Kaia

Kaia is the Tolai name for the malignant spirit-power of the wild, the dangerous being of the bush, the deep places, and the volcanic ground, feared as a bringer of sickness, madness, and death. Unlike the departed dead, who may be approached and placated, the kaia is wholly hostile and alien to human society; it lurks in lonely forest, ravine, and crater, and an encounter with it can sicken or kill. Ethnographers record kaia both as a class of such demons and as a singular dread presence bound up with the underworld and the smoking mountains behind Rabaul. It stands at the far pole from the ordering work of the creator brothers, an embodiment of everything untamed and deadly in the Tolai world.

Domains

• wilderness
• sickness and affliction

Powers

• afflict with sickness and death
• haunt the bush and the volcanic ground

Sources

• Kaia is the Tolai name for the malignant spirit-power of the wild, feared as a bringer of sickness, madness, and death and set apart from the placable dead.: Richard Parkinson, Dreissig Jahre in der Suedsee (1907) (primary); A. L. Epstein, In the Midst of Life: Affect and Ideation in the World of the Tolai (1992) (secondary)
• Ethnographers record kaia both as a class of malevolent demons and as a singular dread presence associated with the underworld and the volcanoes.: A. L. Epstein, In the Midst of Life (1992) (secondary)