Princess Bari

The song can run for hours. A drum holds a low pulse under it, paper banners hang unmoving in the incense smoke, and somewhere past midnight the shaman arrives at the part where the box goes into the water. On the floor of a rented ritual hall in Seoul a family sits with their knees drawn up, listening to the story of a girl their dead relative is now depending on to find the way out.

She was three days old when it happened. Her mother had already given the king six daughters, each of them raised in silk, and when the queen fell pregnant a seventh time she dreamed a dream so favourable that the court began preparing for a boy. The shamans who sing this part have a set of long, ornate images for those pregnancies that turn up almost word for word from the northern provinces down to the southwest coast, one of the oldest fixed things in the whole tradition. Then the child came out a girl. The king looked at her and ordered her thrown away, and in the telling he gives her the only name she will ever have out of the verb for discarding. In several versions the servants have to do it two or three times, because animals keep finding the infant and keeping her warm.

Something always catches her. In the Seoul tradition it is the Buddha, who arrives, looks down at the child, and observes with what sounds a great deal like regret that he cannot take a woman as a disciple, then hands her to an elderly childless couple who are glad of the karma. Elsewhere it is a mountain god, or a stork.

Fifteen or so years later her parents are dying. The illness has one cure, medicinal water from the Western Heaven, and it has to be fetched. The king and queen ask the six daughters they kept. All six say no. That refusal is the hinge of the entire myth and the shamans do not rush it.

So the girl they threw out is sent for, and she goes. She puts on a man’s robes and walks west. In one of the oldest recorded tellings, taken down from a shaman near Seoul in the 1930s, she covers three thousand leagues before the Buddha stops her on the road, tells her he can see perfectly well that she is a woman, and asks whether she really intends to walk three thousand more. She answers that she will keep walking if it kills her. He gives her a silk flower, and when she throws it at the ocean in her way the water turns to ground under her feet. Further on she comes to a fortress of thorn and steel packed with the imprisoned dead, hundreds of millions of them, and she opens it.

The spring itself has a keeper. Around Seoul and Gyeonggi he is called Mujangseung, and he too identifies her in the first exchange. His price is not a riddle or a fight. He wants her labour and he wants sons, and she stays and gives him both, as many as twelve in some versions, before he lets her leave with the water and the resurrection flowers. Nobody in the story ever apologises to her.

She comes home to a funeral. The procession is already moving, the bier is on the road, and she goes into it against the flow, gets the lids off the coffins and puts the flowers on the bodies and the water to their mouths. Her parents sit up.

What she is given for this, in most versions, is godhood. She becomes the deity who conducts souls, or the patron the shamans call their ancestress, or in some tellings the goddess of the Big Dipper. Her sons are set in the sky as the Seven Stars, and Mujangseung is put to work guarding the king of the underworld, which is one way of settling a marriage. Roughly a hundred versions have been written down by scholars, about half of them only since 1997, and as of the late 1990s every single known version was sung exclusively at rites for the dead: jinogwi-gut in Seoul, ogu-gut on the east coast, ssitgim-gut in the southwest. In Seoul itself she is the only shamanic narrative still performed at all.

The regions do not agree about her. The east coast singers stretch the journey out longest and make the water’s guardian an exiled god who cannot return to heaven until he has sons, which gives his demand a motive. The Jeolla tellings are lean and skip the disguise entirely. Jeju has never known her. And two versions collected in South Hamgyong go somewhere else altogether: there she does not earn her way into the divine realm but is let in out of pity, steals the flowers, runs, and then dies at the end of her own story without becoming anything at all, while the mother she raised dies again shortly after. Her funerary office in that corner of the tradition belongs to a different goddess, Cheongjeong-gaksi.

Her power is narrow and absolute. She can cross the boundary the dead cross and come back, and she can carry things across it in both directions, which is precisely why a family pays for her song. She knows the route because she walked it as a living girl with no divine parentage and no weapon, which makes her a more reassuring escort than a god who has never had to ask directions. Her limits are the same shape. She cannot compel anyone. Every gate on the road opens because she agrees to a price, and the prices are steep and are always extracted from her body or her time. She was raised by whoever picked her up, dressed as a man because a woman travelling alone was a problem, and bought the cure with nine or twelve years of somebody else’s household labour. The myth affirms filial piety, which is the most Confucian virtue there is, and it does so by having a discarded daughter outperform six kept ones and then walk out on her husband to go and save her father. There is evidence that King Jeongjo had the song performed for the soul of his own father, Prince Sado, who died shut in a rice chest in 1762, and Seoul shamans say the older version of the text was thick with court vocabulary.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Princess Bari?

Princess Bari is a Korean goddess who guides the souls of the dead, and the patron deity claimed by Korean shamans. She began as a human princess, the seventh daughter of a king who threw her away at birth for not being a son. Her story is sung as a shamanic narrative song in funerary rituals across the Korean peninsula.

Why was Princess Bari abandoned?

She was abandoned because she was a girl. Her mother had already borne six daughters, and an auspicious dream during the seventh pregnancy convinced the royal court that a son was finally coming. When the baby turned out to be another daughter, the king ordered her discarded and named her Bari, from the Korean verb meaning “to throw away”.

What did Princess Bari have to do to get the Water of Life?

She had to walk to the Western Heaven in a man’s clothing, cross an ocean, and then meet the guardian of the spring, called Mujangseung in the Seoul tradition. He demanded years of her labour and a number of sons, up to twelve depending on the version, before releasing the medicinal water and the flowers of resurrection to her.

In what ritual is the Princess Bari story performed?

It is performed only at rites for the dead. Those go by different names by region: jinogwi-gut around Seoul, ogu-gut on the east coast, and ssitgim-gut in the southwest. Bari is the goddess who leads the departing soul, so the song reassures the bereaved that their relative is in competent hands.

Does Princess Bari always become a goddess?

No. In most of the roughly one hundred recorded versions she is granted divinity after resurrecting her parents, but two versions collected in South Hamgyong in the north end very differently. There she is admitted to the divine realm out of mercy rather than merit, steals the resurrection flowers, and dies at the close of the story without being deified at all.

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