The Mul Gwisin

The records distinguished her early. Where the cheonyeo gwisin belonged to the doorway and the rural road, this one belonged to the standing water. The Joseon mortuary tradition recognised a separate category for those who died by drowning, and the term entered the village dialects without consensus. Mul gwisin, in the central provinces. Mulgwi, in the contractions of the southern coasts. Iksa-honryeong, in the more formal accounts kept by the magistrates’ offices. The archive uses mul gwisin. It is the term the fishermen still use.

It was held that the soul of one who drowned could not pass. The reasons given varied. Some said the water itself was the obstacle, that what had been taken in could not be released. Some said the body, slow to surface, kept the soul tethered to the place of its end. The records of the older shamans give a different account. They held that the soul had not finished its breath, and that until the breath was finished it remained in the cold water, listening, waiting for the air to be returned.

The water did not return the air freely.

On her appearance

She was described as standing in the shallows, or seated at the edge of a still pool. The hair was wet, falling forward over the face, and was not bound. The married women of the village tied their hair, but the water had loosened what had been bound, and what the water had loosened the rite had not corrected.

The dress was white. Not the bridal hanbok, never the bridal one, but the sobok of the unburied. The cloth was wet and had taken on the colour the water had given it. In the older sources the cloth was fresh; in the newer it was algae and silt, and the hem had begun to part. The face, where surviving accounts permitted it, was pale beyond pallor. A faint blue, in the lips and along the jaw, where the cold had stayed.

The accounts of the fishermen of the eastern coast, recorded in the village registers of Donghae and Samcheok, agree that she did not approach from the shore. She was already in the water when the boat came near her. She had been there, the older sources insist, since the death.

On the substitution

It was held that she could not pass alone.

It is recorded that another life, taken in the same water, in the same posture, with the same final inhalation unfinished, would release the soul that had been held. The soul that had been held became free. The new soul became mul gwisin. The chain, in some lakes, was traced through generations.

The substitution was not freely sought. The accounts agree on this. She drew the substitute toward the water by a means the records did not always describe. Some said the voice of one already known to the listener. Some said an image rising in the surface, of a woman or a child standing where the standing was impossible. The fishermen who crossed her water and returned reported that the worst of it was not the voice. The worst of it was that the voice already knew them.

On the counter-rite

The Joseon village dealt with her through the mudang.

The shaman performed the gut at the water’s edge in the late summer, when the rivers ran low and the body that had been lost might yet be returned. White cloth was laid on the shoreline. Salt was scattered into the water, three times, in three directions, with a phrase the older shamans did not write down. A bronze hand-mirror was set face down on the cloth. The mirror was for the soul, that it might see itself once more and remember the shape it had worn before the water took it.

A name was called. The name was not the listener’s. The name was the drowned’s, spoken aloud, with the year of the death and the village of the lineage if either could be recovered. If neither could be recovered, the rite proceeded with the name Mu-myeong, the nameless, and a paper figure was laid beside the mirror. The figure stood for the body the family had not been permitted to bring back.

The cloth was not retrieved that evening. The mirror was left where the rite had set it. The salt was left to dissolve into the shallows. The villagers returned without speaking, by a path that did not cross the water again before sundown, and they did not turn at the sound of any voice that called from behind.

The rite did not always work. The accounts admit this. There were waters in which the chain was held to be so long, so old, that no single gut could resolve it, and the lakes were marked, in the older maps, with a single character that the magistrates were instructed not to translate.

The archive holds no position on what the character means. The archive observes only that the lakes so marked were not used for fishing, that no village was permitted to draw drinking water from them, and that the elderly, when asked about the marking, would say only that the water was not lonely, and would not be drawn into saying more.