Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/338

 3oS On the Origin of the Egyptian '' Zai'."

take part in the .:;<Fr/^ it may be supposed that .r-dr are not unknown in Turkey, while even in Mecca .':dr have been described.^- I think it may be stated that the custom has spread wherever Negresses have been admitted to the harems. It must be remembered that Mohammed Ali's conquest of the Sudan brought numbers of slaves from various black tribes into the Egyptian harems, and there is little doubt that these carried with them their cult of tribal and ancestral spirits. Analogous practices among Negro and Negroid tribes at the present day, and the A-Zande zdj'- which I witnessed in the Sudan, together with the entire absence of any mention of adr by the earlier travellers in Egypt, all point to this conclusion. From the works of a traveller, Richard Pococke, published in 1743 in the Aperqit General snr l' Egypte, by Clot Bey, doctor to Ismail Pasha, including such observers as Savary, Sonnini, the Baroness von Manutoli, Lane himself, and also his sister, I have been unable to find any mention of zdr or any similar ritual.

On the other hand,, negro African beliefs are rich in analogous rites, some of which I will refer to here. W. Junker describes the performance of an A-Zande binsa or soothsayer.^^ " The performer taking his stand in the centre of the audience, began with a dance to the accompaniment of the never-failing tam-tam (kettle-drum), first in slow, measured time, and off and on reclining his head in a listen- ing attitude towards the ground. Gradually the step was quickened, becoming wilder and wilder, the gesticulations also increasing, until at last he exhausted himself in furious bounds and contortions. And he still kept listening for the messages from the potent underground spirits. But he now suddenly interrupted his frantic caperings, wiped the per-

^^ Harems el Musulmanes if Egypte, Niya Salima, p. 289. ^^Christiaan Schnouck Hurgronje, Mecca, vol. ii., p. 124. ^'W. J. Junker, Travels in Africa during the years 1879-1883 (London, 1875-1902), vol. ii., p. 137.