CAPTURING PAPUAN COSMOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS: Psycho–Cosmocide, Sacred Geography, and Indigenous Metaphysical Displacement

This paper interrogates the role of Jerusalem as a cosmological fulcrum of the three Abrahamic faiths — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — and traces the global journey of its sacred narratives from their epicentre in the Middle East to the furthest periphery of the colonised world: West Papua (Irian Jaya), Indonesia. Drawing on the author’s own embodied experience as a Papuan Christian convert and later a critical observer, the paper introduces the concept of “psycho-cosmocide” — the spiritual and ontological destruction of a people through the systematic replacement of their indigenous cosmological worldview with an alien sacred geography. The paper argues that the veneration of Jerusalem, when transplanted into colonised communities such as West Papua, operates not as liberation but as a further instrument of dispossession: it redirects spiritual energy, material resources, and political solidarity away from local sacred ecologies toward an externally defined holy centre. Simultaneously, the paper advances a counter-cosmology: the earth itself, and particularly places such as West Papua — whose rainforest represents a living, breathing ecosystem critical to planetary survival — constitute a “New Jerusalem” in the most urgent and material sense. The paper challenges world leaders, religious communities, and scholars to reframe their sacred geographies in ways that honour the sanctity of all life and all places.