Suhohon

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In Meng funerary customs, suhohon (Menghean: 수호혼 / 守護魂), sometimes translated as guardian souls, are spirits of the deceased which have been imbued into inanimate objects. This is customarily done by mixing in the cremated ashes of the deceased in a process known as "affixing." According to this custom, this allows the spirit of the deceased to inhabit the object in question, bringing it good fortune.

History

Beliefs in guardian spirits similar to suhohon stretch back far into ancient Menghean history. The Meng river valley and Haedong civilizations were both animistic, believing in the existence of innumerable nature spirits inhabiting individual trees, rocks, and rivers. Some surviving oracle bones from what is now Gangwŏn Province include passages referring to swords inhabited by deceased kings, and as late as the 11th century CE some tribes in the upper Chŏnsan mountains would enchant a newly enthroned chieftain's sword by running it through the heart of a young girl chosen as a sacrifice.

The first written reference to a suhohon as it exists in modern practice dates to the Five States and Seven Fiefdoms period. According to a well-known account later recorded by the poet Suk Yŏng-su, when Chŏn Yŏm led a Tae incursion into the State of Batu in 447 CE, he sent an advance guard to kidnap Wu Han, a famous swordsmith who lived in a village south of the Jade River. Wu hid in a farmhouse outside the village to evade capture, but when he returned to his village, he saw that his manor had been burned down and his family murdered. The villagers cremated his wife, Ri Yŏ-jin, but told Wu Han to flee rather than stay to mourn and risk capture. The famed swordsmith left the following morning, carrying a box of his wife's ashes with him; when he arrived in Daegok, his first action after appearing before the Batu court was to rush to the city's famous blast furnace. There, declaring that his ancestral shrine was in ruins, he forged his wife's ashes into a finely crafted sword so that he could carry her spirit with him for the rest of his life. If this account is true, it may represent the first definitively recorded forging of a carbon steel weapon in Septentrion.

The sword made using Ri Yŏ-jin's ashes was said to be remarkably light and well-balanced, as though her graceful soul inhabited it and helped it dance in the wielder's hand. Wu Han named the sword bŏdŭlgaji, or "willow branch," and its design is said to have inspired the later design of the willow leaf saber (as a Batu sword from the 5th century, it was most likely straight-edged with a broad blade). The original sword, which was interred with Wu Han's ashes at his temple in Daegok, has been lost to history, but it regularly resurfaced in subsequent legends.

Wu Han's "willow sword" remained a unique weapon until the early Sŭng dynasty, when it became increasingly common for generals, warriors, and poets to request that some portion of their ashes be used as carbon in the forging of a sword. The emergence of "soul affixing" as a widespread practice may have been linked to the growing popularity of romanticized accounts of the Five States and Seven Fiefdoms, including the story of Wu Han. By this time steel production was fairly widespread in Menghe, and the practice of adding 2-4% carbon to iron was understood to produce stronger (if more brittle) blades. As in the legend of Ri Yŏ-jin, Menghean Sindoists also believed that the soul of the deceased would lend its unique qualities to the resulting weapon; thus, a sword with the suhohon of a brave warrior would be particularly sturdy, and a sword with the suhohon of a famous general would inspire courage from troops commanded by its bearer. The obsession with affixed blades reached a fever pitch during the militaristic Yi dynasty, culminating in the legend of Ryu Gyŏng-ho, a 15th-century swordsmith who is said to have orchestrated a string of high-profile murders in order to gather ashes for his masterpiece blades. Not all suhohon, however, were affixed to weapons; the poet I Baek requested that his ashes be buried under a freshly planted tree, whose wood would be used to make brushes imbued with his spirit.

Military use of soul-affixed weapons dwindled during the Myŏn dynasty, as did the quality of Menghean steel more broadly. The belief in suhohon did, however, gradually diffuse further into civilian life, with some governors and city administrators requesting that a portion of their ashes be mixed into the mortar for the foundations of key buildings.

Revival

The destroyer Chŏnghwa

The practice of affixing suhohon to steel objects had virtually died out by the time the Greater Menghean Empire was formed, though it was well-known in the historical record, with affixed swords serving as valuable collector's items. It was only in 1935 that the practice came back into use, and only then through an improvisation.

In that year, Meng Sŏng-chŏl, a mid-ranking naval engineer at the Sunju shipyard, lost his 19-year-old adopted daughter Ŭn-hye to tuberculosis. His parents refused to house the ashes on its altar, as Ŭn-hye was not part of his family, and the city temple refused to store them, as her bloodline was unknown and many suspected she was the child of a prostitute. Distraught over what to do, but recalling what he had read about Yi dynasty swords, Sŏng-chŏl entered the Sunju shipyard at night and placed the box in a structural compartment within the recently laid keel of the destroyer Chŏnghwa. A group of trusted subordinates enlisted for the task then welded a steel plate over the top. Although this was not a "true" affixing, as the ashes were not mixed into the metal, Meng Sŏng-chŏl nevertheless believed that Ŭn-hye's soul would come to rest within the ship.

When they learned of the incident, the shipyard's managers were furious at this breach of discipline, but the move was so energetically praised by the shipyard's workers that the head foreman relented and allowed the ashes to remain in place. The Southern Times carried a highly supportive feature article later in the week, portraying Meng Sŏng-chŏl as a hero who had blessed the ship with supernatural power. In the months that followed, prominent people and retired Navy officers mailed in thousands of requests to have their own ashes entombed in a ship upon their passing, but the Ministry of the Navy remained opposed to the idea on the basis that it excessively elevated the individual.

Commissioned into service in 1937, the destroyer Chŏnghwa gained a reputation for unusually good luck during the Pan-Septentrion War. At the Battle of the Portcullia Strait, her helmsman reported that he had abruptly lost control of the wheel as the ship lurched out of control to port; seconds later, a 14-inch shell from the HMS Indefatigable soared over the ship and plunged into the water right where she would have been on a direct course. Two years later, while she was escorting a convoy along the coast of Khalistan, a Tyrannian dive-bomber dropped a 500-pound bomb straight through her quarterdeck, where it jammed into the hull next to a row of stored depth charges but failed to detonate. She was the only ship to emerge completely unscathed from the Battle of Baumsburg Bay, and in 1943 she survived a submarine attack that sank one destroyer and two escort ships as well as most of the nearby convoy. After Menghe's surrender, the still-intact Chŏnghwa was confined to her dock in Anchŏn, and in 1951 the Allied Occupation Authority ordered that she be scrapped. According to a popular urban legend, the laborers conscripted to dismantle her experienced vivid hallucinations while cutting into the metal, and had nightmares that they were chopping up a girl with a butcher knife; the work was only finished when Sylvan soldiers were brought in and told to shoot any laborer who tried to leave the worksite. A verified report sent by a Sylvan naval officer overseeing the scrapping states that when the keel was uncovered, there was no sign of a funerary box in any of the compartments, possibly indicating that a superstitious worker had smuggled it out of the ship at night and hidden it somewhere in the city.

Cruiser Han Chŏl-wu

Interest in the affixment of suhohon to warships revived again in 1971, when Han Chŏl-wu, who had held the post of Admiral of the First Fleet at the end of the Pan-Septentrion War, passed away, revealing in his will that he wanted a portion of his ashes mixed into the keel of the upcoming Project 032 Cruiser. Some figures in the Menghean People's Communist Party opposed the move, criticizing it as feudal superstition, but the Navy leadership agreed, and the completed vessel was commissioned with Han Chŏl-wu as its name. The next two cruisers in its class were also commissioned with deceased naval officers' ashes infused into the first steel components laid, and accordingly bore their names.

Ryŏ Ho-jun and his anti-traditionalist faction outlawed the practice of affixing suhohon in 1981, though by this time the last cruiser in the Han Chŏl-wu class had already been laid down with ashes in the keel. No other ships laid down under the Democratic People's Republic of Menghe bore suhohon.

Socialist Republic of Menghe

Choe Sŭng-min's nationalist government, which came to power in the 1987 Decembrist Revolution, lifted the prohibition on Naval suhohon in 1989. The Emil-si class destroyers, the Yŏngbok-class frigates, and the Chungsŏng-class cruisers from the third hull onward were all laid down with ashes mixed into their keels, as were all warships of frigate size and above from that point onward.

Current naval traditions

To accommodate the new tradition, the Menghean Navy developed a series of customs and traditions surrounding the use of suhohon on warships. While alive, a person can apply to have a portion of their ashes infused into a warship after their death, in much the same way that they can register as an organ donor. A Sindo priest then reviews the individual's spirit and their worldly contributions in a special temple ceremony, to determine whether they are worthy of the role, and a religious council attached to the Navy narrows down the list of annual applications. With eight warships in this size range laid down in 2017, a relatively busy year, affixment remains a rare privilege. Since 1991, both men and women have had their ashes selected, with women accounting for 63% of all affixings as of 2018.

Only a portion of the deceased's ashes are taken for the ceremony, with the majority staying at a family shrine. Sindo and Chŏndo beliefs hold that the soul of the departed can visit any repository of their ashes, regardless of size, and a permanent urn allows living relatives to make offerings and communicate with the departed spirit. In the presence of a Sindo priest, the taken ashes are mixed into the molten steel which will be used in the casting of the keel. The laying down of the keel on the slipway is also conducted ceremonially in the presence of a priest. The actual content of ash-related impurities in the steel is virtually negligible, with typically no more than 100 grams of ash, primarily carbon, added.

In place of the chapel present on many Western warships, Menghean warships laid down after 1991 have a small shrine room. In addition to tablets devoted to the guardian gods of the sea and of victory, there is a tablet devoted to the individual who donated their ashes to the ship, and sometimes personal mementos donated by family members. Sailors can pray there before a storm or battle, and according to beliefs, the suhohon will guide the ship to safety or improve its performance in combat. The practice is familiar to Sindo, Chŏndo, and Buddhist followers, who worship a variety of minor spirits and deities; Shahidist and other monotheistic crew members are expected to conduct certain rites as a sign of respect, but are otherwise allowed to pray independently.

Once a ship affixed with a suhohon is retired from Navy service, as the Han Chŏl-wu was in 2013, the suhohon must be removed from the ship in order to avoid a repeat of the Chŏnghwa incident. This is done as part of the decommissioning ceremony. A Sindo priest informs the spirit that the time has come to scrap the ship and persuades it to leave, then places a magical seal on the hull to prevent the spirit from coming back. Similar seals are posted around the perimeter of the shipyard until the breaking-up process is complete. Sindo funerary tradition holds that the spirit can cross between the mortal and spirit worlds through any repository of its ashes, and therefore as long as a larger urn is kept at its ancestral shrine, it will not become a wandering gwisin.

Contrast with suhosin=

Suhohon are sometimes confused with suhosin (Menghean: 수호신 / 守護神), a related concept in the Sindo belief system. Confusingly, both are sometimes translated into Tyrannian as "guardian spirits." The difference is that suhohon are the souls of deceased mortals, while suhosin are minor deities or immortal spirits.

For example, a typical post-1991 shrine aboard a Menghean warship contains three memorial tablets: one to Haesin, the god of the oceans; one to Gwan-wu, the god of war and victory; and one to the deceased individual whose ashes were affixed to the ship. The first two are suhosin, deities who can be called upon to protect warships at sea, while the latter is a suhohon exclusive to that warship.

Some cities and towns also have their own specific suhosin, also known as sŏnghwangsin or "gods of the moat and walls." These guardian deities were originally believed to watch over a settlement's defenses and safeguard it from outside attacks, but their responsibilities have since expanded to include a settlement's prosperity and social harmony. In some cases a particularly famous city administrator would be memorialized as a sŏnghwangsin after his death, but this followed from a belief that he had ascended to deity status in heaven for his earthly achievements.

See also