Celestial Gumiho

The gumiho (구미호, «nine-tailed fox») is among the best-known creatures of Korean folklore: a fox that, after several centuries of life, gains the power to take human shape. The oldest Western collections already circle it without using that name: James Gale, in 1913, opens his chapter on the fox by recalling that Orientals count it among the long-lived creatures that «attain to special states of spiritual refinement», and Homer Hulbert, in 1906, notes that the country is full of stories of people who turned out to be foxes in human form, and that the fox is the most detested animal in Korea. This entry describes the end of that road: the thousand-year-old fox that has kept its yeouiju (여의주) intact, the pearl that concentrates its energy, and that aspires to ascend rather than to hunt. It is the only one of its forms to have renounced predation altogether, and that is why the catalogue separates it from the earlier phases — not because the sources number stages.

In this superior form, the gumiho has renounced tearing out the liver or heart of its victims, the most feared trait of the creature in folk tales, and sustains its existence through vital energy obtained without killing. The yeouiju pearl is at once its source of power and its weak point: tradition holds that whoever manages to swallow it obtains knowledge of heaven, earth and people, and that losing it condemns the fox. It is attributed with mastery of illusion and perfect transformation, extreme longevity and wisdom accumulated over centuries. Linked to the mountains of Korea, it embodies the possibility of redemption within a traditionally malevolent figure, a motif that recent folklore and Korean popular culture have explored with growing sympathy.

The central symbol of the gumiho are its nine tails and the yeouiju pearl, emblem of its spiritual power. In the classic tales the creature is usually female and adopts the form of a woman of great beauty to approach men, so that the revelation of its true nature (a tail that peeks out, the reflection in the water, the instinct of dogs) is a recurring narrative resource. Compared to the Japanese kitsune, more ambivalent, and the Chinese huli-jing, the Korean gumiho was traditionally perceived as a threat that had to be discovered and expelled; only the late versions admit its purification. As a celestial aspect of the archetype, this figure condenses the aspiration to overcome the predatory nature through discipline and renunciation, and constitutes the pinnacle of the life cycle of the nine-tailed fox in Korean tradition.