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When Poets Become Sorcerers: The Cases of Virgil and Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn

This article aims to demonstrate how great literati and poets (in this case, Virgil and Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn) may recover their former status of seers/shamans after losing their sacredness in complex societies. In ancient societies, poets represented the historical memory of an ethnic group. As they were able to evoke images of gods, warriors, and spirits, they actually were considered as priests or shamans, at once representatives and defenders of the tribe. As they were considered “sacred,” they lived apart from ordinary people and they were, at once, respected and feared. After the birth of centralized states, poets’ sacred functions decayed and only occasionally were literati put at the service of nationalistic propaganda. However, in case of political or social crises, ancient poets were again given magic attributes and they were entrusted with the task of keeping and defending the traditional cultural patterns of the group/state to which they belonged.