Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/208

 178 The Popular Ritual of

M. Biarnay, in his description of the masquerade of Wargla at 'Asura, simply speaks of a lion-hunt^^ Nor are there signs of any intrinsic connection at all between the masquerade and vegetation. It may perhaps be suspected that the sexual frivolities which form so common a feature of the play are a magical rite intended to promote the growth of the crops ; but, whatever was the case in earlier times, I am not aware of any such idea being at present held by the natives. And, if Bujlud is sometimes induced to plough, the reason for it may simply have been a wish that he should give the soil the benefit of his baraka, just as he blesses the people and tents by beating them.

For my own part I have little doubt that the masquerade belongs to those ceremonies the original object of which is essentially to rid the people of evil influences. A dis- tinguishing feature of the masquerade which takes place at the Great Feast is that the chief figure in it is invariably dressed in skins of sacrificed animals, or at all events has his face covered with a mask of such material. He walks about beating people and tents with a flap of the skin which covers his arm or the foot of a sacrificed animal, or, very commonly, with a stick which he carries in his hand. By so doing he is, in many places, expressly supposed to expel baleful influences owing to the benign virtue inherent in the instrument with which he beats or to the baraka of the skins in which he is dressed. But at the same time he is teased, mocked, pushed about, and sometimes slapped with slippers, — in other words, he is to some extent a scapegoat as well as a positive expeller of evils. The scapegoat idea seems likewise, and indeed exclusively, to be at the bottom of the custom of dressing up men as animals, which are then taken about or chased and sometimes even killed.^* The domestic animals which

^ Biarnay, Etude sur le dialecte berbere de Ouargla, 1908, p. 213. ^ Cf. the European custom of hunting the wren and the procession in which the wren or other animal is carried round the village or town, (Frazer, The