A secretive world of new religious movements offers spiritual guidance but,
IN his neat office next to a girlie cinema in Kowloon Bay, missionary Danny Ma Kwok-tung gingerly fingers a well-worn paperback and a hand-made doll sealed in a plastic pouch with three rusty nails. His caution is understandable. The toy, he believes, was used by Satanists to cast spells on their foes. The book is their bible.
Devil worshippers? In Hong Kong? According to Mr Ma, 50 to 100 members of the Church of Satan are in our midst. He learned of the group's presence in the SAR, he says, only after conducting an exorcism on a former member last April.
'She was invited to join by a friend who came from the US hoping to develop the group in Hong Kong,' Mr Ma says. 'Sometimes she was beaten by members and sometimes when she joined their meetings [somewhere in Causeway Bay] they forced her to drink blood - animal blood, women's blood.' The only evidence Mr Ma has of the Church of Satan's existence in Hong Kong is the 24-year-old woman's blurred memory, plus the sinister-looking doll and book she kept. But nevertheless he is convinced devil worshippers are here and concerned about the threat they pose to society.
It is not the only group he is worried about. In his office at the Hong Kong Christian Short Term Mission Training Centre - an organisation that trains Christians to spread the gospel - Mr Ma has files on 13 other new religious movements (NRMs), a loose term for the myriad beliefs that have been repackaged in various assortments over the past few generations. Some, he says, are 'dangerous'.
They include the sex-for-salvation Children of God (whose spinoff Family of Love operated underground for years but is now recruiting followers through its Internet web site, according to the Oriental Daily News ), and the Church of Zion, which still proselytises openly and has about 1,000 members in Hong Kong, Mr Ma says, despite a police investigation during a public outcry in 1996 over its leader's promotion of hydrogen peroxide as a medical cure-all. One member died as a result of drinking the chemical believing he could cure his acute peritonitis.
Mr Ma's relatively small library is by no means indicative of the total number of NRMs operating here. As religious groups do not have to be registered because, a GIS spokesperson says, 'there is freedom of religion in Hong Kong', it is anyone's guess how many such organisations are active. While Mr Ma estimates the number is around 30, others say this is only the tip of the iceberg.