Magic and Religion in North Africa

not a very favorable land for folklorists. Like those of any other country, its indigenous people once knew the demons of vegetation and solar festivals. But Mannhardt would not have revealed the agrarian cults to us if he had worked in Algeria instead of pursuing his scholarly research in Germany.

However, as terrible as the leveling force of Islam is, it has not totally annihilated the ancient cults. If the beliefs are no longer directly known to us, the rites have often persisted, sometimes uprooted, lying alongside the orthodox cult, relegated to the despised practices of women and children, or sometimes incorporated and blended into the Muslim cult itself. And the old beliefs themselves have not totally disappeared; we would simply not recognize them in their new dress if we did not have the works of ethnographers and sociologists to guide us. While it seems unlikely that North African folklore will ever contribute anything very serious to the sociology of primitive peoples, the results obtained by this science in other fields allow us, on the contrary, to cast a bright light on the history of Muslim civilization. Let us cite two examples.

The festival of ‘Âchoûrâ the tenth day of Muharram, which is the first day of the Muslim year, is supposed to commemorate several events unrelated to one another. But the rites that mark this festival have the character of mourning rites. In North Africa, ‘Âchoûrâ is accompanied by burlesque ceremonies, viewed with a rather jaundiced eye by orthodoxy, and which are very analogous to our carnival. Now, modern sociologists have definitively demonstrated