Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/503

Rh that on the day following the night spent on the mountain the crowd should attend a fair at Tagust in which the sale of cattle is an outstanding feature.

Now cattle are scarce in the Aures; too scarce, one would imagine, to render a special market desirable; for the material reason that the pastures of its valleys are insufficient to maintain large numbers of even the diminutive local oxen and cows. The flocks of the hill tribes, like those of the nomads, consist in sheep and goats. May it not be that in the cattle market referred to we have a survival, changed beyond all recognition in the lapse of time, of some ancient ceremonial in which the cow, sacred to Isis, played some part as did the gilt image of a cow at the Feast of Lamps at Saïs? Herodotus, describing the customs of the nomad Libyan tribes from Egypt to Southern Tunisia, states that in his time these people abstained from eating the flesh of cows, and remarks that "Even at Cyrene, the women think it wrong to eat the flesh of the cow, honouring in this Isis, the Egyptian goddess, whom they worship both with fasts and festivals."

In the course of my investigations in the Aures before the War, when noting some curious family tabus among the Shawiya of the central valleys of the massif, I found that certain families consider it so unlucky for them to kill an ox or cow that, should a member of one of these families desire to slaughter such a beast, they call in a neighbour to do the actual killing, rewarding him for his pains with a portion of the meat, a custom which may possibly constitute a relic from days when in the Aures, as in the eastern districts of Libya, the flesh of the cow was not eaten by the natives out of respect for their principal goddess. In later times we find that Isis was definitely worshipped at Carthage, but her cult probably died out there, according to Bouchier, soon after the reign of Constantine, and the