Sidi Mimun is the great lord of the black spirits in the Gnawa possession liturgy. The mluk are ranked by colour, and the black cohort, tied to the sub-Saharan and formerly enslaved ancestry of the Gnawa, is among the most powerful and most feared; Sidi Mimun heads it. He is summoned in the deep of the night with black cloth, the sacrifice of a black fowl and thick clouds of incense, and his possession is heavy, solemn and commanding. Standing at the threshold between the human and spirit worlds, he is a spirit of night and of the ancestral memory of bondage, and his section of the ceremony is one of its gravest and most charged.