ABSTRACT
A look at the entry on egúngún in Abraham’s Dictionary of Modern Yorùbá (1958) ushers in a baffling amount of information that highlights the layered richness of the concept. In general terms, egúngún—also eégún—refers to ancestor worship. It primarily defines both the ancestor cult as well as the numerous, varied masked manifestations that are the physical expressions of the inseparability of ayé and ọ̀run, this world and the other. The cult finds its organization through the Egúngún Society, a lineage-based institution which dates back to the cult’s phase of expansion, sometime between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In more recent times, the concept has been used by extension to designate any masquerade performance or masked figure—quite independently of the ancestors’ cult.
