Dukduk arrives about six times a year, and always on the day of the new moon. His arrival is announced a month beforehand by the Old Men--the Gerontes. During that month great quantities of food are made ready for Dukduk, and are ‘taken care of’ by the Old Men, his votaries. The day before the epiphany all women disappear from sight. It is death to them to look on the divine being. Before daybreak all the males of the tribe assemble on the beach, most of the young men looking frightened. At the first streak of dawn singing and drum-beating is heard out at sea, and as soon as there is enough light five or six canoes are seen at a distance, lashed together and with a platform built over them. On this platform are two Dukduks, dancing and uttering shrill cries. They are got up like gigantic cassowaries, some ten feet high, surmounted by a grotesque human mask. At least, says Mr. Romilly, the witness whom I cite, the body looks much like the body of the cassowary, but the head is like nothing but the head of a Dukduk. The canoes make the beach. The natives fall back in apprehension, for if Dukduk is touched he frequently tomahawks the offender on the spot. They proceed through the settlement, always dancing and screaming, to the secret house which has been prepared for them in the bush. They stay about a fortnight. They beat people a good deal, and exact money from suitable sources, especially plundering the women; if any one has shown disrespect of any sort to any member of the Dukduk society, not to speak of Dukduk himself, the punishment is swift and terrible. Now Dukduk, like Egbo and Mumbo-Jumbo, is an anti-feminist, whereas Dionysus was essentially worshipped by women. There are several West African parallels to this. The Bundu of the Mendi country is a very powerful woman‘s society.[43] But otherwise is not the whole of this story curiously reminiscent of the Dionysus myths, as they occur, for instance, in the early Corinthian epos attributed to Eumelos? In his native Thrace, very possibly, everybody was initiated to Dionysus; but in Greece his worshippers form a special society. Dionysus arrives in a ship from unknown seas: when he moves inland this ship is set bodily upon a wagon.[44] He makes his epiphany at various places, claiming worship for himself and honours for his worshippers. In the regular propagandist legend that comes down to us, Lycurgus perished for wrongs done to the Bacchic society and the god himself. He ‘sought to stay the women possessed of god and the Bacchic fire’.[45] He smote or drove into the sea Dionysus himself and his Nurses.[46] The same with Pentheus. In the actual ritual, we can have little doubt, a man personated Dionysus, exactly as a man personates the Dukduk or Egbo or Mumbo-Jumbo. And presumably, in just the same way, the uninitiated, as Mungo Park says, ‘were so ignorant, or at least were obliged to pretend to be so,’ as to take the figure on the ship for a divine being.