I Have Come on a Lonely Path: Memoir of a Shaman

by Keum-hwa Kim, E. Ce Miller (editor), Hye-Kyoung Kim

From the time Kim Keum-Hwa was a young girl living in a small village in Hwanghae Province in North Korea, she had an intuition about the life she would lead…

At just seventeen-years-old, Kim became an initiated mudang, a Korean shaman, and immediately embarked on a path that would define the course of her life. Studying the tradition of Korean Shamanism under the often-harsh tutelage of her maternal grandmother—a woman who walked the path of a shaman herself—Kim became an expert in ancient teachings, dedicated to offering guidance, teaching the wisdom of her ancestors, and healing all who sought her help in mind, body, and spirit.

After migrating to South Korea during the Korean War, Kim’s Shamanic rituals and teachings carried her through decades of social, cultural, and economic transitions of modern Korea—including the increasing persecution of shamans and their traditions. Kim’s journey was equal parts grueling and divine, lonely and abundant, earning her the designation of Korea’s Intangible Cultural Property in the 1980s and, eventually, recognition as the most famous Korean shaman of modern times.

Kim’s memoir, I Have Come on a Lonely Memoir of a Shaman, tells the inspiring, heart-wrenching, and sometimes harrowing story of one woman called to do what few traverse the path between the spirit world and the human one.

Now available for the first time in English after Kim’s death with new chapters by her successor Kim Hye-Kyoung, I Have Come on a Lonely Path shares the remarkable story with a broader audience, inviting readers into a world of ancient wisdom and spiritual traditions that might have otherwise been lost to time.

290 pages, Paperback

Published April 29, 2024

Reviews

[chaeklore · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s fascinating and devastating to me that our own corean people, at large, still doesn’t recognize 무교 mugyo/musok traditions as ancestral.

I speak for myself when I type this- many, not all, coreans even among our corean diaspora are knee deep assimilated to white supremacy and religious colonialism that they have forgotten who we are and where we come from. I can’t imagine having to fear death as one practiced mugyo during Japanese colonialism and having to perform for the empire as a puppet state, but isn’t it time for us to keep and pass down our corean traditions and knowledge to our descendants?

I love my people as much and as critical I am about the way things are in our corean society at large. We can blame capitalism, colonialism, and all the isms for how our relationships to one another is the way it is due to them, but we cannot deny that we are losing our roots in being corean. What does it mean to be corean if we don’t know our history, our language, our traditions, and ignore each other’s burden? What does it mean when we care more about how we’re perceived by others? Why have we not centered care and understanding as the root of our existence? Mugyo teaches this. I find the difference between Hawaiian’s teachings of mana, aloha, and humility and our corean’s lack of value of our character embarrassing.

Manshin Kim Keum Hwa’s memoir is not just about mugyo and what it means to be a 무당 shaman, but how coreans are still discriminated against for paying respects to their ancestors to put it simply. It is a blessing that this book is translated for all to experience. And I hope more coreans can still wake up from this ongoing trauma of surviving under the empire. We cannot survive nor thrive when we don’t know who we are.

[Krystsina Radzevich · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish there were more books like this translated into English.