Sidi Ali ben Hamdush is the founding saint and eponym of the Hamadsha brotherhood, a holy man remembered as living on the Zerhoun massif near Meknes during the long reign of the sultan Mawlay Ismail in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Around his person a body of miracle-legend gathered, and his sainthood (baraka) is held to persist in his descendants, in the brotherhood that bears his name and above all in his domed tomb and sacred spring at Beni Rachid, the mother-shrine to which the possessed and the sick are brought. In cult he is inseparable from his companion Sidi Ahmed Dghughi and from the she-demon Aïcha Qandisha, whose ecstatic and self-mortifying rites the Hamadsha perform under his patronage. Around the saint's spring and grotto the living tradition weds Sufi devotion to the older world of the jnun.