WHEN talking about Spirit Nogut today, we say that it is a form of evil magic that is more accurately termed witchcraft than sorcery.

Some people believed to possess evil power and this evil power is often described as a little animal residing in a person, which takes possession over them and force them to do evil things. Melanesians believe in miracles, in the things they see in dreams, in the spirit of nature and ancestors, in the power of magical spells and the effectiveness of sorcery and witchcraft. The Highlands people nowadays tend to attribute deaths, diseases or accidents that happened more often to witches that they are the cause of this. In the Highlands society, majority of the people who were accused of witchcraft are elderly women or the people with low positions in society. Those who are accused of being witchcraft are often tortured to confess and then murdered. This also affects their relatives for which they fall under suspicion and are therefore loathed and avoided. This then forced the relatives to move out of the home villages to settle somewhere because they are either suspected of being witches or are afraid of being targeted by witches. The settlements in towns and cities are homes for these fearful people. By all this, there is a difference in the mindset of every individual. Those who believe in the Gospel and those who believe in the natural super powers. In a situation where it is believed to be possessed by evil spirits in the Gospel stories, possession by demons or evil spirits affected the people by making them sick and they were in need of cure. Their proof of healing was the expulsion of the evil spirits. However, the present day belief of the people in PNG who are being possessed by the evil spirit is different. Those who are said to be possessed by the evil spirits are not made sick but gifted with extraordinary powers of doing evil. Another difference in the behaviour of people said to be possessed by evil spirits, in the Gospels, the possessed were not said to try to harm other people, with the exception of those spirits made them insane. By contrast, many Papua New Guineans believed that people who are being possessed by evil spirits use their extraordinary powers to inflict others on all sorts of terrible things like diseases and deaths, car accidents and other disasters. The final difference is in people’s attitudes towards those said to be possessed by evil spirits.In Gospel stories, people show concern and compassion for them and they look for ways to cure them. In the Highlands, those said to be possessed are harassed, tortured and even murdered. In the Gospel stories, people who are not possessed do not seem to fear those who are. Unlike in our context, those who are not possessed live in fear of being attacked by sorcerers and witches, and of themselves being accused of beingpossessed and of having evil powers. The mindsets of people are different. Unfortunately, those who believed to be possessed in the Highlands areas are subjected to discrimination and cruel persecution. It is time now that this inhuman behaviour of murdering and persecuting those who are said to be possessed should be look into closely. There should be cooperate efforts put by the PNG Government, education institutions and churches to eradicate such belief and behaviours.

Flora Kageni