Korean shamanism knows two roads into the role of mudang, and they produce two kinds of ritualist. In the charismatic tradition of central and northern Korea, the road begins unasked, with sinbyeong, the spirit sickness: an affliction of body and mind, wasting, dreams and visions, that resists every treatment until it is read for what the tradition understands it to be, the summons of a spirit demanding to be seated. The resolution is the naerim-gut, the initiation ceremony in which an established mudang seats the possessing spirit and the sufferer crosses over into the role, taking up a relationship with a personal pantheon that will speak through her thereafter. Ritualists of this kind, often called mansin, divine, advise and in the ecstatic passages of ceremony give the spirits voice directly.
Along the southern coasts and in parts of the southwest the road is instead inherited: hereditary mudang, known regionally by terms such as tangol, receive clientele and ritual craft through family lines, performing the great communal and household ceremonies as consummate liturgists and musicians without the possession that defines their northern counterparts. Most mudang are women; the male minority, baksu, work chiefly within the charismatic stream. In both traditions the central work is the gut, the ceremony of sequenced acts in which spirits are invited, entertained, fed, consulted and sent off, and the mudang's authority rests on doing that work well: on ceremonies that visibly move their spirits and their clients.