A Study on the cultural sense for woman’s death through a Korean Shaman myths

This study aims to read the meaning of life and death culturally anew, focusing on the narrative of women’s death in Shaman myths. In shaman myths, death and resurrection events after death occur only in women (goddess). There is always death in the life of a woman who lives as a family member of a daughter, wife, and mother. Women’s death situations and the process of solving problems vary from myth to myth. However, women in myths are performing a common task in that they face a death incident while playing a role as a family member. In addition, the common narrative structure of ‘life → death → life’ can be confirmed in the process of a woman’s life leading to death and a series of events leading to another life after death. However, there is always a middle term between ‘non-life’ and ‘non-death’ in the narrative from life to death and the narrative from death to life. From this, a new cultural reading of life/death could be explored. As a result of analyzing the narrative structure and narrative method of women’s death, the women of myths are resolving the contradiction between living and dead life. Such death is not a tragic event that signifies the end of life, but shows the continuity of life in that it becomes an immortal existence that never dies as death. In this respect, the death of a woman in shaman myths is understood as a sacred event that leads to belief in the immortality of a divine being. Women face death as a mechanism to resolve the deficiencies given to life. Through this, you can read the myth of enabling filling with emptiness. It is natural for women in shaman myths to become the protagonists of cultural creation in that they rule the human world by traversing the lives of this and the afterlife. However, the cultural meaning and logic of the myths inherent in the death of women have not received much attention because of the male god’s activities shown in the myths. Death functions as an inevitable narrative device that heralds the emergence of a new goddess, and contributes to reading a new culture in that it causes an expansion of the perception of life/death.