Korean Votive Offerings

At Seoul's magnificent Museum of History ...

 Kudos to Korea for their respect for history!

... there was a special exhibition of the "votive offerings" found down wells right across Korea.

Votive offerings, as you probably already know, are special objects either destroyed by fire or thrown into water when you make a request of the gods.  It was a prayer-ritual performed in ancient times by Romans, Greeks, Celts, Spartans, Scythians among others, and still performed in parts of South America and the Mediterranean today.

The fact that it was also meant to be done in Korea is one of those "mmmmm, strange" mysteries I've pondered over the last decades so it was something we were very fortunate to have the opportunity to check out while we were in Seoul.

Let me show you a few of the Korean votive offerings:

 A water pot!

 Lots of water pots!

A truly ancient pot and necklace beads!

 Cowbells!

 A toddler!

 Pots, beads and a fairy!

It's all a little too strange, isn't it!  These were all found deep in ancient wells.  Water pots? Necklaces? Cowbells?  Are those all items that you'd expect gods to be offered or items you'd expect fall accidentally into wells over the course of millennium?

And a child or two?  Yes, I can see small children falling into wells.  There were also a great many skeletons of various animals and the only thing I could think was "No one sane deliberately throws anything that decomposes into their own water source, no matter how deeply they're praying for something." 

Even the Ancient Celts threw their human sacrifices into water well away from their own drinking supply, usually waaayyy out in the wilderness someplace.  It's a simple fact of life that no one will deliberately taint their own water supply with decomposing flesh, yes?

Think about it?  We did and the conclusion we reached was "These are NOT votive offerings." The archeologists have simply misread the evidence.  This is just stuff that's gone in by accident.

So there's our conclusion: Koreans did not do votive offerings into water.  Or if they did, these aren't the objects.  

However, before we go there is one thing we glanced over and you may not have noticed.  I'll show it to you again only larger:

All this was found down a single well.  Lots of different stuff. But can you see it there?  A tiny little adult-skulled human barely a foot tall.  This little person entirely blew my mind and I spent an entire week scrambling around looking for Korean myths and legends trying to find if they ever had a mythic little people.  Nothing.  I did discover there are 80 families in Korea who carry the gene for dwarfism (they register in exchange for only paying 8% of any medical bills) but that's the full extent of anything I could find to do with Korean little people.

So how on earth do you explain that tiny little human?  S/he's an adult so would have been around for at least twenty years, so how is it possible that there's no folk memory of him/her? All I can think is that s/he fell into this water source many many millennium ago before the Korean people ever arrived.

And also that here is someone who requires a great deal more investigation because s/he certainly has me asking questions.