한국 일생의례의 성격 규명과 주술성

Abstract

Despite the clear category differences between the family rites, which are the four ceremonial occasions of coming of age, wedding, funeral and ancestral rites, and the rites of passage and lifelong rites, their usages have been mixed together today with no clear concept distinction. In the East Asia cultures, they found the origin of all creatures in “energy” with no concrete form and understood man’s life and death as a process of energy being gradually gathered and then scattered with certain time intervals. That is why, the lifelong rites as rites of passage even include the rite for birth before actual birth of a child and the religious ceremony after one’s death. The cognitive lifelong rites emphasize their roles as the rites to confirm an individual’s newfound social status and, at the same time, have the character of norm as the practical ethics of innateness of human life, reward for the ancestors’ boon, family, and society. Thus the family rites do not include upbringing and longevity rites. Characterized by “the wrong application of sympathetic principle(similarity and contagion), direct manipulation of transcendent power, relief of psychological anxiety about the unknown world, and implementation of dispelling bad luck and inviting good luck,” magic is a technology and perceptive system to help people search for more feasible solutions instead of succuming to reality in the middle of inevitable conflicts when faced with limitations they cannot resolve with simple knowledge or technological capacity but still have to pursue. When there was the shortage of human knowledge and understanding of nature and society, they inserted all sorts of magical acts in the lifelong rites informally in order to pass turning points in life safely. The gap between the individual and social goals pursued through the lifelong rites and the limited human abilities represents the degree of conflicting situations they face when carrying out rites and the degree of supernatural magical elements being inserted in rites. Thus the traditional society witnessed a very high degree of magical elements being inserted in the rites for birth and upbringing and a relatively high degree of them being inserted in wedding and funeral rites compared with the modern society with highly advanced medicine.