What happened
Aisha Qandisha (Aïcha Kandicha) is the best-known figure in Moroccan jinn folklore. She is described as a beautiful young woman with the hooves of a goat or camel instead of feet. She lives by water – in the sea at Tangier, in the Martil River at Tétouan, in a drainage canal at Fez, in the Sebou itself among the Beni Ahsen – and lures young men, only to drive them mad or kill them. She fears steel knives and needles. She holds a special place in the rites of the Hamadsha brotherhood, which venerates two saints buried near Meknes, Sidi Ali ben Hamdush and Sidi Ahmed Dghughi. During night-long ceremonies, to drums, the ghaita oboe and the gimbri lute, men possessed by “Lalla Aisha” fall into trance, and some slash at their heads with knives – the she-demon is said to demand blood. In the late 1960s the anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano described these rites, as well as Tuhami, a working man from Meknes who said he had been “married” to Aisha for years and that she would not let him take a human wife.
Witnesses
The anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano, who studied the Hamadsha in the late 1960s and described them in “The Hamadsha” (1973) and “Tuhami” (1980). Earlier, the Finnish ethnographer Edward Westermarck recorded beliefs about Aisha in “Ritual and Belief in Morocco” (1926).
Explanations and hypotheses
Crapanzano treated the Hamadsha rites as a form of folk psychiatry: possession by Aisha gives the sufferer a language for fears, impotence or family conflict, while shared trance and sacrifice bring relief and a new role in the community. The figure's origins are unclear. Westermarck traced her to the Phoenician goddesses Astarte and Qetesh, but his theory rested on an outdated reading of Near Eastern religion that scholars now reject. A newer suggestion holds that she began as a woman who fought the Portuguese near El Jadida in the 16th century, but there is no evidence for it. Beliefs vary from region to region and from one brotherhood to another – for some Aisha is a jinn, for others something else entirely.
Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.
Sources
- Vincent Crapanzano, The Hamadsha: A Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry (University of California Press, 1973)
- Edward Westermarck, Ritual and Belief in Morocco, t. 1 (Macmillan, 1926)
- Samira Douider, Deux mythes féminins du Maghreb : la Kahina et Aïcha Kandicha (Recherches & Travaux, 2012)
- Christopher J. Witulski, Crossing Paths: Musical and Ritual Interactivity between the Ḥamadsha and Gnawa in Sidi Ali, Morocco (Yale Journal of Music and Religion)
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