North Korea’s war on superstition backfires as fortune-telling goes underground

Despite the North Korean authorities’ intensified crackdown on superstitious practices, the fortune-telling market is spreading in ever more covert forms. Rather than suppressing demand, harsher punishments appear to be pushing the market underground, creating a paradox in which enforcement produces the very outcome it seeks to prevent.

A Daily NK source in South Pyongan province said Wednesday that “even as the party congress got underway and law enforcement officers including security agents and political security officials worked reinforced shifts around the clock across the country, superstitious practices among the North Korean people never stopped.”

In South Pyongan province, nighttime patrols and inspections by enforcement agencies expanded significantly in connection with the party congress. Because the congress is the most important political event in North Korea’s calendar — setting the country’s five-year policy direction — social controls in each region were tightened considerably under the pretext that not a single incident could be permitted to occur.

Superstition as a threat to socialist values

Superstitious practices are among the behaviors most frequently targeted by the North Korean authorities. Particularly as the regime has doubled down on ideological control over its people and placed increasing emphasis on ideological unity and preparedness, authorities have come to view superstition as an antisocialist element at odds with the socialist way of life — as well as a behavior that paralyzes people’s revolutionary consciousness and stirs up social disorder.

Even so, superstitious practices have not declined. If anything, they have become more active in the shadows. The source said the North Korean people hold such a strong belief that ritual protection against evil spirits and bad fortune — so-called aengmaegi and bangto — are critical to determining the luck of the coming year that they continue these practices through ever more covert means to avoid detection.

This is not merely anecdotal. Food offerings, red beans, and coins discarded after protection rituals have been turning up one after another in alleys and at intersections throughout Pyongsong city. Some of the abandoned items have included banknotes ranging from 1,000 North Korean won (approximately $0.11) to 50,000 North Korean won (approximately $5.60) — all of them, according to the source, traces of superstitious activity.

“No one touches the food or money left on the street like that, even if they are starving for lack of rice,” the source said. “There is a widely held belief that eating food discarded after a ritual or picking up and spending that money will transfer the bad luck to yourself.”

In response, security officials in Pyongsong have been making the rounds at neighborhood watch unit meetings, urging people to report immediately any traces of superstitious practices found on the streets. They have also repeatedly warned people that anyone caught in the act faces severe legal punishment, the source said.

The source said that “even knowing that punishments could be far heavier during a major political event like the party congress, the belief that the year’s fortune can only be set right by properly performing protection rituals was so deeply ingrained that superstitious practices continued.” The source added that traces of such practices “kept appearing from after the party congress through the Great Full Moon Festival,” referring to the first full moon of the lunar new year, known as Daeboreum.

North Korea’s criminal law, Article 291, stipulates that a person who engages in superstitious practices shall be sentenced to a labor discipline camp. Habitual offenders or those whose superstitious acts produce grave results face up to five years of reform through labor. In particularly serious cases, the sentence may range from five to 10 years of reform through labor.

Articles 23 and 29 of the Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Act explicitly prohibit the dissemination of superstition. Viewing, distributing, or reproducing publications that propagate superstition is banned, and violations can in some cases be punishable by death.

Even enforcers seek out fortune tellers

Despite this web of laws targeting superstitious practices, the behavior has not diminished. It has continued steadily and actively in the shadows.

“Superstitious practices are inseparable from the daily lives of the North Korean people, so the harder the crackdown, the more deeply and covertly they spread rather than disappearing,” the source said. “Even the people conducting the crackdowns and their families are so caught up in visiting fortune tellers and engaging in superstitious practices out of anxiety about the future that enforcement has not had much effect.”

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