Healing and exorcism: Christian encounters with shamanism in early modern Korea

Abstract

Many scholars have argued that Anglo-American missionaries destroyed shamanism in the name of Protestant monotheism, Western rationalism, and modern civilization in early modern Korea. However, in the process of confrontational power struggles—between the Christian Holy Spirit and shamanistic evil spirits, and between Western germ theory and superstitious views of diseases—Anglo-Saxon missionaries accepted a premodern view of demon possession, and many female missionaries practiced Christian exorcist healing rituals in contradiction to their rationalism and the official doctrine of the church on miracle and faith healing. On the other hand, the missionaries' appreciation of the Koreans' premodern world view revealed their Christian Orientalism, which regarded Korean religions and spirituality as primitive and obsolete for modern civilization. As a result, paradoxically and liturgically, shamanic spirits were able to exist in the burning of fetishes and exorcism rituals, and shamanism and its spiritism, at the turn of the twentieth century, survived by being included in Protestant missionary discourse on demonology.

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