Long ago, there was a king who had many daughters but no son. When the seventh daughter was born, he became greatly incensed. He placed her in a stone box and cast it in a pond. But heaven sent Dragon King who rescued her and took her to heaven. When she was about fourteen years of age, she came down to earth and learned that her mother was critically ill. She travelled far to the Western Sky and brought medicine water and saved her mother. Since then people have visited the princess’ spring of medicine water and listened to the bubbling water as though it were the voice of the princess. The princess was an ancestor of Korean shamans.

These stories are two of many legends about the origins of Korean shamanism. Although simple, in them we can identify some of the key characteristics of Korean shamanism. First, those who are deemed to be ancestors of shamans had direct experiences of heavenly spirits, the Dragon King in the first story and the crane in the second story. Second, the shamans trace their origins to the royal lineage, an interesting point since the shamans for a long period in Korean history were considered as outcasts, the lowest class of people.