With enlightenment came their relegation to the mean status of cultural curiosities, their reduction to festive curiousities with extortionist antics, hardly wielding the power they used to have.
The thick jungle shrines that were their mecca have given way to the hustle and bustle of the metropolis. A land filled with inattentive people who have long since traded their superstition for faith, now beleaguered with pressing concerns. People who can afford no more than a mild, fleeting interest at the colourful display of beads, tassels and ornamental frippery.
In a world that is fast losing native essence, in the global melting pot of being, masquerades, extortionist parodies or not, might be one of the last repositories of dwindling cultural heritage, a reminder of the times when life was simpler, ruled less by logic and more by the feeling of being under the protection of ancestral deities.
