Obeah

Photo14: The various items used for carrying out the process of obeah [Source: Spellcaster Info]

In Guyanna the practice emerges as

(1) The religious rites of certain traditional African mystries brought to the Caribbean by the formerly enslaved and frowned upon by slave owners as devil worship and calling up spirits from the dead.

(2) The rites attached to poisoning, administered in secret by slaves on their European masters, in a deeply motivated urge to freedom.

(3) Spells against other slaves for money, or to gain love, or in revenge for wrong, real or imagined.

Obeah men or women were often individuals with powerful personalities and with a desire to dominate, who used a paraphernalia of materials for the purpose of harming others e.g. a compound of dirt from a human grave and the blood of a black cat mixed with a paste and kept in a goat’s horn, a dried frog, the tail of a pig, feathers from a white fowl, various herbs to induce trances are among the many. In recent times, the Prime Minister of Guyana stirred regional emotion by removing certain laws involving obeah from the statute books.

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