Ask a North Korean: What superstitions and urban myths exist in North Korea?
The state has failed to fully root out folk beliefs, which range from wedding rituals to tall tales about Kim Il Sung
Joshua Kim July 4, 2022
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A mythical Chollima horse statue at Mangyongdae Children's Palace in Pyongyang | Image: Eric Lafforgue (April 29, 2010)
“Ask a North Korean” is an NK News series featuring interviews with and columns by North Korean defectors, most of whom left the DPRK within the last few years.
Readers may submit their questions for defectors by emailing ask@nknews.org and including their first name and city of residence.
Today’s question is about whether North Koreans believe in superstitions and urban legends.
Joshua Kim (a pseudonym) — who was born and raised in North Korea and lived there until he defected in 2019 — writes about how folk beliefs persist despite state opposition to anything approaching religious belief and tall tales about DPRK leaders that spread through the grapevine.
Got a question for Joshua? Email it to ask@nknews.org with your name and city. We’ll be publishing the best ones.
A North Korean propaganda poster featuring the Juche Tower | Image: Eric Lafforgue (May 20, 2009)Throughout its history, communism and its followers have often sought to suppress religion and proclaim its harms. The godfather of communist thought Karl Marx famously characterized religion as the “heart of the heartless world” and “the opium of the people,” pronouncements that have led many to view religion as an obstacle to revolution and communist thought.
But while many communist countries have sought to limit religious activities, few have sought to eliminate religion itself. That isn’t the case in North Korea, where the Kim regime has sought to completely exterminate the foundation of religion from the minds of the people through state tyranny.
In 1967, the one-man dictatorship of Kim Il Sung established the Juche ideology of self-reliance as the only ideology of the Workers’ Party of Kim. The North Korean founding leader’s son Kim Jong Il, officially designated as his successor in 1974, subsequently systemized this Juche ideology under the banner of Kimilsungism.
Through movies and plays, Kim Jong Il proclaimed the absurdity and evils of religion to the people. One of the most representative is the play “Seonghwangdang,” which depicts how one man is freed from the superstition of folk religion and comes to embrace the one true doctrine of Juche.
In North Korea’s official state ideology, Kim Il Sung is deified and lifted into the realm of the gods. Much as the first of the Ten Commandments says “You shall have no other gods before me,” the DPRK does not tolerate the belief in any gods other than the mythic, almost divine figure of Kim Il Sung.
As a result, even though the North Korean constitution guarantees freedom of religion, in reality the state punishes almost all religious activity as “anti-state” and “anti-party” in accordance with North Korea’s Ten Principles that undergird the personality cult of the country’s founder. The state imprisons and punishes those who harbor unsanctioned religious beliefs or practice their faiths in violation of these principles, the only exceptions being state-run churches of dubious authenticity.
A North Korean couple poses for photos in front of a traditional Korean home in Kaesong | Image: NK News (Sept. 20, 2018)OLD WIVES’ TALES
Despite the Kim regime’s best efforts, the staying power of traditional Korean culture, including Confucianism, means that the state has not fully eradicated the roots of superstition among North Koreans.
One example of this is the common practice of moving houses or holding wedding ceremonies on days when the lunar calendar ends in a nine or zero, which are referred to as days without evil spirits. Fortune telling often remains of great influence for assessing compatibility when choosing a partner to marry.
Another superstition relates to the North Korean practice of holding two wedding ceremonies in one day when getting married.
First, the man visits the woman’s house in the morning to hold one ceremony and greet her parents, and then he takes his bride to his own house and holds another ceremony. But when the man takes the woman home for the wedding, tradition dictates in many parts of the country that his sisters cannot see the bride.
This superstition is summed up in the use of the expression “an enemy made in heaven” to refer to the groom’s sisters, which speaks to apparent discomfort about the sisters being in the presence of their brother’s bride.
The folk belief crops up again in superstition about kimchi. Koreans have long eaten various types of kimchi, the best-known type being cabbage kimchi, and in the DPRK, it is said that an unmarried woman who eats the root of cabbage kimchi will be blessed with not having a sister-in-law when she marries.
A man handles a large snake at the Korea Central Zoo in Pyongyang on Oct. 6, 2016 | Image: NK NewsKIM FAMILY URBAN LEGENDS
Other well-known superstitions might be better characterized as urban legends.
For instance, North Koreans say that there is a book published in the country that the state has designated as a forbidden text. The book supposedly relates a prophecy that Kim Il Sung’s father, a man said to have a deep knowledge of superstitions, told his son: “Seongju (Kim Il Sung’s real name), be careful of snakes in your life. If a snake blocks your path, do not go that way.”
The relevance of this story connects to another tale about Kim Il Sung’s death that all North Koreans will have heard at least once. According to this legend, the DPRK founder did something that he should not have done before he died at Mount Myohyang in 1994.
On his way to the mountain, a serpent blocked the road, and Kim Il Sung’s bodyguard tried to kill the snake. Kim stopped his bodyguard and told the snake to move away quietly. After staying there for a moment, the snake cleared the path, which should have been a sign of danger to Kim Il Sung and led him to turn back.
According to rumors still circulating in North Korea, Kim Il Sung died because he knew about the prophecy but ignored it. Snakes are considered mysterious animals in the DPRK, and the prevailing superstition is that serious harm will befall anyone who kills a snake where they live.
Prophecy also crops up in the activities of fortune-tellers who predict people’s fates in exchange for money, away from the eyes of authorities. While North Korea has sought to control these activities, the state has been unable to completely root out the source. There are said to be cases where party officials will secretly seek out these soothsayers for insight into their careers.
Similarly, people in the DPRK will sometimes seek out shamans and healers for superstition-based medical treatment when hospitals fail to cure an illness.
All this shows that while North Korea may not have any official religion, superstitious beliefs persist among the population and cannot be ignored, despite the official dictum that citizens should have no god before Kim Il Sung.
Edited by Bryan Betts
Joshua Kim
Joshua is a pseudonym for a North Korean defector writer. He was born and raised in North Korea and lived there until he defected in 2019. He now resides in South Korea.
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