The Korean peninsula has its own indigenous religious traditions that survived beneath and alongside the great imported systems, Buddhism, Confucianism, and later Christianity, that shaped its high culture. The oldest is Korean Muism (or Musok), the native shamanism whose practitioners, overwhelmingly women, are the mudang: ritual specialists who mediate between the community and a world of spirits, gods, and ancestors, chiefly through the gut, an elaborate ceremony of music, dance, offering, and spirit-possession performed to heal, to secure fortune, or to settle the dead.
Long disparaged by the Confucian elite and by modern missionaries and states, Muism proved remarkably durable and remains a living practice. Korea also gave rise, in the mid-nineteenth century, to an important indigenous new religion: Cheondoism ("the Religion of the Heavenly Way"), which grew out of the Donghak ("Eastern Learning") movement founded by Choe Je-u in 1860 as a native response to the pressures of Western influence and Catholic missionary activity. Teaching that the divine is present within each person, Donghak fed a massive peasant uprising in the 1890s and became a vehicle of Korean religious nationalism. The peninsula thus preserves, alongside the East Asian mainstream, a female-led shamanic tradition of great tenacity and a homegrown modern religion born of national self-assertion.