ABSTRACT
This chapter offers preliminary thoughts on how divination works to recall bygone moments in time, related to the potent moment when someone has died or become ill from witchcraft or sorcery. It runs a general claim about witchcraft, however awkward that might be, in the Melanesian nation of Vanuatu. The chapter agrees that phenomena of the occult must be understood in relation to their rootedness in cultural-historical and structural circumstances, but it also shows the need to articulate universal connections in the way people around the world act upon death and illness, and how they with intentionality construct and act upon that realm of life that is not life. The chapter is about the ontological ambivalence and ambiguity that witchcraft reveals, and it tries to get closer to its social status as an event. Artifacts of witchcraft can be ashes of human bone, a needle or a particular thorn or some other hardly observable thing.
