Imugi

Rain fell on the district for a day and a night, and it was not supposed to. The barley had been curling brown in the fields below the temple, the ponds were dropping, and then the cloud came in low over the pine ridges and the drought broke. The next morning a messenger of the Heavenly Emperor was standing on the flagstones of the courtyard, asking politely for the culprit. The monk pointed at the pear tree by the gate. Lightning came down and split it open, the smell of scorched sapwood went through the courtyard, and the messenger returned to the sky, satisfied. Under the monk’s writing desk, coiled tight in the dark, the actual culprit kept very still.

The creature under the desk was an imugi, which is the Korean word for a dragon that has not happened yet. Korea had its own vocabulary for these things before the Chinese character for dragon flattened all of it: mireu was the native word, close kin to the old word for water and to the word for what is coming, because a dragon in the record is almost always a sign of something about to arrive. Around mireu clustered the others, imugi and isimi and yeongno and kkwangcheori and bari, and they have nearly vanished now. The imugi was the one everybody knew. Imagined as an enormous gureongi, the common thick-bodied rat snake of the fields, grown huge and old in a deep pool, it is a serpent with a dragon’s abilities and a dragon’s ambition, kept out of the sky by paperwork. A thousand years in cold water, and it goes up.

It is a creature best described by what it is missing. It has no horns. It has no legs, or four short broad ones at most, and the old Korean carvers and painters knew a whole ladder of these half-made dragons: the tadpole-shaped thing with ears, then the gyoryong, snake-bodied and ten feet long with four flat feet, then the hornless iryong, a soft-faced young dragon with a lengthening tail and horns that have only just started, and then the coiled dragon, still on the ground, waiting. Only at the top of the ladder does the finished thing fly. Above all, the imugi has no yeouiju, the wish-granting jewel that an eastern dragon must hold to ascend. That jewel began as a small ridged crest on the dragon’s head, and Buddhism prised it loose from the body and made it an object, which meant that from then on it was something a dragon could fail to have.

So the imugi waits in the water, and the water is the whole of its life: cold, still, deeper than a rope will sound, ringed with frogs that go quiet when the coils shift. Villages knew which pools were occupied. A pond that never dried in August was suspicious. The one beside the temple at Jakgap was occupied by Imok, and for years he lay in it quietly and helped the teaching along, which is a strange job description for a serpent and one the record gives without further comment.

Iryeon, compiling the Samguk Yusa around 1281, tells how he got there. The monk Boyang was coming home from China when the Dragon King of the West Sea drew him down into the sea palace, had him recite the sutras, gave him a robe of gold silk, and sent his own son Imok back with him to serve. Found the temple at Jakgap, the Dragon King said, and you will be safe from the bandits, and before many years a king who honours the law will come and settle the three kingdoms. Boyang came to the valley, saw magpies pecking at bare ground, remembered that jakgap means the magpie ridge, dug where they were pecking, and turned up buried brick without number, enough to raise the pagoda that had stood there before. Imok took the little pond by the wall. Then the drought came, and the crops began to burn in the fields, and Boyang told him to make it rain, and he did, and the whole district had enough. The Heavenly Emperor took the view that this was not his office to fill, and sent to have him killed. Imok ran to the monk. The monk put him under the desk. And when the sky’s envoy came into the courtyard demanding that Imok be handed over, Boyang pointed at the pear tree, because the two characters of the serpent’s name can also be read as pear tree, and the envoy took the joke at face value and blasted it. The tree came down broken. The dragon crawled out and stroked it, and it stood up alive again. Some say it was the monk’s chanting that did it. Years later the tree finally fell, and someone cut the wood into a latch mallet and kept it in the refectory, with letters carved into the handle.

That story is doing two things at once, folding an old water-spirit into a Buddhist temple’s staff, and it is unusually kind to its imugi. Most are not. The rain matters because everything mattered on rain: the whole country prayed at pools it believed a dragon’s son was lying in, painted dragons on cloth and set them on altars, made dragons out of clay and had shamans beg at them, and left the evidence all over the map in place names, Yongso and Yongyeon and Yongdam and Yongchu, the dragon pool and the dragon pond and the dragon hollow. When an imugi at last completed its long discipline and went up, the clouds were supposed to gather and enormous rain to fall, and whatever river or pond was left behind took the dragon’s name and got the offerings.

The ones that never go up are another matter, and Korean has proverbs for them. An imugi that failed to become a dragon has nothing left but spite. An imugi that failed to become a dragon breaks the levee. There is a tale, kept in the oral archive, of a scholar so poor his wife had to weave cloth to buy grain, who sold the cloth and then found a crowd in the road beating a great serpent to death. He asked them to leave it alone. They told him to mind his business. He handed over every coin he had for their drink instead, and went home with no grain at all. Later, ruined and pretending to be a geomancer with a borrowed compass, sitting in a stranger’s funeral house with a bowl of rice he did not deserve, he gave half of it to a shabby child who had come in at the door. The child made him the finest geomancer in the province and rich beyond counting, and then told him what it was. It was the serpent. It had not become a dragon, because the crowd broke their promise and came back for it. It had come to settle the debt, it could do nothing more for him, and it left.

That is the gentle version. In the others the imugi comes back for the people who stopped it, and the country is full of the marks. There is a rock in Cheongdo split clean in two, and the story is that a furious imugi lashed it with its tail on the way out. In the Gyeongsang provinces they spoke of the kkwangcheori, a snake that failed to become a dragon and can fly anyway, and when it flies the sky fills with fire, and the rain will not come, and the fields dry up. In the old puppet plays the isimi is simply a monster that eats people and livestock without discrimination. And in the tales about villages that used to give a girl to the water every year, the thing in the water is named as a snake, an isimi, a dragon, an imugi, without much interest in the distinction. Whatever is down there is owed a body.

Everything the imugi can do, it can do already. It is vast, it is strong, it is patient past the point where patience means anything, it lives in the water and it can make the water come out of the sky, and given a thousand quiet years it will be a god. What it does not have is permission. Rain belongs to heaven, and heaven audits. The one imugi in the record who used the power well was hunted for it within the day, and survived only because a monk was willing to lie to an angel on his behalf. And the thousand years can be undone in an afternoon by any farmer with a stick and a grudge, because the creature cannot rise unless people leave it alone, and people are not reliable. Mostly, it waits. The dragon pools are still on the maps, every one of them a place where something either got out of the water or did not.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an imugi in Korean mythology?

An imugi is a giant hornless serpent of Korean folklore, understood as a proto-dragon: a creature that has the abilities of a dragon but has not yet been allowed to become one. It was pictured as a gureongi, the thick rat snake of the Korean countryside, grown enormous in a deep pool. The name belongs to a set of old native Korean dragon words, alongside mireu, isimi, yeongno and kkwangcheori, most of which have now fallen out of use.

How does an imugi become a dragon?

Tradition says an imugi that survives a thousand years in deep water completes its long discipline, becomes a true dragon and ascends with cloud and torrential rain. It must also have the yeouiju, the wish-granting jewel that an eastern dragon needs in order to rise. Korean tales add a further condition that has nothing to do with the creature itself: humans must help it, or at the very least not interfere, because an imugi caught and beaten by villagers stays an imugi.

Are imugi good or evil?

Both, depending on the story. The imugi Imok in the Samguk Yusa breaks heaven’s law to end a drought and save a district’s crops, and one folk tale has an imugi repay a poor scholar who once saved its life by making him rich. But the proverbs are blunt about the rest, saying an imugi that failed to become a dragon has nothing left but spite and will break the levee, and in tales of human sacrifice the creature in the water that demands a girl each year is often an imugi.

What is the story of Imok in the Samguk Yusa?

Imok is the son of the Dragon King of the West Sea, sent home with the monk Boyang to serve him, and he lives in the pond beside Boyang’s temple. During a drought Boyang asks him to make rain, and he does, and the Heavenly Emperor sends an envoy to kill him for exceeding his authority. Boyang hides Imok under his desk and points instead at a pear tree, whose name is written with the same characters as Imok’s, and the envoy destroys the tree by lightning. The serpent then strokes the broken tree back to life.

What is the difference between an imugi and a yong?

A yong is a completed Korean dragon: horned, jewelled, able to fly and to command water as a matter of right. An imugi has the same nature but none of the standing, and in art it is shown at the half-made stages, hornless, sometimes with four short legs, coiled on the ground rather than in the clouds. The short version is that a dragon that cannot ascend remains an imugi in a pond.

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