People Seeking Hope from Fortune Tellers

Since the liberation from Japan in 1945, the North Korean authorities have, in line with most socialist states, emphasized that religion is no different from superstition, the opiate of the masses.

Indeed, although the highly negative description of the term in North Korea’s encyclopedia was amended in the 1990s to make the authorities’ stance less visible to the outside world, and the regime continues to maintain some showcase religious institutions in Pyongyang, formal religious and other activities judged to be superstitious have been expressly forbidden in the country since the 1970s.

However, with the 1990s, as simply putting food on the table became more and more difficult and peoples’ belief in the authorities disappeared, there was a great rise in the number of people visiting fortune tellers. Compared with religious activities, which could lead to execution or a political prison camp, the punishment for visiting a fortune teller was, and is, relatively minor, feeding this choice.

Of course, some way away from the prying eyes of the authorities there had always been the odd person who would visit a psychic to enquire after their fortune or treatment for an illness, but it was only in the mid to late 1990s that the activity really exploded. Even officials began to take their own trips to fortune tellers, proffering weak excuses as they went; “You can’t navigate your way through life if you don’t know your fate”; or, “Believe not in God, but in the God of Chosun.”

North Korean defectors believe that the main reason for this increase in visits to fortune tellers was complete loss of faith in the national leadership; this inability to trust the authorities or the state, not to mention exhaustion caused by the mere fight to survive, the declining state of state-provided health care and absence of outside sources of news and information, led people to seek out ethereal sources of believable information.

One defector recalls a pediatrician who diagnosed their son, who was suffering from a high fever, with a “demon spirit,” and summarily recommended a well-known shaman. “Given that even doctors’ are of that mind, what hope is there for everyone else?” he points out.

In North Korea, that’s not all. People typically seek out a shaman to address sicknesses, the starting of a business, marriage or even choice of grave site for a parent. Some of those who can afford it will apparently call upon a shaman for almost anything you can think of.

One defector from Hyesan explains it well, saying, “Even though it is really hard to survive, the reason people will spend the money for five kilos of rice on a shaman is because they want to find hope, even though it is just in words. They draw courage and strength from the belief that even though not everything the shaman tells them is right, if they go this way, good things will happen.”

Fortune telling is still a banned practice in North Korea. Not that it seems to be having much effect, the authorities have responded to the growth of the activity with lectures about how it is contrary to socialism, and there is even a play called Village Shrine, written solely to remind people of its pointlessness.

The play is about a mother struggling to bring up her only daughter alone during the Japanese occupation. Even though their house is bare, the mother spends every day at the village shrine preparing ritual offerings such as pork, rice cakes and wine for her ancestors, pleading for her child’s future.

One day, a young intellectual from the village who has watched the woman coming and going to the shrine tells her, “There is no such thing as superstition. Every person is the master of his own destiny.” Finally convinced by the man, the woman destroys the shrine.

But reality is flowing the other way, and one might say that the North Korean people are now rebuilding the destroyed village shrine. Fortune tellers have found a place in their lives, so much so that people say not even Kim Jong Il could stop them were they to work together. It is, to be sure, another bizarre development in the North Korea that Kim Jong Il has made.