[Editor’s Note: This essay to be posted as sequels is from the second volume of the S/HE journal. See S/HE: An International Journal of Goddess Studies (Volume 2 Number 1, 2023). Page numbers and footnote numbers differ in this page.]
Two Major Royal Matrilineages
At the root of Sillan political power was the royal matrilineage. By the royal matrilineage, I mean the lineage of female royal members including queens and queen mothers who gave birth to a daughter in marriage with a ruler respectively and/or who gave birth to a son who became a ruler respectively. The title, “Queen Mother,” indicates that her son was enthroned, whereas “Queen” implies that she was married to a ruler. Within the Sillan matriarchal royal system especially during the Early Period and most of the Middle Period, which I call the strictly matrilineal period (57 BCE – 737),[1] Queen Mothers symbolically and virtually held the state power. Put differently, the royal matrilineage continued for nearly eight hundred years in Sillan history. That Sillan matriarchal leadership is inscribed in the royal matrilineage goes unnoticed among historians. Sillan history is queen-centered. Like their queens, male rulers are derived from the one royal matrilineage. Sillan royal patrilineages, sporadic and short-lived, take shape as a byproduct of the matrilineage. To the point, the Sillan royal matrilineage reflects the biological principle of Nature. As both sexes are issued from the mother or the Female, both queens and male rulers come from the royal matrilineage.
The Sillan royal marriage was exclusively exogamous, insofar as the matrilineage was in place. This means that the progenitor of a royal matrilineage was a non-Sillan woman, an outsider who came to Silla and established her royal own matrilineage.[2] To maintain the exogamous marriage, the queen, the consort of a ruler, had to be of the royal matrilineage. On the part of the queen’s mother, her duty was to secure the succession of her matrilineage by her (queen) daughters. That way, queens were always of the non-local lineage. For queen mothers, her duty was to secure her son ruler to marry a woman of the royal matrilineage. A consanguineous marriage was rare but happened. In the case of Queen Mother Jiso, she married her ruler son and her daughter, each born from a different father.[3] Within this system, the patrilineage of Sillan rulers happened as a byproduct, which did not stand on its own. Male rulers carried his maternal lineage for his own generation.[4] This means that a male ruler was recognized as a son of his mother upon enthronement. Such a custom was a practice exactly opposite of today’s custom of Korean women who follow her father’s surname. Upon marriage, while she keeps her maiden name, her children follow the surname of her spouse. Her own lineage does not get carried on by children. And a few queen mothers ruled as a regent for their sons were too young to rule on his own.[5] The Sillan matrilineal marriage system provided Sillans with the solid foundation for stability and prosperity for the first eight hundred years. I posit that the custom of the Sillan royal matrilineage was pre-patriarchal in origin. Sillans adopted the old system of pre-patriarchal Magoist Korea, the One People of Mago, the Creatrix, a topic, which escape the scope of this essay.[6] The oral myth of Mago Halmi is not unrelated with this custom, as it tells that (1) Mago gave birth to eight daughters and sent them away to eight different islands. (2) Her eight daughters (who married a local man respectively) became the progenitors of mudang mothers (shaman mothers).[7] These shaman head mothers were trusted as the representative of Mago, the cosmic sovereign.
Silla was shaped by the two successive major matrilineages. These two matrilineages stand in tandem rather than replaced by the latter. That Silla had two major royal matrilineages mark the change of capital from the coastal regions of the East Sea (the East Sea of present China) to Gyeongju, the coastal city of the East Sea also known as the Sea of Whales in the Korean Peninsula at the end of the Early Period.[8] Sillan history is summarized as the two major matrilineages. The first major matriarchal lineage begins from Holy Mother of Mt. Seondo and continued five generations to Queen Ahyo. The second major matriarchal lineage began with Sulrye and lasted for seventeen generations to Saso, the queen mother of the 37th ruler Seondeok. I maintain that royal matrilineages shaped the history of Silla. Based on the royal matrilineages, I have divided the matricentric history of Silla into three periods, the Early, the Middle, and the Late (see Appendix I). The Early Period (57 BCE-230), Early Silla, is marked by two matrilineages (see [Table 3]). The major matrilineage (the Holy Mother lineage) is headed by Holy Mother of Mt. Seondo, Queen Mother of the 1st ruler, Hyeokgeose, which ends with the consort of the fourth ruler, Talhae (r. 57-80). The second minor matrilineage is the Aerae-Naerae lineage.[9] Noteworthy is that Sillan patrilineages in the Early and the Middle Periods are the offshoot of the major matrilineages, as seen in Appendix II.
The Middle Period (196-785), Middle Silla, spans nearly six centuries from 196 to 785, which is marked by the most prominent lineage, the Sulrye lineage. Queen Mother Sulrye,[10] the progenitor of the second major royal matrilineage, the Sulrye lineage continues through her female descendants for seventeen generations. I hold that the Sulrye lineage shaping the backbone of Sillan history was the last of the Magoist matriversal lineage among Koreans. With the decline of Silla in 935, the royal matrilineage was gone to the past. To look more closely into the Sulrye lineage, the royal matrilineage shows no sign of a strictly primogeniture succession (see [Table 4]). For example, the fourth Queen Ihye had two daughters. And one of her daughters, Gwangmyeong, had two daughters, Aryu and Boban. The Sulrye matrilineage culminates at the 9th generation Seonhye (Queen of the 21st ruler Soji) from whom come two horizontal lines (see Appendix I). These daughters (Bodo and Odo) spread to three horizontal lines (11th). And their three daughters became four horizontal daughter lines, which grew to five horizontal lines in the next 12th generation. To be discussed later, Queen Mother Manwol, the Regent of Hyegong the Great, did not come from the Sulrye lineage, an indication of a political degression in the royal matrilineage.
Insofar as these two major matrilineages are concerned, sons did not carry their own lineages.[11] It is plausible that a patrilineage was posthumously traced back. For example, the 29th ruler Taejong Muyeol (r. 654-661) is often recognized as the progenitor of his own patrilineage by later historians. His lineage continued for six generations and ended with the 36th ruler Hyegong (r. 780-785), for the duration of about 125 years (see [Table 5]). This is only partially true. The Taejong Muyeol patrilineage was an offshoot of the second major matrilineage. The Taejong Muyeol’s patrilineage was possible due to the stabilized Sulrye matrilineage. Royal patrilineages, as shown in Appendix II, existed within the rubric of matrilineages directly for the Early and Middle Periods. Derivative of the matrilineages, they formed eleven short-lived patrilineages.[12]
| 29 Taejong Muyeol | |||
| 30 Munmu | |||
| 31 Sinmun | |||
| 32 Hyoso | 33 Seongdeok | ||
| 34 Hyoseong | 35 yeongdeok | ||
| 36 Hyegong | 37 Seondeok | ||
[Table 5: The Taejong Muyeol line]
(To be continued)
[1] The strictly matrilineal period refers to the span of about eight hundred years, which began with Holy Mother of Mt. Seondo and ended with the last year of Seongdeok the Great (r.702-737). His successor Gyeongdeok married the two queens of Gyeongdeok, the son of Seongdeok, come from another matrilineage not the main Sulrye lineage, see Appendix I.
[2] For the first major royal matrilineage, the Holy Mother of Mt. Seondo, also known as Saso or Paso, was the princess of Buyeo. See Samguk Yusa, Volume 5. For the second major royal matrilineage, the Sulrye lineage, Sulrye was the last princess of the Somun State. See Jong-uk Yi, The Story of Sillans drawn from the Hwarang-segi (화랑세기로 본 신라인 이야기), Seoul: Gimyeongsa (2000), 62.
[3] According to the Hwarang Segi, Jiso married her son, the 24th ruler Jinheung (r. 540-576), fathered by Ipjong, to her daughter, Sukmyeong, fathered by Isabu. Both Jinheung and Suknyong were not deeply in love but cared for each other throughout their lives. See the Hwarang Segi, Wihwarang. Intriguingly, the marriage between a brother and a sister is registered in the case of Gim Chunggong and his sister Mother Guibo. Because of the discrepancy in the two historical sources, the Samguk Sagi and the Samguk Yusa, it is debated if they were from the same mother (Queen Mother Seongmok) and the same father (Crown Prince Hyechung Gim Ingyeom). For this case, however, it is suspected that they had the same father but different mothers. Chunggong held the highest rank of office, Sangdaedeung in the year 822, whereas Mother Guibo was the mother of the 44th ruler Minae.
[4] Jong-uk Yi, The Story of Sillans, 66.
[5] Regent Queen Mothers include Bodo, Jiso, Sinmok, and Manwol.
[6] I hold that the exogamous marriage system of queens originates from Danguk of the Goma. The lore that Mago Halmi dispatches her eight daughters accords with the historical record that Goma appoints queens to eight different peoples, which makes a total of nine states. Being the Mother State, Danguk led the confederacy of nine states, the Nine Hans, the People of Mago, the Creatrix. See Hwang, “Goma, the Shaman Ruler of Magoist East Asia/Korea, and Her Mythology,” Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture, edited by Mary Ann Beavis and Helen Hye-Sook Hwang (Lytle Creek, CA: Mago Books, 2018), 261-2.
[7] The motif of the Mago Halmi story is told in the regions of Mt. Jiri and Gurangsa (Nine Maiden Shrine) better known as Suseongdang (Holy Water Shrine) in the Byeonsan Peninsula. See Helen Hye-Sook Hwang, “Gaeyang Halmi, the Sea Goddess of Korea” (5 parts), Return to Mago E-Magazine, accessed March 27, 2023,
https://www.magoism.net/2012/08/gaeyang-halmi-the-sea-goddess-of-korea-by-helen-hye-sook-hwang/.
[8] I hold that these two major royal matrilineages account for the Sillan migration from the coastal regions of the East Sea (the East Sea of present China) to Gyeongju, the coastal city of the East Sea also known as the Sea of Whales in the Korean Peninsula at the end of the Early Period.
[9] I hold that the major royal matrilineage (the Holy Mother lineage) in Early Silla discontinued due to a massive migration of Sillans from the coastal region of the East Sea of today’s China to Gyeongju of the Korean Peninsula. The actual migration of the capital and the royal house possibly took place during the period of Naerye (Queen Mother of the 8th ruler Adala) and Jijin Naerye (Queen Mother of the 9th ruler Beolhyu).
[10] Sulrye married Gim Gudo from whose union came a son who became the 13th Michu (r. 262-284), the first male ruler of the Gim clan.
[11] It was possible that Sillan males followed their mother’s surnames in the early period. However, rulers were clearly given their surnames, which were likely given by their mothers.
[12] The eleven derivative patrilineages are: the Hyeokgeose, the Jobun, the Namul, the Jijeung, the Jinheung, the Jinpyeong, the Taejong Muyeol, the Soseong, the Sinmu, the Gyeongmun, and the Sindeok. See Appendix II.