Barriers Laid on Every Side, and the Byeoksa of Today

Human anxiety isn't so one-dimensional that it stays confined to a single line at the front gate. Misfortune always hunts for the unpredictable gap, striking in the vulnerable moment when we feel most at ease and let our guard down. So humankind went beyond the front gate as a first line of defense, and began casting a tight, elaborate net of byeoksa — doubled and tripled — across "here and there" in the radius of daily life, and even into the invisible "crossroads of time."

Beyond the individual house, people built seonghwangdang (village guardian shrines) at every mountain pass and village entrance that marked a community's boundary. These were like giant "spiritual checkpoints" planted at every boundary line, so that some unknown outside plague or chilling evil spirit could never set foot inside the safe territory of "our village." Every single stone that a passerby tossed onto the pile became, in that act, part of a vast defensive wall.

Scale this up to the boundary of the state and the capital, and you find the haetae standing guard in front of Gwanghwamun. The haetae was far more than a symbol warding off fire — it was the most sacred, supreme byeoksa guardian beast protecting the king's territory, said to unerringly sniff out every kind of evil aura, every good and evil in the human heart, every right and wrong, and gore it down.

These vast lines of defense then branched further, like blood vessels, down into the smallest and most delicate corners of the home. At the most vulnerable and sacred moment of all — a child's birth — a geumjul (sacred straw rope strung with red peppers and charcoal) was hung across the gate, physically and spiritually sealing off outsiders and microbes alike from the start. At the highest point of the house, in the gap at the tip of the roof, the ghost-face of Chiyu was carved into the eave-end roof tile, repelling misfortune falling from the sky on every side.

Humans even set up byeoksa at the crossroads of flowing time itself. When dongjinal arrived — the winter solstice, the day with the longest night of the year, when the yin energy peaks and a ghost's power is said to be at its strongest — people of old saw it not as an end but as "the true start of the new year (a lesser New Year's Day)," the point where the old year's darkness ends and the sun's light begins to lengthen again.

On this day, boiling red bean porridge and scattering it around the house — on the walls, by the earthenware jars, beside the front gate — was a massive "defensive wall in time," raised so that not a single grain of the old year's misfortune or evil spirits could cross over into the wholly new territory of the coming year. Only by filling in the new year's very first button-hole with this red line of defense could people greet the year ahead with any peace of mind.

The more advanced the world becomes, the more refined and sharp-edged the anxiety and uncertainty humans face grows. When cold, hard science fails to offer a "clear, immediate reason" for this new, fragmented anxiety of modern life, the human brain never stops inventing new forms of salvation and its own private doctrine to protect the mind's peace. As long as anxiety in the human heart never stops, new forms of byeoksa are bound to keep emerging for as long as humanity exists — it's an inevitable survival instinct.

And right now, at what we consider the very peak of science, this tens-of-thousands-of-years-old discourse of byeoksa is being reproduced, eerily perfectly, at our fingertips, inside our smartphone screens.

The seonghwangdang once built at the mountain pass, and the tightly woven geumjul once hung by the door, have become the digital barriers of an SNS block and a private account — a smartphone's way of cutting off unpleasant stimuli that shake our mental state, and excluding other people entirely from our world at the root. And the winter-solstice red bean porridge that guarded the boundary of the new year, along with the instinct to somehow make sense of another person's invisible, complicated inner self, has simply become MBTI — a modern interpretive tool, a talisman unique to our era, that slaps a label from one of sixteen frames onto the forehead of a person we find incomprehensible and unsettling, just to put our own brain at ease.

In the end, the brain of a primitive human who once felt relief watching a shaman's fire deep in the forest tens of thousands of years ago, and our own brains now tapping at a smartphone screen in the corner of a room, are vibrating at exactly the same frequency. Nothing has actually changed.

The reason we keep pasting new talismans here and there across the radius of our lives, keep drawing knife-sharp lines, keep hitting the block button — it's because this is a human survival strategy, a wish to somehow keep the ordinary, warm daily life of ourselves and the people we love from breaking apart, in the middle of this vast chaos full of unknowable fear and noise.

Byeoksa was never really a technique for driving out ghosts — it was a cultural device for handling anxiety. As the times changed, the seonghwangdang disappeared and the smartphone appeared, but humans still try to make sense of the world by drawing boundaries and giving them names. The form of byeoksa has changed, but the human strategy for enduring uncertainty hasn't changed all that much.