puri.
"[110] In the 1630s, a mainlander exiled to Jeju wrote that the island's shamans "throw cups and moon blocks to speak of fortune and misfortune.
[113] In the late eighteenth century, a local nobleman included the earliest known use of the word mengdu in a description of how his parents had hired a shaman when he had been very ill as a child:[114] At the night of the Rat [00:00—02:00] they glared fiercely with their eyes and raised their voices.
[116] It was only in the 1960s that proper academic study of Jeju shamanism began, but few scholars have focused on the mengdu and other material culture of the religion.
[118] The military junta of Park Chung Hee initiated the Misin tapa undong, a major government program to undermine shamanism, which resulted in the confiscation of many sets of mengdu by the police.
[125] The mainlanders are joined by laymen from Jeju who decide to practice shamanic ritual without bothering to undergo the difficult training and initiation processes.
[126] Many of these new kinds of ritual practitioners independently make their own mengdu and worship them on special altars of the type seen in Seoul and other northern forms of Korean shamanism.
But unlike in the north, the will of the gods is conveyed not through the shaman's actual body via trance possession, but through the mengdu: sacred objects that are physically separate from the human.
