 Koreans have had a family of distinctive native folk beliefs, which can be called “mugyo (or musok)” or, more generally, “shamanism”. Originally thought to have descended from the Siberian-Manchurian tradition, Korean shamanism is a cosmological insight that is associated with the native and most ancient world-view in Korea and also its religious ritualist practice. This native folk belief is a form of animism that worships nature and believes in spirits. In other words, this native world-view in Korea pledges alliance with spirits residing in many objects, and there is a medium (mudang) that connects the humans to such spirits. Accordingly, there are spirits who inhabit natural things such as rocks, trees, mountains, as well as heavenly spirits, earthly spirits, etc. The most well-known spirits include the Mountain Spirit (Sansin who is usually depicted as an old man with a tiger at his feet), Toksŏng, or the Recluse, and Ch’ilsŏng (the spirit of the seven stars, the Big Dipper). These spirits are believed to have the power to influence or to change the fortunes of living people and animals as well as their environment. But without exception, they are all rooted in a nomadic world-view, and they emphasized a more universal idea of Heaven, which Koreans sometimes identified as their ancestor-god; this was later transformed into a tool for consolidating political power and its ideology. Thus, Iryŏn (1206–1289), the Buddhist author of a medieval history text speaks of the Korean foundation-king of Tangun, who is believed to have been a shaman (P. Lee 1993: 6). In general, shamans are not ordained institutionally, but receive ordination directly from Heaven itself. This suggests that the world is divided into two different realms, the conditioned world and the yonder world. The two worlds or realms are mediated by shamans as medium. The supreme God, “Lord of Heaven” (Hanullim or Hwanin) plays an important function in all the myths regarding shamans. To be sure, shamanism is not philosophy per se but it certainly provided a first preliminary conceptual venue for developing abstract thinking apt for a Koreanized form of philosophical ideas. For example, the view that there must be a cause for events or phenomena that affect human life. It also suggests a rudimentary form of panpsychism, the view that everything in nature is living and has a soul or animating spirit. Finally, it shows a form of cosmogony with an anthropomorphic agent, which is another form of causal explanation of the universe.