Mireuk
Also known as: Mireuk-nim
Mythological Narrative
The creator of the world in the Korean shamanic Song of Creation, who separates heaven and earth, props up the sky with copper pillars, makes stars from an extra sun and moon, and creates the first humans, before losing the world to the cheating Seokga.
Scholarly Commentary & Evolution
## The Song of Creation
In 1923 the folklorist Son Jin-tae recorded the *Changse-ga* ('Song of the Creation of the World') from the shaman Kim Ssang-dori of Hamheung in northern Korea, publishing it in 1930. It begins when heaven and earth came into being and Mireuk was born. Heaven and earth were stuck together, and Mireuk pushed the sky up like the lid of a pot and set copper pillars at the four corners of the earth to hold it. There were two suns and two moons; Mireuk took one moon to make the stars of the Big Dipper and the Southern Dipper, and one sun to make the great and small stars.
## Fire, water, and people
Mireuk wove clothes from arrowroot vines. To learn where fire and water come from, he questioned a grasshopper and a frog, who did not know, and then a mouse, who told him to strike stone and steel on one mountain and find spring water on another, and was rewarded with the right to all the rice chests in the world. Then Mireuk held a golden tray in one hand and a silver tray in the other and prayed to heaven; five insects fell on each, and they grew into the first men and women.
## The lost world
When Seokga came to claim the world, Mireuk won their first contests, but in the last, a contest of growing a flower while asleep, Seokga cheated and stole the flower from Mireuk's lap. Mireuk surrendered the world with a curse on Seokga's age: it would be full of wickedness and misery. The name Mireuk, the future Buddha Maitreya, gives this lost golden age a hope of return, a theme found in Korean messianic movements.
## A note on gender
The Korean song does not mark Mireuk's gender: it describes a giant creator and uses no gendered pronouns. English retellings, including this one, conventionally say 'he', and this entry is filed as male on that convention rather than on anything the song states.
Cross-Pantheon Parallels & Archetypes
Academic Discussion & Critique
Exchange peer-reviewed hypotheses, comparative Indo-European etymologies, and archaeological field interpretations regarding Mireuk.
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