Tsk tsk… bring me that worry of yours

The peach-blossom energy said to draw people to you effortlessly. Tradition holds that popularity and gossip arrive together with it.

The energy of the relay-station horse that never stands still. Once read as a wanderer's fate, today it is read as the luck of expansion and travel.

A folk cycle in which misfortune is said to visit each zodiac sign for three years out of every nine — a period for caution rather than fear.

The two 'unpaired' slots in the sixty-year cycle. Tradition reads them as zones of hollowness and scattered rewards — and also of spiritual depth.

A warmth that seeps out rather than shines out. Where dohwasal is a flower in full bloom, hongyeomsal is an ember glowing under ash.

The sal of an 'open ghost gate' — read in folklore as spirit-sensitivity, and in modern terms as deep intuition and a finely tuned nervous system.

The flow of money in and out of a life. Tradition's twist: fortune is measured not by what arrives but by the bowl that holds it.

The idea that ancestors' accumulated virtue shelters their descendants. Koreans say of a lucky escape: 'the ancestors pushed from behind.'

The traditional idea that a small misfortune pays off a larger one in advance. It is also a distinctly Korean way of steadying the heart after something bad happens.

A drawing or inscription carried or posted in hopes of blocking misfortune and drawing fortune. Tradition drew them in red cinnabar on yellow gwaehwangji paper.

Words believed to be delivered by a spirit through a shaman's mouth during a gut or reading. Its mark is a plain, casual tone conveying an oracle or the words of the dead.

The shamanic idea that a spirit settles into a chosen person, opening the path to becoming a shaman. It is told alongside mubyeong, an unexplained affliction, and the naerim-gut that resolves it.