Abstract
We have many folk games on the festive seasons through the year in Korea, and on January 15th of the lunar year there especially are so many gang fight games. In this paper I tried to explain why.
We usually understand the folklores of the January 15th as the games and events for forecasting a good or bad harvest of the year, but there seemed to be other reasons could be count, I think, because we have the time-honored tradition of the creation myths in Korea.
In those creation myths, we can notice the fight motif between Miruk and SeokKa or Taebyolwang and Sobyolwang; they fight each other on the problem who will rule over this world. This fight is meaningful because it is connected to the primal chaos , the beginning of the world. And the gang fights of January 15th are played at the beginning of the year as well.
We examined four motifs in the creation myths; ① the cosmic fight between two heroes, ② trick and stealing of SeokKa or Sobyolwang, ③ modification of the sun and moon, ④ holy marriage of heaven-men and earth-woman.
They correspond with the folklore of January 15th; ① gang fighting folklores such as stone throwing, playing tug-of-war, pseudo-farming in the court. ② trick and stealing shown in ‘Stealing good-fortune soil’, or ‘Stealing treadmill’. ③ so many folklores related to fire or light as ‘Burning rice sheaves’, ‘Displaying fireworks’. ④ wishes for affluence such as ‘Jujube tree marriage’, What lay behind this similarities is the awareness of the homogeneity of the time of the beginning, the likeness of the beginning of this world and a new year. Eliade of Romania explained that it showed the same process of 'From Chaos to Cosmos', using the various myths and folklores of the world. And he also showed us that the beginning folklore of a new year is the folklore of the bumper crop year, for the cyclically repetitive process is the similar to the cyclic repetitiveness of the agriculture.
We usually understand the folklores of the January 15th as the games and events for forecasting a good or bad harvest of the year, but there seemed to be other reasons could be count, I think, because we have the time-honored tradition of the creation myths in Korea.
In those creation myths, we can notice the fight motif between Miruk and SeokKa or Taebyolwang and Sobyolwang; they fight each other on the problem who will rule over this world. This fight is meaningful because it is connected to the primal chaos , the beginning of the world. And the gang fights of January 15th are played at the beginning of the year as well.
We examined four motifs in the creation myths; ① the cosmic fight between two heroes, ② trick and stealing of SeokKa or Sobyolwang, ③ modification of the sun and moon, ④ holy marriage of heaven-men and earth-woman.
They correspond with the folklore of January 15th; ① gang fighting folklores such as stone throwing, playing tug-of-war, pseudo-farming in the court. ② trick and stealing shown in ‘Stealing good-fortune soil’, or ‘Stealing treadmill’. ③ so many folklores related to fire or light as ‘Burning rice sheaves’, ‘Displaying fireworks’. ④ wishes for affluence such as ‘Jujube tree marriage’, What lay behind this similarities is the awareness of the homogeneity of the time of the beginning, the likeness of the beginning of this world and a new year. Eliade of Romania explained that it showed the same process of 'From Chaos to Cosmos', using the various myths and folklores of the world. And he also showed us that the beginning folklore of a new year is the folklore of the bumper crop year, for the cyclically repetitive process is the similar to the cyclic repetitiveness of the agriculture.
| Translated title of the contribution | On Some similarities between Creation Myths and folklore of January 15th of the Lunar Year in Korea |
|---|---|
| Original language | Korean |
| Pages (from-to) | 227-251 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | 비교민속학 |
| Issue number | 52 |
| State | Published - Dec 2013 |