ABSTRACT
When his father, Wumu, died in 1942, Lin Qingbiao inherited responsibility for the management not only of the pharmacy but also of Shiding’s public temple. This was of course in the middle of the Pacific war, and Taiwan was still a colony of Japan. Lin Qingbiao’s father had added to that temple a new shrine and two festivals. He had introduced a new deity, the Immortal Lü Dongbin. For Wumu this had been the keeping of a moral pact with the Immortal, a pact that had been his own salvation based on revelations through spirit-writing. Because Lin Qingbiao inherited Wumu’s charisma, a Weberian sociologist would say we must be dealing with routinised not original charisma. But we shall see that Lin Qingbiao was respected in his own right, and that he did not simply carry on what he inherited. He changed it. He too was an innovator who introduced new rituals within the intentionality, the constraints and conventions he inherited, some of which he felt obliged to follow, but others of which he brought to an end.
