4 ideas
Eulhwa, a village mudang, welcomes back her son Yongsul, who was sent away as a child and returns a Protestant convert carrying a Bible and praying to Jesus. She treats his faith as possession by a foreign spirit and tries to drive it out with ritual, while he sees her gods as demons to be cast out. The confrontation between them turns violent and ends in the son's death.
When two cosmologies collide, each side reads the other through its own categories rather than on its own terms. The shaman sees Christianity as one more spirit that has taken hold of her son and must be exorcised. The convert sees shamanism as demon worship that must be cast out. Because each side has already explained the other away, argument between them is impossible. Only force or withdrawal remains, which is why the conflict escalates instead of resolving.
The kut is a sequenced ritual with set stages. The mudang invokes the spirits, is possessed by the dead and speaks as them, lets them voice their grievances, feeds and appeases them, and finally sends them off. It gives a community a public, embodied way to settle unfinished business with the dead: the bereaved hear the deceased speak and see the soul released. It works as therapy and as social mediation as much as belief.
The novel shows shamanism losing ground because the new religion arrives with schools, literacy, and modern prestige, not because it is proven false. Christianity in turn is not shown as liberating: it breaks a family and leaves ruin behind. Refusing to name a winner makes the reader see religious change as social replacement rather than a victory of truth.