From the time Kim Keum-Hwa was a young girl living in a small village in Hwanghae Province in North Korea, she had an intuition about the life she would lead…At just seventeen-years-old, Kim became an initiated mudang, a Korean shaman, and immediately embarked on a path that would define the course of her life. Studying the tradition of Korean Shamanism under the often-harsh tutelage of her maternal grandmother—a woman who walked the path of a shaman herself—Kim became an expert in ancient teachings, dedicated to offering guidance, teaching the wisdom of her ancestors, and healing all who sought her help in mind, body, and spirit.

After migrating to South Korea during the Korean War, Kim’s Shamanic rituals and teachings carried her through decades of social, cultural, and economic transitions of modern Korea—including the increasing persecution of shamans and their traditions. Kim’s journey was equal parts grueling and divine, lonely and abundant, earning her the designation of Korea’s Intangible Cultural Property in the 1980s and, eventually, recognition as the most famous Korean shaman of modern times.

Kim’s memoir, I Have Come on a Lonely Path: Memoir of a Shaman, tells the inspiring, heart-wrenching, and sometimes harrowing story of one woman called to do what few are: traverse the path between the spirit world and the human one. Now available for the first time in English after Kim’s death with new chapters by her successor Kim Hye-Kyoung, I Have Come on a Lonely Pathshares the remarkable story with a broader audience, inviting readers into a world of ancient wisdom and spiritual traditions that might have otherwise been lost to time.

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