Yeongdeung Halmang

On the first day of the second lunar month, a goddess arrives at Bokdeokgae Port on the northwest coast of Jeju Island. The port’s name means “harbor that welcomes blessing and virtue.” She comes from the east, from somewhere outside Jeju, and she brings the wind with her. For two weeks she crosses the island, scattering seeds of seaweed, abalone, conch, and barley into the sea and across the fields. On the fifteenth day she leaves through Udo, the easternmost islet. While she is present, no one fishes. No one dives. The ocean belongs to her.

Her name is Yeongdeung Halmang. In the Jeju dialect, halmang means grandmother. She is one of roughly eighteen thousand gods that populate the island’s shamanic tradition, but she holds a particular position. She does not live on Jeju. She visits. She is what the islanders call a “foreign goddess,” a transient deity who comes from outside and returns to wherever she came from. This makes her unusual in Jeju’s pantheon, where most gods are tied to specific villages, springs, or mountains. Yeongdeung Halmang belongs to the wind and the open sea.

Origin

The Jeju origin myth tells of a young sea goddess who rescues shipwrecked Jeju sailors from a northern island inhabited by cyclopes. She teaches the men a magical chant and tells them to sail home without looking back. The cyclops king, enraged by her defiance and her rejection of him, orders his horde to tear her body apart and scatter the pieces across the sea.

Her mother, the Sea, and her father, the Wind, find the fragments one by one. They stitch her back together. The reassembly transforms her. She is no longer a young sea goddess. She is something older and more powerful: a grandmother deity of wind and ocean. Her identity as a scatterer of seeds across the waters mirrors what was done to her. The goddess who was once torn apart now spreads life wherever she goes.

The cyclops element is unusual for East Asian mythology and may point to an archaic layer of storytelling that predates the organized shamanic traditions. Or it may reflect contact with maritime cultures that carried their own monster stories across the Pacific. The myth does not explain itself. It simply presents a young woman who was destroyed, reconstructed, and came back stronger. The islanders did not need the origin to make sense. They needed the goddess to arrive on time.

Appearance

Traditional Jeju shamanic art depicts her as a robust elderly woman with long, wind-swept hair. She rides waves or stands surrounded by them. She holds fans that command the wind. Stone statues of her and her entourage stand at Bokdeokgae Port in Gwideok Village, her mythological entry point. The statues include her husband, Yeongdeung Hareubang (Grandfather Yeongdeung), and two female figures identified as her daughter and her daughter-in-law.

Her visual identity fits the halmang archetype that runs through Jeju mythology: a serene-faced older woman, silver hair tied back or wrapped in a headscarf, wearing flowing hanbok. She looks like someone’s grandmother, and she controls the weather.

The Daughter and the Daughter-in-Law

The most distinctive folk belief about Yeongdeung Halmang concerns her traveling companions. She does not come alone. She brings either her daughter or her daughter-in-law, and the islanders read the weather on the first day to determine which one.

If she brought her daughter, the weather during her two-week visit will be balmy and pleasant. The wind makes the daughter’s skirt flutter in pink. The sea stays calm.

If she brought her daughter-in-law, storms lash the coast, rain comes sideways, and the sea turns dangerous.

This served as a folk weather system for the unpredictable second lunar month. But it also encoded something about Korean family dynamics. The relationship between a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law was traditionally the most fraught bond in Korean domestic life. Tension between the two women could make an entire household miserable. The Jeju islanders projected this onto the weather itself. When the grandmother goddess was happy with her companion, the world was calm. When she was not, everyone suffered.

The Ritual

The ceremony is called the Yeongdeung-gut. The representative performance takes place at Chilmeoridang shrine in Jeju City, though similar rites happen across the island. Simbang, the Jeju shamans, lead the proceedings. The sponsors are the haenyeo (female divers) and ship owners, who prepare the food and offerings.

Jeju simbang differ from mainland Korean mudang in a critical way. They do not become possessed by spirits. Instead they use sacred implements called mengdu, brass knives, bells, and divination tools believed to incarnate the spirits. The simbang channels the god through the object, not through the body. The Yeongdeung-gut is not an ecstatic trance ceremony. It is a structured negotiation between humans and a visiting deity, conducted through sacred tools by a trained specialist.

The welcome rite on the first day calls the gods, offers prayers for a good catch, and includes a three-act play to entertain the ancestral spirits. The farewell rite on the fourteenth and fifteenth days is more elaborate. It includes the Ssidrim, where millet seeds are thrown onto the sea to symbolize the sowing of abalone, conch, agar, and hijiki. A red rooster is sacrificed to ward off disasters. The simbang performs divination for individual villagers and haenyeo using millet seeds.

The ceremony ends with the Yeonggam Nori, the launching of a straw boat. The village’s senior men build a small vessel equipped with mast and rudder, load it with offerings, and send it out to sea. The boat carries the goddess home. This final act has a gendered division that reverses the rest of the ceremony. The haenyeo, all women, sponsor and prepare the ritual. The men launch the boat. The goddess and the ocean she returns to are both female, but the act of releasing her requires male hands.

The Island of Eighteen Thousand Gods

Yeongdeung Halmang sits within a pantheon so large that Jeju islanders say the island has eighteen thousand gods. Most are grandmother and grandfather spirits: Seolmundae Halmang created the island itself, Samseung Halmang governs childbirth, Jowang Halmang watches over the hearth, and Gopang Halmang brings prosperity. The preponderance of female deities reflects a matrifocal spiritual culture where women hold central religious authority. The haenyeo, who dive without breathing equipment to harvest seafood from the ocean floor, are both the economic backbone and the primary religious sponsors of coastal Jeju.

Jeju shamanism predates the introduction of Buddhism and Confucianism to Korea. Some of its mythological layers are pre-shamanic, rooted in animistic beliefs about the spirits of wind, stone, and water. Later myths show direct shamanic influence. Yeongdeung Halmang sits at the intersection. Her origin story is archaic, with its cyclopes and scattered body parts. Her ritual is organized shamanic practice, with trained simbang, sacred implements, and a calendar of prescribed actions.

The tradition has survived modernization in part because simbang Ahn Sa-in fought to preserve it starting in 1980, establishing an association of simbang to safeguard the ritual before his death in 1990. Kim Yun-su succeeded him as recognized Skill Holder in 1995.

Modern Recognition

UNESCO inscribed the Jeju Chilmeoridang Yeongdeunggut on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. It is also designated as Important Intangible Cultural Property No. 71 of Korea. The inscription recognized the ritual’s academic value as the only haenyeo-gut in Korea that combines diver beliefs with wind-goddess folk religion in a single ceremony.

The haenyeo culture itself received separate UNESCO recognition in 2016.

Bokdeokgae Port in Gwideok Village, where the goddess arrives each year, now has a dedicated park with stone statues of her entire entourage. The Yeongdeung Halmang Batdam Road in Gwideok-ri, a walking path along traditional stone field walls associated with her cult, is designated a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage site.

The goddess still arrives every second lunar month. The simbang still perform the rite. The haenyeo still sponsor the offerings. And the senior men still launch a straw boat into the sea, loaded with everything they hope the grandmother will carry away with her: the storms, the bad luck, the tension between a mother-in-law and the woman her son married.