Rains, Heat, and Poison: The Folklore of the Fifth Lunar Month

Yeah , if we had a video , sean , we should do it . Start listen . Just call it a podcast . A podcast , yeah , It doesn't sound appealing . Yeah , we're both sober . By the way , it's the afternoon And and today we're going to continue our series on the folk months , the monthly folk traditions . I was close . Ok , yeah , i'm paying attention .

The biggest traditional festivals takes place in this month , a lot of other things , of course . The weather starts to really change in this month . This is when the monsoon start , so , traditionally , koreans looked at the fifth month as being a pretty important time of year , so this was one of those big , big monthly events for them .

So I'll chat a little bit about these , these things today .

Now , one of the most important things in the past that happened on the fifth month was called Dan Oh , dan Oh . So it's kind of like if you have a buddy named Dan , you can say hey , dan Oh . So it's not Dan Oh , it's Dan Oh Yeah .

So the uneven numbered months all have generally not always , but generally have important days . So the one one , the first day of the first month , that's New Year's Day , of course . Then you have the third day of the third month fifth of the fifth month was just Dan Oh , and then the seventh , the seventh , ninth and ninth , things like that .

So there's always something major on these days , these double uneven numbered days . So Dan Oh was the fifth day of the fifth month . It was also called the Chungjul in some of the traditions , but also Suratna . These are other names for it in the past , but today people just generally say Dan Oh . These older names are not acknowledged anymore by most people .

Extremely important . Even though it's still acknowledged , it's not really widely celebrated in any way . People will talk about it . It does fall on the calendars . The calendars will mention it , but nothing much is really done . The day just passes .

People just go to work , kids go to school , it's just nothing really happens , except in different places , and we'll get to that a little bit later . So some of the things that people did do in the past is that they would dress up for Dan Oh . They put on their Dan Oh best And this was called the Dan Oh Bim .

More like a festive clothing , people would give gifts , especially fans . Now , it was kind of a vast tradition .

There were various types and various types of fans , i should say , and there's something that kind of symbolized the Korean people in the past So much , so much so that the Chinese called the people of Goryeo , the Goryeo dynasty , fan-bearers , even in winter , because the Koreans loved fans so much that the Chinese were like oh , they even have fans in the wintertime

, they love their fans so much So Dan Oh was a time of year when people would actually gift fans to one another And , like I said , so many different types . An interesting thing that was done on Dan Oh was washing . It was the one time a year no , not the one time a year , joking , but it was a special time of year to get washed .

People would wash their faces , and usually in water that was infused with iris flowers , and so people would wash their faces . Women especially would wash their hair at this time . This is still done today , you can hear . But a lot of people will have different festivals and whatnot on the Dan Oh And they'll wash their hair in iris infused water .

Have you seen paintings like that ?

people will get stuff that was new , and this was important for people because , for commoners especially , getting new things was very rare . It wasn't , it was just a few times a year . You can get anything that was new , afford it or have the resources to make it in or whatever it would be . So , yeah , it was .

it was something that was quite important to get something new , like a new piece of clothing or something , or a new fan or whatever on . or new car , new car Be good , today , get a new car . She didn't cheat him . traditional wrestling wrestling was really popular .

I asked my wife is a dick because her , her grandfather in in their small village in Jundju , their farming community They she was huge in that in that community And I asked her if her grandfather did , did she them wrestling on dino ? And she's like he did it every day .

So now one of the big things about dino today Yeah , there are still festivals . There are different places where festivals are done . Probably the most important and the most widely recognized takes place in Gangneung , on the east coast .

So in Gangneung there's the Gangneung Danoje and so the Dano Festival , and it's such a wide festival that it's recognized by the Korean government . Of course , it's listed as an important intangible cultural treasure . It's number 13 on the list and it's recognized by UNESCO .

It's one of the masterpieces of the world and intangible cultural heritage of humanity , which is a fairly long list of intangible cultural assets , oral and intangible cultural assets Globally . Korea has 22 entries on that list .

So every time I hear someone say it's like , oh , that tradition died , japan destroyed our traditions . It's like , well , japan destroyed your tradition during the occupation . They certainly attempted in a lot of ways , but if they were successful , then these traditions wouldn't exist anymore . There would be 22 of them officially recognized by UNESCO .

So stop saying that Japan destroyed your traditions and recognize that your traditions survived and start following them again .

Jew meaning booze , so the God's booze that's offered to two literary spirits And , interestingly , the event begins on the fifth day of the fourth lunar month , so all only one month before , and it concludes on the seventh day of the fifth month , so it's more than a month long than the entire festival itself .

All the festivities , preparations , everything It's just it goes through a little bit longer than 30 days . Come a few of the key things that happen There's the Yangshun J , which is a welcoming right to you , welcoming the spirits .

That occurs on the third day of the fifth month , and then there's actually the Dano Goode , which is the shamanic right that concludes the festival . That's the pretty much at the very end . It's such a huge events , so many things happens . There's so much folklore that I don't know .

Maybe in the future I'll do an episode just on that , maybe I'll save it for the fifth month next year . There's just so much involved So just don't have time to talk about all of it now , but it's a huge event .

So if anyone happens to be in Korea between if you're not sure what the lunar months , when they fall you can check Google or get in touch with us , find the calendars . We can help you out with that . It's now done for this year , it's finished .

But if you happen to be in Korea in the future and you think you'll be in Korea around June , which is usually when the fifth lunar month starts , you can go to Gangneung on the East Coast And you can attend one of the largest cultural events in Korea following traditions of Dano which date back centuries . So something that you can do .

Fun tourism stuff too , that just never gets any promotion very little promotion at all , unfortunately . So there are a couple other things that kind of happened at this time in the past . Especially there was the idea and I talked about this before the idea of making tiger figurines out of mugwort or soup , or soup .

They're called the , the , the A-Ho and or the soup . What ? Yeah , you said the same thing last time because it's it's in the warding off evil episode , right , i think it's that episode where I first talked about it .

They often would have been put around certain places , sometimes given to palace scholars , and women would wear them in their hair And they were designed , of course , to purify , because mugwort was considered a purifier in folk tradition . It's also mugwort . It's also delicious , Yeah , so yeah , and it was used to ward off evil .

So I talked about this in the warning off evil episode now , one of our earliest episodes , i think , yeah , within the first 20 or 30 episodes , i believe . Another thing is the , the Dano Bujok . So this is the amulets , of course , that we talked about , and several did we do . Yeah , we did . We did a whole episode on Bujok Bujok .

Yeah , it's called Lucky Charms , yes , yeah , so go back and have a listen . I'm pretty sure maybe in that episode I talked about the Dano Bujok as well . So the key thing about making the amulets for Dano is that it was believed that the Yang Yin Yang , so Yang energy , was strong , so it was a good day to make them .

They're often made by monks and people would go to the temples to get them . They'd hang them over gates or like on their kitchen walls and things like that , and they were considered to be good , good deterrents of Japqui , which are the collect miscellaneous ghosts and that can bring misfortune and sickness .

So it hang these , these Dano Bujok , around their homes to ward off these ghosts . So quite , quite interesting And yeah , so go back and listen to the Lucky Charms episode , where we talk about Bujok .

One that happened around Dano or the beginning part of the month anyway , beginning part of the at some point throughout the fifth month , but normally near the beginning , was the endu chanshin . Now , endu are mountain cherry , so they call them . They grow in trees and they're quite tiny .

They're not perfectly round like the more well-known cherries that have a little bit of poisonous . No , they're . They're lightly sweet , they're delicious , they're fantastic . They have a fairly large pit , but but they're . You see , you just pop them in your mouth and you eat around the pit and then spit you know , spit the pits out . So endu fantastic .

We brought them home Just feast wash them and feasted on them , watching TV , oh so living in the country is really cool .

So so this is another example of how , in the past , the offering of things to ancestral spirits was done far more often than it is today . It was just a couple of days a year , which is even now that's only kind of moving more to once a year .

Now we're used to seems to stop , seems to be the more just almost like the last , the only time left for a lot of people .

I find a lot more people are starting to travel during Salah , so they're going to leave it , they're leaving the winter here and they're going to , they're going to Southeast Asia and stuff , and so they're not following the traditions anymore .

you know , i think the dragon , the Eddie Murphy's dragon , was supposed to be kind of like a god , a family god , and Guardian Mushu , mushu That was his name , mushu Yeah . Anyway , that's how , from up from my brain , this is . this is my little comparison . This is how I'm able to envision it . Right , right .

Another couple of things linked to to link to Dano , was the , something called the , the sonang jai , and sonang is the , the village , to the Larry guardian , guardian spirit , and so this was a right . The sonang jai jai means a ritual or right . This would often , more often , especially in some regions , be done , done on John .

Well , they put them John , will , they put on my favorite time of year , but there are regional differences . In some places would do these rituals on Dano or around Dano And , yeah , they'd give prayers and offerings to the , to the sonang , the , to Larry spirit of a village , for the village's welfare .

It's good fortune , safety , good harvests , a good catch if it's a fishing village . And then they'd also do so , saying they , they try to predict the future and but especially predict the fortunes of the villages themselves . So this was often done And I'm sure there's still some smaller villages around the country that still do stuff like this .

And so another interesting thing , just to finish up on Dano rock fights , rock fights , stone fights .

the way it's described in one record is that the stones would fall like rain , and some records even say that people died during these , these stone fights , these games .

So so , yeah , so these are some of the traditions that are directly linked to Dano . What a , what a festivity that I wish would be more widely celebrated more . But , alas , something else that was quite common throughout the fifth month was the idea of the odok . Now , odok means the five poisons , and so Dano was essentially .

The belief was it was the onset of summer , and then this meant , of course , it was the onset of potentially dangerous animals . So the five poisons were snakes , spiders , scorpions , centipedes which appear heavily as monsters in in Korean folktales and frogs .

So one of the ways that they would try to avoid these five poisons coming into the home is that people had hang herbs over their gates , herbs that had some sort of like a sense of some sort that would .

That was believed to keep the the five poisons away , and related to that , the idea of , also around this time , hanging a tiger bone over a gate was also believed to ward off evil generally , not necessarily the odok , but evil in general .

Now , it's interesting that odok is linked to the beginning of the fifth lunar month And one of the odok is snakes , because , as Joe mentioned at the beginning of the episode , yeah , i've had an interesting experience on one of our , one of our , the very last Walk Among the Graves tour for this season . So on the traditional calendar , this fell on the .

This tour fell on the sixth day of the fifth lunar month , which was , of course , the the day after Dano . Oh no , you know what ? No , i'm sorry , it was the seventh day of the of the fifth lunar month , not the sixth day .

So two days after Dano , which still the beginning of around that time when it was believed that these five poisons would start to appear .

So now the Walk Among the Graves tour of course goes up into a cemetery And I think I've mentioned before , cemeteries are up on hillsides in Korea And they're usually they're usually , you know , not grown over , they're , they're cleared away of too many trees and bushes and things like that .

But there are sections where trails do tend to overgrow , especially in summer . So I initially did not plan on running the the tour through June , but the demand was so high that I decided to say , okay , shag it , i'll do it anyway .

So I ran it through June And the very last booked tour for the season was on June 24 , which was the seventh day of the fifth lunar month . Five people on on the tour , yeah , and and so the and I'll say hi to him . I think I remember all it's . It was Natalia and Jessica and Jessica or Jennifer , i think .

Jessica and Lisa , abby and son , so and me leading the group , and as we're coming away from one clear area of graves , you have to turn down in through the bushes a little bit . And it's , it's not too bad , it's still . It's still quite , quite wide . I guess it's not fully grown over yet , but it started to grow over And I stepped through first .

I said , okay , we're gonna walk through here , be careful , it's starting to grow over a little bit . I stepped forward with my left foot And I felt something weird under my foot And I glanced down and I saw a massive snake flicking around everywhere And I didn't jump back , because that's often a bad thing to do .

So I I glanced down and I saw that it was . it's tail was flicking And I was stepping on its head So it was under my foot , safely under under my foot , and then I moved my arm back .

The sun was on the tour And son peaked over my shoulder , my right shoulder , and he could see the snake And I think he saw it after I lifted it , because I moved back a bit and I lifted my foot and I slowly and I let it , i moved like I moved back , lifted my foot , not slowly , rather quickly moved it back and then the snake spun around and took off

And I got a fairly good look at its patterns , even though it was moving pretty quickly . It was very big , it was longer than my arm and about as fat around as my wrist .

So pretty , pretty , big , pretty fat snake and through the patterns it looked like it may have been a Mushi , which is a very venomous pit viper , one of the most venomous snakes in Korea . You may hear a myth that there are no venomous snakes in Korea . Yeah , that's there , there are , there are , there are .

There's at least four different types that I know of . Might even be even more , but the Mamushi is one of the the most venomous and people die from Mamushi bites every year in Korea A small number , a few , a few people every year .

What happens when a Mamushi bites you is that your , i think your , your , your tendons or your cartilage or something , or your , maybe your bones , that something begins to liquefy and yeah , and then you , you , eventually , if you know you , either you , if it , if it's near it , goes to your brain , your heart or whatever . You guess that that's what kills you .

But the poison goes through your body pretty rough . So we saw that right on the right just after Dano . Yeah , the this large snake on the tour that I stepped on . Now , i've seen lots of snakes on the hiking tours . I've seen lots of snakes just privately in Korea on my own , and , yeah , that's the closest I've ever been to one stepping .

I've been very close to them , just next to me , but this is the largest one I've ever seen . The largest one I've ever seen .

If it was a Mamushi , it was the first one I've saw a Mamushi and , yeah , the first first time I've ever actually stepped on one , and someone pointed out it was a good thing that I stepped on its head and not its tail , because it may have spun back . I'm not sure if it would have been able to get through .

I wear fairly thick hiking almost like a cargo cargo pants . Don't know if it would have been able to puncture that maybe . But yeah , it would have been an interesting descent down to get me to a hospital . And so there you go . So I've decided that I'm not gonna run the tour next summer or next season .

I'm not gonna run the tour that late , i'm just gonna keep it , finish it at the end of May . So , yeah , that was the adventure we had last week , but we continued , no one was hurt and and just make it . I'll make a quick note . I knew what to do when I saw it .

And safety whenever the tours designed their safety precautions in place , guides should always have this in mind and I knew what to do and I avoided getting hurt and I and no one else got hurt . Everything was completely safe after that . So the snakes slithered out , the snake was also fine , and so win , win , win , win for everyone .

So don't be worried about snakes and stuff .

You come on a tour , guides are prepared , okay , and now another key thing , speaking of things getting getting poisonous yeah , the poisonous summer heat starts around the fifth lunar month , because it's also the summer solstice , generally happens around the the beginning of the lunar month , so so in Korean it's called haji , and it began this year on the fourth day

of the on sorry , on June 21st , of course , on the Gregorian calendar , which was the fourth day of the of the fifth month . Around this time , traditionally , people would have prepared for floods because the rains are coming . This is a big flooding see . Korea still suffers from floods every every summer .

Last year was awful 10 years , so 10 11 years ago was absolutely terrible , so hopefully this year won't be too bad so there's there's a time a year when people would prepare for it , so farmers would often , around this time , perform , perform something called the QJ , and the QJ was at different times of year , but it was the .

It was a right for abundant but non-destructive rains , of course , because farmers need rains , but they don't need so much of it that it floods or destroys their crops .

So and this would especially be done if the summer rains hadn't started yet , by by haji , by the beginning of of haji , the summer solstice , if there haven't been any really heavy rains yet , they would perform the QJ to pray for , for healthy rains .

Another thing of speaking of rain , there was also something which is interesting called the Taejong Wu , and the Taejong Wu was Taejong's . Rain in Taejong means Taejong means the king , king Taejong , and rain , not the rain of a king , but rain , the falling of rain .

So there are a couple of different versions of this , including one that that discusses the King Taejong of Sheila , but the most popular version of this involves Taejong of Chosun , so the third king of the Chosun dynasty , the father of King Sejong , the famous , the famous King Sejong . And Joe , you talk about him a bit on your by the bridge , right ?

Yeah , we don't have to go into the story . No spoilers .

Of course , and on his deathbed He said he was going to ask the , the different gods , especially the , the , the the auction , the Jade Emperor , the okwang , if to bring rains to the peninsula . And then Taejong died on the , the 10th day of the fifth month , and on the day he died It rained . Finally , the drought .

The drought finished , the drought was done and it started to rain on the day he died , like he said he was going to do . That's the legend . And then it said that on the anniversary of Taejong's death , every year It , it rains , it rains every year . Now , coincidentally , joe , today is the 10th day of the fifth month .

There's something called the sosa , and the sosa is the 11th Jolgi , and the Jolgi , again mentioned several times , are the Solar terms , so different events throughout the traditional calendar That follow the Sun and not the moon , and this is why Korea does not have a purely lunar calendar . This is a misnomer .

Korea has a , has a solo , a , a loony solar calendar , or solely lunar calendar . It's mixed , it's mixed together , it's not a purely lunar calendar . So , and the Jolgi , you know , is evidence of that .

So , on the 20th day of the fifth lunar month , with which will be July 20 , july 7th this year , this is sosa , and it was believed that this Jolgi , the solar term , was the beginning of the real summer temperatures and Humidity . Things start to get really rotten around that time of time of year . So sosa means the small heat and the .

This was the the beginning of summers , summers , rain , summers , ravages , and It pre it happens before the day saw , which is the grand heat when things get really shitty . So , and also right around this time is believed that the rainy season wasn't full swing . Things were . Things were getting Quite crazy around this time .

So that's coming on July 7th on The Gregorian calendar , sosa , the 11th Jolgi solar term . And Finally , this one last thing to mention is something I've talked about before . I really like this , joe . I'm sure you like these as well . It's the , the turbo and , yeah , the first of the sample here we go .

These days is more chicken soup by some gay time , and Now I'm starting to see other Other dishes being brought in . I can't think of them off the top of my head , but you know , some people are just More vegetarian or something .

So our A fire energy became very powerful During Chobok and it would , it could kind of diminish our metal energy and Dog meat especially was believed to have , was to be high in metal energy .

So By eating dog meat on the sample , the sorry , the well , the Chobok , but but all three sambok , the Chobok It would balance out our , our metal , our metal , and it would bring our metal energies back and we'd be balanced . So these are the folk medicinal traditions linked to these .

These days of yeah , the , the hot days of The hottest , traditionally the hottest days of the year in Korean , on the Korean calendar .

Going to cooler places , mm-hmm , they're not as hot Like valleys or springs . Natural springs was very popular , water still is . Koreans love Like . If you ask a Korean , where , where are you going for summer vacation , they'll often say , kegel , we're going to a valley . Mmm , yeah , very good , so common where .

Yeah , i mean , it's not something we'd say , i think in Canada anyway , we wouldn't say , we wouldn't say like I'm going to a valley for , for , for my holiday . Yeah , korean . Koreans have this deep tradition related to the Chobok , the Sambok , generally Going to valleys , and I love it .

I love it when they say oh , we're going to a valley , we're going to a Valley to sell , to get away from the heat and the heather , you know , to celebrate summer and stuff like that . My wife and daughter are going to a valley this afternoon . We should get some from school . Well , that sounds great .

I love this place because it's so . It encapsulates quirky Korea , because it's this random artwork , sculptures in the forest , and There's a , there's a Buddhist temple and they're just all these Cafes and restaurants and hiking shops that that cater . You know , you know that the Korean restaurant , the resort restaurants I have of , i love Korean resort restaurants .

I'm not talking about stuff that cages to foreigners . It's almost stuff that cares to Koreans , because you tend to get more unique stuff , like there was one guy that was like he was turning a half of a hog on a spit and rubbing it with soju as it was going around . You know , nice , nice Stuff like that , oh , fun stuff .

Traveling around Korea was just fascinating , like my early years in Korea , traveling around and seeing stuff like that . You're witnessing folk traditions happening and traditions generally . I just love it , i love it . I love it . So things like this are great .

So , yeah , and going to springs as well natural springs and stuff traditionally were important because in the past , koreans believed that spring water could cure any skin diseases or bad skin and stuff like that . So doing this on the Cho-Bok was something that was quite common .

Going to a natural spring or something and washing your face in it to clear your skin Ah , folk belief . Ah . And again , offerings to ancestral spirits was done on Cho-Bok . They'd give wheat and rice , offer wheat and rice to ancestral spirits during Cho-Bok .

So another example of how this was such an important thing to Korean tradition in the past the idea of the ancestor , the ancestral spirits extremely , extremely important .

He's just like conked out from the heat . So bok-je , where these were rituals or rites performed on farms , you'd give rice offerings to gods for the growth of healthy crops . So this was usually done in the past on Cho-Bok .

So Sharon's a PhD candidate , she's involved in cultural studies , she's also and her focus is on K-pop really and it's a little bit broader than that , i think , but that's a big part of it . So she did a lot of studies in K-pop fandom and whatnot and talked about the dark side of it . That's what she's kind of interested in that type of thing .

Create episode that was one of our top five downloaded episodes last year . So if you haven't listened to that , go back and have a listen . And she's doing something really interesting again . The reason she's back in Korea this year . She just gave a presentation in Daegu . I know what it is , but I think we talked about it .

We might have her on again to talk about her current presentation in Daegu . Quite interesting . But this time at this conference in Daegu , sharon was joined by her friend , jess Van Damme , and Jess did the dark side of Soul Tour with Sharon . So Sharon's now done it twice . But Jess also came on the Walk Among the Graves tour on Dano , oh Yeah .

So Jess left us a review for the dark side of Soul Tour on TripAdvisor and Jess said wonderful , spooky tour of Soul . Definitely recommend this tour As it takes you to parts of Soul you may not necessarily see or provide stories You may not necessarily know . Does not disappoint .

So thank you , jess And thank you Sharon , good to see you again And , yeah , hope to see you both again in Korea sometime in the future .

They're visiting Korea and their thing is they go to comic shops when they go overseas , to go travel , and they found out about our tour from the comic book shop .

We keep our shipping costs down by going for the slowest method , like if you're ordering from , like the method you do if you order from AliExpress or something this is so it's not going to be Amazon type of speed . It's going to take like maybe like in the old days Remember in the old days when they had those what was it called ?

home shopping shows and stuff like that , and they always say wait four to six weeks for delivery . That's kind of what we're doing . It's going to take four to six weeks to deliver . So plan ahead of time And then the fun is the wait . But you will get your place , but you will get your books if you order .

I mean , if you want it done , given to you faster , contact us , we could do faster shipping . It's just really pricey .

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If you don't , it's okay , you can cancel it anytime . That's right . Forty-six weeks for delivery called 1-800 . All right , anyway . 1-800 , darksideofsoul , darksideofsoul Call . Now Operators are standing by . That was fun . Telemercial , was that what it called ? Infomercial , infomercial , gosh , you live away from a country for so long it's like I totally forgot .

I've not seen an infomercial in maybe 25 years , so it's like forgot the word . Well , if you enjoy infomercials , i hope you enjoy And I hope you enjoy the fifth month of the lunar year .