Aicha Qandisha

A young man in Tangier was walking home in the middle of the night when a woman in the street called out to him, “O man, O man, come!” He did not answer. He went to his room, shut the door, got into bed and put out the light. Then his hand, reaching for the pillow, closed on the breast of a woman. He fled to his parents’ house and came back with his mother and brother, and the room was empty. The next day an old man explained it to him. Every night at that hour Aicha Qandisha stands in that street in the shape of a woman, and whoever goes with her loses his mind.

The Finnish sociologist Edward Westermarck heard that story in Morocco and printed it in *Ritual and Belief in Morocco* in 1926. He found her among the Arabic-speaking people of the north, a jinniya with a proper name and a character of her own, which most jinn do not have. She wore a lovely face. She had also been seen with the legs of a goat or an ass, or with a woman’s legs under the body of a she-goat. Four decades later the American anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano, working in Meknes and the villages of the Jebel Zerhoun in 1967 and 1968, met the same being and described her in *The Hamadsha* (1973): sometimes a beauty, sometimes an old hag with pendant breasts, and always with the feet of a camel or some other hoofed animal. She hides them under a flowing caftan. That is the whole trick, and it usually works.

Her home is water. Westermarck’s informants put her in the sea at Tangier, from which she climbs to a cave above the beach of Rmelqala; in a spring among the Tsul; in the river outside Tetouan, at a ruined bridge, where people said she killed three or four bathers every year and on hot summer days sat in plain view on the bank. At Fez she crawled out of a city drain as an ugly old woman. Among the Beni Ahsen she lived in the Sebou and liked to visit married men in the shape of their own wives, which cost the men their lives. One mother told Westermarck that Aicha Qandisha had climbed onto her son’s back while he swam in that river, and that he shook her off only by shouting to the people on the bank to give him a dagger. Steel frightens her, even a needle.

Her husband is Hammu Qaiyu, a very tall jinn who shares her river and is much less talked about than his wife. On Midsummer day the Beni Ahsen threw burning straw into the Sebou as an offering to the pair before they went swimming. Crapanzano heard the same name, adding that the Hamadsha take care not to confuse him with another jinn, Sidi Hammu, who haunts slaughterhouses and is fond of blood.

Where she came from depends on who is asked. The Hamadsha tell it as part of the legend of their two saints, Sidi Ali ben Hamdush, who died in 1718/19 or 1722/23, and his servant Sidi Ahmed Dghughi. Sidi Ali told Sidi Ahmed to close his eyes, and when he opened them he was standing in front of the palace of the king of the Sudan. The guards were asleep. He walked out with a reed flute, a drum and Aicha Qandisha, and the soldiers who came after him were turned into frogs. That journey is the heart of the Hamadsha legend, because it explains both the ecstatic trance of the brotherhood and the arrival of Aicha. Other tellers made her Sidi Ali’s slave woman, who vanished from her own burial and was heard laughing that her jinn had carried her away; or the daughter of Sidi Shamharush, king of the jinn; or the child of a human mother and a spirit of the wind, which is why, one informant said, she has a human name, Aisha, and a devil’s name, Qandisha.

Westermarck had his own answer, and it has outlived its evidence. He heard in Qandisha the Canaanite word *qedesha*, which he glossed as a temple harlot, tied her lust and her rivers to the goddess Astarte, and supposed that Carthaginian colonists had brought the goddess to Morocco, where she sank into a disreputable jinniya. He noticed that belief in her and her husband was liveliest among the Beni Ahsen, near the probable site of an old Carthaginian colony at Mehdiya, and proposed that Hammu Qaiyu was the Carthaginian god Hammon. Crapanzano was cooler about it. The parallels with the ancient Mediterranean were real, he wrote, but so were equally strong parallels with female demons and ogresses across the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa. The reading of *qedesha* as a sacred prostitute that the theory leaned on has since fallen out of favour among historians of the ancient Near East. A more recent Moroccan explanation makes her a real woman of El Jadida who lured Portuguese soldiers into ambushes. Neither Westermarck nor Crapanzano records that story.

She was never quite the same being everywhere. To the coastal Arabs, Crapanzano wrote, she is a siren; inland she is a mother of earth, mud, water and rivers. Westermarck found no one using her name in the far south or in the Rif, but he found her double in both. Men from the Sus described a libidinous jinniya with the feet of an ass or a mare, and the Ait Temsaman of the Rif told of a spirit with a nice face who calls a man by name and asks him to marry her. If he answers with the formula “I take refuge with God from Satan the stoned one”, she vanishes. If he says yes, he is done for. In Doukkala the people knew her only as a line the Hamadsha sang before chopping at their heads with axes: Aicha Qandisha is sitting and smearing herself with henna.

Among the Hamadsha she is Lalla Aisha, “our mother”, the great female muqaddim. She never laughs. She is libidinous and quick-tempered, and ready to strangle, scratch or whip anyone who insults or disobeys her. A man who meets her as a beautiful woman has one defence, which is to drive a steel knife into the ground at once; then he may send her away, or bargain for a marriage on his own terms. A man who has already slept with her belongs to her. Her husbands are expected to wear old dirty clothes, never cut their hair or nails, and keep to the women she allows. Her followers dress in red, black or a sharp yellowish green, and burn black benzoin to calm her when she takes hold of them.

At the peak of a Hamadsha ceremony the musicians play her tune, the lights go out, and the dancers say she rises from the earth beneath them to dance with them. She is fond of blood. Some of her devotees slash their own heads when her music plays, and black and red chickens are her usual price. Her chief shrine is a grotto a few hundred yards east of the village of Beni Rachid, where the roots of an enormous fig tree are knotted with rags left by women as pledges of a sacrifice if she grants their wish. Behind them is a dark, muddy inner hollow where an underground stream trickles up. That is where she lives. The descendants of Sidi Ahmed, in the neighbouring village, keep a small muddy hole called Aisha’s pit and feel, since their ancestor brought her to the Zerhoun, that they ought to see more of the grotto’s takings.

Her power is the power to take a person over, whether through fright, desire or a vow, and the same power turned the other way is what the Hamadsha work with. The saints outrank her. Sidi Ali’s followers say he orders her to leave her victims alone, while Sidi Ahmed’s followers speak of an agreement in which she promised to keep out of their saint’s way. Her other weaknesses are small and practical: cold steel, the name of God said at the right moment, and those feet, if a man thinks to look down.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Aicha Qandisha?

Aicha Qandisha is a named female jinn, or jinniya, of northern Moroccan belief. She appears as a beautiful woman or an old hag, always with the hoofed feet of a camel, donkey or goat, and she seduces, maddens or kills men. Edward Westermarck recorded her in 1926 and Vincent Crapanzano described her cult among the Hamadsha brotherhood in 1973.

Where does Aicha Qandisha live?

Aicha Qandisha lives in water: the sea at Tangier, rivers at Tetouan and along the Sebou, springs, and even a drain at Fez. Her most important shrine is a grotto near Beni Rachid in the Jebel Zerhoun, where an underground stream rises beneath a large fig tree.

How do you protect yourself from Aicha Qandisha?

Aicha Qandisha is afraid of steel, even a needle. The Hamadsha say a man who meets her should drive a steel knife into the ground at once, after which he can refuse her or bargain with her. In the Rif, reciting a formula taking refuge with God makes the equivalent spirit disappear.

Is Aicha Qandisha the goddess Astarte?

That was Edward Westermarck’s theory in 1926, based on the resemblance between Qandisha and the Canaanite word qedesha and on Carthaginian settlement in Morocco. Vincent Crapanzano found equally strong parallels with female demons elsewhere in the Mediterranean and in sub-Saharan Africa, and the reading of qedesha the theory relied on has since fallen out of favour.

What is Aicha Qandisha’s connection to the Hamadsha?

The Hamadsha brotherhood of the Jebel Zerhoun treat Aicha Qandisha as their special jinniya and call her Lalla Aisha. Their legend says the saint Sidi Ahmed Dghughi brought her back from the palace of the king of the Sudan, and at the height of their ceremonies she is said to rise from the earth and dance with the devotees.

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