Title: Touching Butterflies, Touching Your Eye
General Information about Item:
- Customary Folklore: Korean Superstition (Bad Luck)
- Language: English
- Country of Origin: South Korea
- Informant: Jamie Park
- Date Collected: November 5, 2018
Informant Data:
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Jamie Park was born in New York City, New York on October 22, 1997. Jamie lived in New York for a short time with her parents and sister, until they moved to Seoul, South Korea, where her parents initially immigrated from. The Park’s time in Seoul was brief and eventually they moved back to the United States, settling down in Rancho Palos Verdes, where Jamie grew up until she graduated from Palos Verdes Peninsula High School. Currently, Jamie is a Junior undergraduate student at Dartmouth college, majoring in Studio art, with the hopes of going to medical school upon graduating. In addition, Jamie makes frequent visits to South Korea, as her parents moved back to Seoul in August 2018.
Contextual Data:
- Social Context:
As a young girl, Jamie would often go around her yard and chase the butterflies that were flying around the gardens. Jamie’s grandma would yell at her in Korean to stop trying to catch the butterflies, because by touching the butterfly’s wings, if she were to touch her eye thereafter, she would go blind. Jamie’s grandmother would warn her that the butterfly’s wing contained a sort of magical dust that would spread into her eyes, and thus cause her to go blind.
- Cultural Context:
This superstition is one that has been around for centuries. This superstition has lost popularity, though, especially in recent years, but is still practiced in Korean culture today. In addition to being bad luck and causing blindness, the practical implication of this superstition has been to discourage eye infections by not touching your eye after putting your fingers on a foreign object. Thus, this superstition is not only to avoid bad luck, but also to avoid real health risks.
- One can become blind by touching the wings of a butterfly and then proceeding to touch their eye. Koreans believe that this magical dust on the butterfly’s wings had the ability to cause blindness in people if it found its way into the human eye.
Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):
Collector’s Comments:
- The superstition of the evil eye is not as popular as most other superstitions in Korean society. The superstition still has a roll in promoting good health. This is an example of magic superstition.
Collector’s Name: Clay Han
Tags/Keywords:
- Korean. Superstition. Butterfly. Eye. Magic Superstition.