Baksu

Korean Muism recognizes shamans of both sexes, and while the mudang, generally a woman, is the more numerous and far more extensively studied figure in the ethnographic and popular literature on Korean shamanism, the baksu, a male shaman, holds a recognized and long-attested place in the same tradition rather than being a marginal or invented variant. Like the mudang, a baksu typically enters the role through what scholars of Korean shamanism call the charismatic path: an episode of sinbyeong, spirit sickness, an often severe and prolonged period of physical and psychological affliction understood within the tradition as a possessing spirit's demand to be recognized and served, resolved only through a formal initiation ceremony (naerim-gut) that binds the afflicted person to the spirit and confirms them as a practicing shaman rather than simply a sufferer.

Once initiated, a baksu performs the same central ritual form the wider tradition is built around, the gut, an extended ceremony of music, dance, offering and possession-trance performed to address a client's specific concern, whether illness, misfortune, an unresolved grievance involving the dead, or a request for material or spiritual wellbeing. Scholars of the tradition have noted regional and historical variation in how common male shamans are relative to female ones, and some specialization in the kinds of ritual work particular regions associate more with baksu than mudang, but the underlying structure, spirit sickness, binding initiation, and gut performance, runs through both roles as one shared tradition rather than as two separate practices that happen to share a name.

Korean Muism did not end with the country's modernization, industrialization or the spread of Christianity and Buddhism as its dominant formal religions, and baksu, like mudang, continue to practice and to be consulted by clients in contemporary South Korea. Anthropological fieldwork on the tradition, including the ethnographic study this entry draws on, documents shamans of both sexes actively working through the late twentieth and into the twenty-first century, serving clients across a wide social range even as Korea's religious landscape has shifted substantially around them, official state attitudes toward shamanic practice have varied considerably across different political periods, at times actively discouraged as superstition and at other times treated with more tolerance or even folkloric pride, without this consistently ending the practice on the ground.

Recording the baksu's practice-status as a living tradition rather than purely historical reflects that continuity directly: this is not solely a role reconstructed from older written sources but one still held by working practitioners today, serving real clients with real concerns, the same basic ritual structure, sinbyeong, initiation, gut, carried forward largely intact from long before Korea's modern religious landscape took its present shape.