Once, a rich but childless couple prayed to the Prince of the Northern Star and had a daughter. When the girl turned seven the couple, called to high office, locked their daughter in a room and put her in charge of a servant. The daughter, missing her parents, escaped out a window and went searching for them until she came under the protection of a Buddhist monk and stayed with him.

The parents returned on hearing about their missing daughter and were in grief when the monk brought the daughter back. By this point the daughter was pregnant by the monk. Calling it a shame to the family, the parents put her in a stone box and cast her out to sea. The box made landfall at Hamdeok-ri on the north coast of Jeju Island, where it was found by women divers.

When the divers opened the box, wondering if it contained treasure, eight snakes crawled out: The pregnant girl had given birth to seven snakes and become a snake herself.

The women divers cast the snakes away and left, calling them filthy animals. The women fell sick soon after, however, and were told by fortunetellers that the cause was their mistreatment of foreign gods whom they should hold rites for. When they did, their illness left them and they all became rich.

After being gods at Hamdeok-ri for many years, the snake gods went into the burgh to become gods there. The Song family in town took them home for worship and were showered with prosperity. Later on, realizing the family's luck would soon run out, the mother and daughters decided to split up to make their own ways and took charge of different domains, from harvest to home.

Source: https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0058498

Does anyone else get a strong disability vibe from the Chilseong mother and daughters' narrative? I know mythology doesn't always make logical sense but it still feels deeply strange that the parents left their only child, an underage one at that, home and confined despite having more than enough means to care for her. It starts to fit a little better when one considers the parents were joining high society where appearances are everything, giving the impression that the daughter was already considered an embarrassment long before her supposed misdeed. What's more, confining a physically or intellectually disabled people to avoid embarrassment or other social difficulties has been a distressingly common ableist practice.

There is also the unavoidable implication that the daughter was impregnated while still underage, which resonates with the horrific sexual violence victimization statistics for disabled people and especially disabled women and girls. This became the excuse for the parents to cast their daughter away for good: When locking her in a room failed to confine her, they abandoned her to the pathless sea.

Yet the Chilseong mother's story does not end as a victimized child, but continues as a mother of her own daughters and an agent in her story. When the mother and her seven daughters make landfall, the way they were cast away for their appearance also has resonance to stigmatization of disability. Yet the divers' disregard and abuse are recognized as wrong, and they and the community are not made whole until they make amends and give due respect to the once-despised family as an integral part of the community.

The snake form itself has disability implications, being a form that's so clearly alien most humans and not having limbs that are assumed to be necessary for "full" functioning. The Chilseong mother going from human form as a child to full snake along with her daughters gives me feelings of someone no longer hiding their difference or trying to pass, abandoning masking to show themselves as they are. It's also interesting to me that the occasion for the transformation was the birth of the sisters: I imagine the Chilseong mother both realizing that masking would not get her the acceptance she wanted, and now having daughters like herself and seeing how loving and lovable they were, learning that they did not have to change themselves for social respectability and that she was proud to both reclaim herself and exist in solidarity with her daughters.

The Chilseong family also do not remain static after their acceptance at the seaside village. They are shown constantly watching for new developments and moving to better pastures for themselves. First they go from Hamdeok-ri into town, which was the kind of move the mother's own parents abandoned her for. Now, as a parent herself, not only does the snake god make the move herself without shame and openly in her own form, she takes her daughters along as well. Though the family of gods find a pretty good gig there, they realize ahead of time that it won't last for long and move on again, each taking domains for themselves even though independence may have been a scary change after being together ever since the sisters' births. The snake-gods went from stigmatization and victimization to finding their own way in the world, always vital, changing, surviving, and thriving.

Fascinating! Are there individual stories associated with them?

No individual stories that I know of! I think they were worshiped as a group. There is a ritual with a similar motif to cure someone who killed a snake or saw a dead thing and fell sick by Chilseong-sent disease as a result. The rite consists of proving that a straw man did it and "exiling" the straw man (i.e. throwing it far away) to take the punishment away from the sick person and bring the dead snake back to life. https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0058499