Ungnyeo

In the tale, a tiger and a bear lived together in a cave and prayed to the divine king Hwanung to be made human. Hwanung heard their prayers and gave them each 20 cloves of garlic and a bundle of mugwort, and ordered them to stay out of the sunlight and eat only this food for 100 days. Due to hunger, the tiger left the cave after roughly 20 days, but the bear remained inside. After 21 days, she was transformed into a woman. Ungnyeo was grateful and made offerings to Hwanung. Her lack of a husband drove her to depression, and she began to pray beneath a sacred betula tree () to be blessed with a child. Hwanung heard her prayers and was deeply moved. He took Ungnyeo as his wife and soon after, she gave birth to a son, Dangun, who would go on to found the nation of Korea. == Interpretation of the story ==

There are two main characteristics of Ungnyeo. The founding myth of the Korean ancient nation generally sets the founder's paternal blood line as the Cheonsin () and the mother line as the Jisin (). This union of the divine and the land may partly serve as a political message. The earliest form of the myth is found at the beginning of the Samguk Yusa, a part-mythological, part-historical chronicle of Korea’s Three Kingdoms Period (primarily focusing on the kingdom of Silla). It was written by the Buddhist monk Ilyon during the late 13th century CE, while the Korean Peninsula was under Mongol rule. Through a Confucian lens, Ungnyeo represents the ideal woman: she was rewarded for her patience and obedience by becoming a woman, and her desire to be a wife and a mother fit two of the roles that a woman was expected to fill (the other role being a daughter). The part of the Samguk Yusa that describes 20 cloves of garlic being given is written as “san isip mae” (산이십매). This is based on Galenic humoralism, the pre-modern system of medicine which states that the human body contains four humors (yellow bile, black bile, white phlegm, and red blood); it was further believed that the humors were “defined by the combination of the qualities heat, cold, dryness, and wetness,” with women being generally cold and wet. East Asian medical theory integrated humoralism into the concepts of yin and yang, with women (closer to yin) having a “weaker, wet, dark, and cold nature,” and men (closer to yang) having a “stronger, drier, bright, and hot nature.” With humoralism, it was believed that menstruation and fertility issues were due to the woman in question being too cold. Mugwort was the primary warming treatment for women across Eurasia, and it is still used to treat various conditions in women in Korean traditional medicine today. The most common method of using mugwort in Korea has been to ingest it with food, while fumigation and moxibustion (“burning moxa, a dried sponge made of mugwort, on or above the skin”) are also used. == References ==