page_title: Korean mythology
section_title: Other literary myths
hierarchical_section_title: Korean mythology / Literary mythology / Other literary myths
caption_attribution_description: English: This is an illustration of a mask used in the Cheoyong dance, a Korean court ceremony.
context_page_description: Korean mythology is the body of myths told by historical and modern Koreans. It is divided into two distinct corpuses: the literary mythology written in traditional histories, mostly about the founding monarchs of various historical kingdoms, and the much larger and more diverse oral mythology, most of which are narratives sung by shamans in rituals invoking the gods and which are still considered sacred today.
  The state-foundation myths that represent the bulk of the literary mythology are preserved in historicized form in Classical Chinese-language works such as Samguk sagi and Samguk yusa. They are divided into northern-type myths such as that of Goguryeo, in which the founding king is the son of a celestial male figure and an earthly female figure, and southern-type myths such as that of Silla, in which the founding king descends from heaven via an object and marries an earthly woman himself. One state-foundation myth, that of Dan'gun, has come to be perceived as the founding myth of the Korean nation as a whole. Other literary myths include the origin myths of descent groups written in traditional genealogies.
context_section_description: Many other supernatural stories are contained in the Samguk yusa to the point that Grayson calls its compiler, Iryeon, "the first Korean folklorist." Some of these stories reflect shamanic mythology. One example is the tale of Cheoyong. Cheoyong, a son of the Dragon King of the East Sea, arrives in the Silla court where he marries a beautiful woman. One night, he goes home to find the smallpox god having sex with his wife. Rather than punish the intruder, Cheoyong only sings a song. The smallpox god is so astounded by his mercy that he repents and agrees to never enter any house with Cheoyong's face on its gate. The people of Silla then attach portraits of Cheoyong to their gates. The story of Cheoyong is traditionally interpreted as the myth of a shaman or benevolent deity who wards off the spirit of pestilence, although the exact relationship between Cheoyong's song (which survives in two different versions) and Korean shamanic chants continues to be debated.
  Another genre of literary mythology are the origin myths of specific descent groups, recorded in traditional genealogies. The motif of the founding ancestor's birth from a stone or golden chest also appears in the genealogies of many non-royal descent groups. Other ancestor myths involve the coupling of a human and a non-human. The Chungju Eo (魚 eo "fish") claim descent from a man who was born to a human mother and a carp father, while the Changnyeong Jo are thought to descend from the offspring of a Silla noblewoman and the son of a dragon.
caption: Illustration of Cheoyong in the 1493 Akhak Gwebeom
exif: {"Image Tag 0x000B": "Windows Photo Editor 10.0.10011.16384", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image Software": "Windows Photo Editor 10.0.10011.16384", "Image DateTime": "2020:06:24 10:40:02", "Image ExifOffset": "2242", "Image Padding": "[]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "96", "Thumbnail YResolution": "96", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "4516", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "13816", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2020:06:24 10:38:57", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2020:06:24 10:38:57", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "49", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "49", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}