LENS


We live in a time when frenzied consumers worship at the altar of materialism and rely on handheld gadgets to do the tricks once reserved for wizards. So there would seem to be little role left for ancient beliefs in magic, spirits, tribes and monks. Indeed, ageold traditions are often discarded like outmoded computer operating systems.

But in some places, the otherworldly ways of the ancients are gaining new relevance, especially as faith in modern ways erodes.

For centuries in rural Taiwan, village shamans, or jitong, were thought to channel spirits and heal the sick. But as Taiwan became less poor and more urban, the jitong faded.

Now a new breed of jitong is adapting to the needs of city dwellers, as Jonathan Adams reported in The Times. They work in high-rise buildings instead of huts and offer suggestions - via disembodied spirits, of course - on problems as diverse as the office, money and marriage.

Chang Yin, a shaman in Taipei who channels the advice of a liquor-swilling Buddhist monk from the 12th century, assured Mr.Adams that “the gods have changed along with the times and kept up with the trends.”

One 40-year-old financial worker visited Ms.Chang recently.“In the U.S. or the West, people go to a psychologist,”he told Mr.Adams.“The jitong plays the same role.”

In Estonia, the population is among the most secular anywhere, surveys have found. Many reject not only Christianity but also, as Ellen Barry reported in The Times, the atheism that Soviet domination imposed on them. Today, though, some are reconnecting to the pre-Christian animist religions that celebrate nature, witches and wood elves.

“Estonia is full of natural magic,” Mari-Liis Roos, 37, a translator, told Ms.Barry while she visited the Witches Well of Tuhala recently during one of its occasional eruptions of water and vapor.

Geologists say the well overflows when underground water pressure builds up, but many Estonians prefer the ancient explanation: witches are taking a vigorous sauna. Some travel from across the nation to visit the well for its legendary healing qualities.

In the Americas, where native cultures have long struggled to survive , some novel ways of honoring the past have emerged.

In Puerto Rico, an annual beauty pageant emphasizes the traditions of the Taino, the island’s native tribe. And in the American state of New Mexico, young Navajos are keeping their tribe’s folklore alive in a gritty art form usually found in America’s urban centers: “slam” poetry.

“For the kids, spoken word is a reconnection with the oral tradition, a return to the origin of language, its sound, its music,” Tim McLaughlin, a writing teacher at the Indian School in Santa Fe, told The Times’s Dan Frosch.

Inevitably, when ancient meets modern, tensions arise.

As Laos hurtles headlong into the 21st century, it often tramples the culture of its past. The 700-year-old town of Luang Prabang, a mountainous enclave for saffron- robed Buddhist monks, has escaped that fate, but just barely. The town was designated a World Heritage Site in 1995 but is now inundated with camera-toting tourists.

“Now we see the safari,” said Nithakhong Somsanith, an artist who works to preserve Laotian traditions, told Seth Mydans of The Times.“They come in buses. They look at the monks the same as a monkey, a buffalo. It is theater.”