KOREAN RELIGION. The earliest religious practice of the peoples of the Korean peninsula is a form of Siberian shamanism, or musok in Korean. Neolithic archaeological excavations on the peninsula have produced pottery with geometric designs identical to those found in regions of Siberia, Manchuria, and Mongolia, suggesting that Koreans of the Neolithic period (beginning around 4000 BCE) can be traced back to the same ethnic stock. The label shamanism as the native religion of Korea has encountered some definitional problems, however. Mircea Eliade supplied the essential definition of shamanism as the technique of ecstasy, or the separation of the soul from the body to journey to heaven or to the underworld. Modern Korean shamans do not undergo such flights of the soul. Instead, they become possessed by spirits, who "descend" into the shaman and speak through her. Ethnographic data contravenes the definitional problem, however, by attesting to...