Category Archives: Contagious

Korean story: The Leg Lump and the Monster

Nationality: Korean
Primary Language: Korean
Age: 68
Occupation: retired, former pastor
Residence: Seoul, South Korea
Performance Date: 24 March 2024

Tags: legs, lump, monster, greed, shrewd, lie

Text:

Once upon a time, there was a man with a huge lump on his leg. One night, he went out on a walk near the forests, singing a tune along the way. A monster came by, entranced by the man’s singing, and asked the man where the singing was coming from. The man, being keen and knowledgeable of the monster’s evil nature, knew that the monster just wanted the singing ability for himself, so the man lied and said that the singing was coming from the lump. The monster then magically took the lump away from his leg and scurried off. The man was very happy since he didn’t have a lump on his leg anymore, and news of the events traveled through the neighborhood. One particularly greedy neighbor also had a lump on his leg, and hearing the story made him mad and jealous, so he sought out to do the same thing so his lump would also be removed. Thus the following night, the greedy neighbor went out to the woods, singing his own tune. The same monster arrived and again asked where the singing was coming from, and the greedy neighbor lied that it was coming from his lump, just as the other man had done. The monster, however, had already realized the other man’s trickery, so in a rage, he cursed the greedy neighbor and gave him yet another lump on his leg that burdened him further.

Context:

H. is a born and raised South Korean citizen, and has had experience with telling stories through giving sermons in his church. This was simply one of the stories he told me when I was young in Korea.

Analysis:

This is a very typical aesop one would see in a Korean storybook for children, which is probably where H. got it from. The aspects of being shrewd and able to read a situation as well as not being greedy are pretty common lessons that still hold up in modern Korean society.

Eating twelve grapes on New Year’s

Text:

Eating twelve grapes on New Year’s Eve

Minor Genre:

Holiday Celebration; Folk Magic

Context:

“On the most recent New Year’s Eve, I was at a New Year’s Eve party when someone told me that you’re supposed to eat twelve grapes right after the clock strikes midnight as a new relationship thing. I decided to do it but I accidentally ate the grapes before midnight, so when the clock struck twelve, I ate another twelve grapes. I ended up getting into a love triangle afterward and now I’m superstitious that it was because of the grapes. I had never heard of or practiced this ritual before hearing about it at the party.”

Analysis:

I have heard different variations of this tradition of eating twelve grapes on New Year’s. The tradition is of Spanish origin, and the most popular version seems to be to eat twelve grapes on New Year’s Eve to bring about twelve months of good luck. Other variations include eating the grapes while sitting under the table and eating twelve grapes in order to find a new relationship in the upcoming year. 

This ritual is an example of contagious magic; the grapes are believed to possess a fortuitous quality that is then transferred to a person upon their consumption of the fruit. While I do not necessarily believe in the magical effects of consuming grapes on New Year’s, I do think that it would make sense for a person to trace back to their success in a new year to such an action. Particularly in the informant’s situation, where being in a love triangle is a fairly rare occurrence, it makes sense from a psychological standpoint that they would blame this situation on the mistake they made in the New Year’s Eve grape ritual.

Break a Leg Ritual

Text
“So this is like the traditional ‘break a leg!’ before a performance, because I’m a theater major. But before any type of performance, instead of just saying ‘break a leg,’ the performing group that I grew up in since I was a kid to high school, we always would say ‘break ALL your legs.’ As like a way of saying ‘you’re even gonna do better than just break a leg, like you’re gonna have a phenomenal performance.’ And then we would- I don’t know how to explain this properly, but we basically lock our pinky fingers together, and then like, bump each other’s hips, each hip twice, and then like, spin, like, turn with our arms. And I was like- everyone in the group that I grew up in performing did this, um, and was incredibly superstitious about it. It was a thing of like, even if you were called to places, you would run backstage to the other side of the stage to find the other people in the cast to do it to. Because it was an incredibly, like, you HAVE to do this. Like, if not something’s gonna go wrong. Um, and so I was incredibly superstitious about it. Like if I didn’t get the chance to do it to everyone, I, like, I was not comfortable on stage and I was like ‘something’s gonna go wrong, I’m gonna mess up, just it’s not gonna be the performance I know it can be.’

And now that I’m in college and I’m not part of this performing group anymore, I still carry it on. Um, especially with this one, like, performance group I’m part of. Backstage before every show that I’ve started since freshman year doing, I teach it to like anyone who’s new in the group, and I do it with as many people in the cast as I can do, and I even like, explain the story of it to people, like ‘this is something I used to do in my past performing community that I was a part of, and we’d say break all your legs,’ and I teach it to them and then like, they go on to do it to other people in the cast and explain it to them. So it’s something I’m like carrying on and spreading to other people.”

Context
C is a current student at the University of Southern California and grew up in Palm Desert, California. She gave the context that she had been part of the same local theater group for her preteen and teenage years until coming to college. When asked to elaborate about some of the logistics of the ritual, C explained how the ritual would be done between two people in the cast, with the goal of everyone in the cast eventually doing it with everyone else. She also stressed the importance of performing the ritual as immediately before the beginning of the performance as possible. She also described how different people in her original group believe in different degrees of consequences for not performing the ritual with everyone in the cast; while some people think it is not strictly necessary, many, including C, believe that there will be “severe and immediate consequences” during the performance for not doing it with everyone. Finally, C explained that, while she is not sure when the ritual began, allegedly everyone who her director had worked with had a similar kind of ritual, which leads her to believe it stemmed from him and evolved to what it is today.

Analysis
As C acknowledged, this tradition takes a widely-known example of theater-specific performative speech and adds an additional physical element as added superstitious behavior. I would say that this ritual combines elements of homeopathic and contagious magic. By believing that not performing this ritual correctly induces bad luck, this theater group exhibits the ‘like produces like’ belief behind homeopathic magic; however, the contact required for the ritual, perhaps to ‘share luck’ amongst the cast, suggests that the connection between two cast members lingers after contact, which is characteristic of contagious magic. There also seems to be an added dimension of promoting the group’s strength and unity; by requiring everyone in the cast to perform this bad-luck-warding behavior together, it reinforces the idea that the group is stronger together. Ultimately, I think this ritual is a perfect example of the multiplicity and variation that is often said to be a core component of folklore, and I would be interested to see if/how this ritual changes after its introduction to USC theater spaces.

Evil Eye

Text: The informant started wearing evil eye jewelry, accessories, etc. during middle school. All the evil eye items they possess were gifted to them by family and, later, friends. They like to gift people evil eye items now. The informant always wears the evil eye because they see it as a barrier between them and any bad energy or intentions that could come their way.

Context: The informant grew up with both their parents always having an evil eye charm on them. Before they were gifted their first evil eye, their dad told them a story about his jealous brother, and how every time he would tell the brother about his accomplishments the evil eye’s blue color would fade, which he took as a sign that the evil eye was protecting him from the jealousy of his brother.

Analysis: Evil eye is widely used as a form of spiritual protection from negative energies. This folkloric belief is an example of contagious magic, since possessing an evil eye charm or having it on your person is what is believed to protect you from the negative spirits. Belief in the evil eye could be a reflection of values like spirituality and protection.

Wishing on eyelashes

Text:

HT reports that he uses eyelashes to make wishes.

“When I find an eyelash on my cheek, I swipe it up with my finger, make a wish, and blow on it.”

When asked what the rules are for this ritual, HT responded with the following:

“You have to keep the wish to yourself. You have to blow it off your finger, it won’t work if it’s still stuck to you. My dad told me that there’s a game you have to play as well, if you notice someone else has lost an eyelash, you hold it between your pointer and your thumb and ask them to guess which finger it’s stuck to. If they get it right, then they get to make a wish. If they get it wrong, then you get to make a wish. But, you have to make a wish for that person, not for yourself. I don’t really do it that way, I just make a wish with the eyelash.”

When asked where he picked up the ritual, HT responded:

“From my parents. When there was an eyelash on my cheek, my mom would say that I get to make a wish, so I just kinda made the connection from there. Other than my dad explaining the game you can play with it, no one really explained it beyond that. I used to kind of pick my eyes for eyelashes, but my mom made me stop that by telling me I wouldn’t get to make a wish if I forced it that way.”

When asked what he likes to wish for and if there are any limits to the kinds of wishes you can make, HT responded:

“I can’t tell you what I wished for cause then it won’t come true. But no, I don’t think there’s any limit to what you can wish for. I guess it is just an eyelash, so you probably can’t ask for anything big, like winning the lottery or something. I don’t know, I just wish for little things here and there.”

Context:

HT is a twenty-four year old man, a recent college graduate, who is currently living at home with his parents. This the response that he gave when he asked to tell me about any good luck charms that he has.

Analysis:

By making a wish and blowing an eyelash away, HT engages in a form of sympathetic magic, where the act of performing a ritualistic action is believed to influence real-world outcomes. In one sense, the practice is a form of homeopathic magic, where the act of blowing the eyelash, which has been imbued with the wish, can be put out into the universe, a magic act that takes the wish from the mind of an individual and into the physical world. The size of the eyelash also seems to have some correlation with the size of the wish that one can make. In another sense, this is a form of contagious magic, wherein a smaller part of his body, his eyelash, will be able to affect the world and he affected in return. Since the eyelash was once physically connected to him, the magic that happens with it/to it will impact him as well. HT’s father’s explanation of the game that involves the eyelashes adds another layer to the ritual’s complexity. The game involves a form of reciprocity, where the eyelash has the opportunity to grant a wish to another person. However, this wish has limits, as it still must pertain to the person that the eyelash came from. It’s possible that the invention of this rule could be a modern adaptation, a way of taking the sting out of someone losing their wish by losing the game. The game elevates the ritual of making wishes with eyelashes by infusing it with interactive elements (albeit voluntry ones, by HT’s admission) and reinforcing its communal significance within the group.