진천 금한동의 천제와 축문

Abstract

This paper aims to understand the characteristics of the village ritual for heavenly deity in Geumhandong Jincheon through the analysis of its traditional written prayer. The prayer as text reflects primarily the relationship between deity and villagers. And the recitation of the prayer in ritual place functions as prayer acts which realize the relationship between the two. This is why I pay attention to the written prayer for village ritual. There is a debate about how to understand the ritual characteristics of Geumhandongs village rite. Until recently, the controversy about whether mountain-river ritual or heavenly god ritual has not been solved. The very heart of the matter which caused the controversy is nothing less than the prayer text. In fact, Geumhandongs prayer text has dual characteristics: ritual for mountain-river and ritual for heavenly deity. We can see clearly the mountain-river deity in opening part of the prayer text. The reader of pryer on the behalf of all villagers calls officially gods name, mountain-river in the beginning. That is why most scholars looked upon Geumhandongs ritual as a kind of ritual for mountain-river. But uncalled heavenly deity appears as a divine benefactor in the main body of the prayer text. In other words, it is just the heavenly deity who receives sacrificial offerings and listens to plea for assistance. Villagers call formally mountain-river deity at first, and then they petition only heavenly deity for blessing and protection. This incongruity between first and second part of the prayer text provoked the controversy about ritual characteristics of Geumhandong. But to villagers, theological consistency seems to be insignificant. Rather, it might be very important that they live in consistent order of daily life. We need to regard the matter as not an either/or, but instead a both/and approach. From this viewpoint, we can tackle the situational discordance of village rituals.