Egungun are the collectively returning ancestral dead, appearing in masquerade during festivals and at family occasions. The costume is the theological statement: layered cloth, often extremely elaborate and expensive, covering the wearer completely, with no skin, eyes or hands visible anywhere, because what is present is not held to be the man inside. The masquerade moves in a non-human way, speaks in an altered voice, delivers blessings and judgments, and historically arbitrated disputes among the descendants of the lineage. Attendants with switches keep spectators at a distance and contact with the cloth is a grave matter. The costume itself is inherited property of enormous ritual value. Women are traditionally excluded from approaching or from the associated society, an exclusion that is now argued about, particularly in the diaspora, and that coexists with the fact that Oya, a female orisha, is the one who commands egungun.