II
We come now to consider the purposes of the sacred dance.
The whole idea and object of dancing, among civilized peoples, has now become so purely a matter of pastime and enjoyment that it is, at first, difficult to realize its very serious aspect among men in past ages, and among uncivilized races to-day. It may be true enough that dancing has always been a means of exercise and pleasure[27]; but from the earliest historical times—and, judging from what can be gathered from its very widespread practice among all known races of uncivilized men, the same is probably true of remote prehistoric times—this purpose has always been subordinated to religious uses primarily. There are, it is true, many instances among savages at the present day of dances being nothing more than a means of exercise and enjoyment; but it is not too much to assert that in every case the elimination of the religious element is due to extraneous influences. This is vividly illustrated in Polynesia, for example.
“Polynesian dancing,” writes Mr Macmillan Brown, “has advanced far on the road to conventionalism. It has shed much of its pantomimic purpose and its religious meaning, and in this it reveals the collision of two or more cultures. In a region marked by so much that is so highly primitive, nothing but the clash of different religious systems could explain its divorce from rites and ceremonies and its appearance as an almost purely secular art, intended to amuse and delight an assembly of spectators.”
The same writer shows that the character of the dancing among them presents the proof of its originally purely religious purpose; for
it is not like European dancing, a harmony of “twinkling feet.” It is wholly occupied in posturing, waving the arms and bending the body, as if before a shrine. It is the upper part of the body that is chiefly engaged. Where the feet come in, it is only to effect the occasional advances or retreats, as if to or from the altar, or in the resounding thud of the war-dance. The Polynesian dance is oftenest stationary[28].
At the same time it would be a mistake to suppose that all religious dancing was necessarily of this more or less stationary character; we shall refer to examples of a very different kind below; but it is well to emphasize the truth that all dancing was originally religious, and was performed for religious purposes.
Of course it often happens that the different objects of the dance coalesce; religious and secular, or religious and utilitarian, or more than one religious purpose, being combined in the same dance; this, as we shall see, is illustrated in Israelite practice. Nevertheless, it is very certain that in numberless instances all feelings of enjoyment had ceased though the dance continued hour after hour because it was believed that a sacred duty was being performed thereby. The young North American Dakotahs, for example, did not go on dancing for a couple of days because they were so enamoured of it; nor was it for pastime that the Thyiads danced on madly in honour of Dionysos until they dropped to the ground unconscious. The reasons which made this sort of thing necessary are absurd to us, but from the point of view of antique thought it was a very serious and solemn matter.
It is this serious aspect of our subject upon which stress must be laid because now-a-days we naturally think of dancing as mere enjoyment and pastime. Some of the dances and their objects, and the ways in which they are performed, among savages are so funny that they would, we imagine, provoke a smile on the face of a sphinx, were it capable of doing such a thing; but while, at times, we cannot resist a laugh, we shall do well to remember that it was far from being a laughing matter to the savage; to do him justice we must seek to get to the back of his mind, to enter into his feelings, and to look at things through his eyes; then it will be realized what the sacred dance meant to him, and its essential seriousness will become apparent.
What the sacred dance meant not only to uncivilized men, but also to the most cultured races of antiquity, will be seen from the purposes for which it was performed. These we will now briefly enumerate.
(a) It was, first and foremost, performed for the purpose of honouring what were regarded as supernatural powers[29]. In the pre-animistic stage these powers were entirely vague and undefined; in the animistic stage they developed into spirits, some benevolent, others maleficent, powerful for good or evil. Later they became gods and goddesses. Why dancing was a means of honouring these supernatural, later superhuman, powers was for these reasons: It was supposed to be an act of imitation, and therefore flattering to the higher power (the imitative propensity in man has already been referred to). Secondly, by “taking it out of yourself” in the presence of the power or deity you were offering something in the nature of a propitiation, whether as a gift or as an act of self-sacrifice; in either case it would be honouring the higher power. This taking it out of oneself in honour of a spirit or a god is an interesting phenomenon, and in one form or another has asserted itself throughout the history of religion. It is the earliest form of what in course of time showed itself in such things as self-castigation and self-mortification; its extreme form being the love of martyrdom; for to whatever degree the cult of self may have entered into these things, it would be grossly unfair not to recognize that they were believed to be pleasing in the sight of the deity, and that they were, therefore, done with a view to honouring him.
(b) Psychologically connected with the foregoing we have as another purpose of the sacred dance that of “showing-off” before a higher power. One must enter into the child-mind in order to grasp what a real thing this is. The close analogy between the way-of-thinking in the child and in the more or less primitive savage has already been referred to, and is recognized on all hands. Here are two cases of great interest which vividly illustrate the point under consideration. The present writer vouches for the literal truth of each. A little girl, not exceeding five years, was dancing before a picture of the Madonna and Child; after her dance she turned to her mother and said: “Do you think the Baby Jesus liked to see me dance?” It is not quite easy to say in this case in how far the purpose was to please the “Baby Jesus,” and in how far the perfectly natural and innocent purpose was to “show off” before Him; probably both motives were combined. But the second is purely one of “showing off.” A child of about three, a boy this time, kept on jumping as high as he could in the fields; presently his father heard him say: “See, God, how high I can jump!” We could hardly have more delightful and instructive illustrations of the innate desire, common to the child and to man of immature mental development, to show what they can do in the sight of their betters. So that we may justly reckon among the purposes of the sacred dance this desire to “show off” before a superhuman power, or what is conceived to be such.
(c) Next; the honour done to the higher power by means of imitation had, in the eyes of uncivilized man, some important consequences which offer further reasons why the sacred dance was performed. Just as in imitative magic the thing imitated was thereby effected, so by imitating the supernatural power the imitator conceived himself to be making himself one with him who was imitated. This purpose of the sacred dance would not, however, have belonged to the earliest stage, for it presupposes the recognition of personality in the supernatural power, and that points to a distinct advance; and the possibility is worth contemplating as to whether, and in how far, the sacred dance may have contributed to this advance. At any rate, this idea that an undefined union was brought about by means of the sacred dance seems to be the precursor of the more developed form of the same idea that union could be brought about by personating a god or a goddess. When, for example, men and women, by disguising themselves as horses, cats, pigs, or hares, personated Demeter and Persephone, and danced in their honour, they believed that they were, in some inexplicable way, united with these goddesses. In the earlier stage, by imitating what a god does, i.e. dancing, union with him is effected; in the later stage, the like result is achieved by imitating what he is, and dancing in that guise. At the bottom of all this lies the principle which looms so large in savage philosophy that “like produces like,” i.e. sympathetic magic which assumes that
things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy, the impulse being transmitted from one to the other by means of what we may conceive as a kind of invisible ether, not unlike that which is postulated by modern science for a precisely similar purpose, namely, to explain how things can physically affect each other through a space which appears to be empty[30].
As is well known, a more pronounced and realistic means of union was that of eating the flesh or drinking the blood of a sacrificial victim which represented the god; by receiving the god into himself a man became identified with the god. So that we have in the course of the development of religious thought and practice, in a materialistically ascending scale, three means whereby union with a supernatural power was believed to be effected: imitation, personation, and the act which produced identification. But the important point for our present purpose, and it is one which needs emphasis, is that over and over again it is found that the two latter rites (i.e. those of personation and of absorbing the god) are accompanied by the sacred dance as a necessary adjunct. It may be argued that this is merely done on the principle of making certainty doubly certain; but it is at least possible that we have here a case of the retention of the earliest rite simply because it is the earliest. We are bound to look for great naïveté in considering the ideas and practices of backward races—and, indeed, not only backward races where religious rites are concerned;—and if, in course of time, new means suggested themselves of uniting oneself with a god or goddess, it is quite in accordance with what we know of uncivilized man to suppose that he continued the older method side by side with the newer ones, even though there was not much meaning attached to it.
This theory that one of the earliest purposes of the sacred dance was to imitate what supernatural powers did, and that this imitation was believed to be the means of union with this supernatural being (as it came to be), receives some support and confirmation from what we know to have been the purpose of the ecstatic dance.
(d) Uncultured man believed that by dancing to such an extent that he became unconscious he was not only doing something that was honouring to the deity, not only offering something in the nature of sacrifice, but that, he was, above all, making his body a fit temporary abode for his god. He did not enquire how this came about. Conceivably, the earliest idea, though unexpressed, was that by honouring the god to this extent the god showed his approval by uniting himself with his dancing worshipper. The earlier widespread belief that the deity took up his abode at certain times in trees, stones, etc., may well have suggested the possibility of the same thing occurring in men, but more especially in those more intimately and directly dedicated to his worship. The question would have arisen as to the means to be employed whereby this end could be achieved in the case of men; and as dancing was the earliest form of worship this would have been the most natural means to suggest itself. The dance would then proceed; during it the performers would be anxiously awaiting some inner indication of the entrance of the deity; nothing, of course, would happen until the long-continued dance would induce first giddiness, then semi-consciousness, and finally a state of semi-delirium ending not infrequently in total unconsciousness for some time. But it is easy to understand that the first signs of semi-consciousness would have been interpreted as the advent of the deity and the beginnings of the divine overpowering. Given belief in the possibility of divine indwelling in a man, the further belief that the god utilized his worshipper as his mouthpiece was a natural and easy transition. Natural, because it could not be supposed that the god would take up his abode in a man without some purpose, and what more obvious purpose than that of making his will known? Easy, because the mechanism, if one may so call it, of utterance was all ready to hand. Other things would follow, also in the natural course; for if, on the one hand, the god utilized the body of his worshipper as the vehicle for making his will known, the worshipper could, on the other hand, utilize the divine power with which he was suffused for other purposes. Thus, for example, we have the Hebrew prophet who, in an ecstatic state, utters the will of Jahwe, or gives an oracle; or, as illustrating the other side, we have the Bodo-priest “devil-dancer” of Southern India who utilizes the divine power within him for working cures.
But whatever the result might be, the important thing from our present point of view is that the requisite state required for the accomplishment of these things was brought about by the performance of the sacred dance.
The ecstatic dance will receive a good deal of notice below ([pp. 107 ff.]), so that we need not say more about it here.
(e) Another purpose of the sacred dance was to make the crops grow, or of helping, or inducing the god to do so. From one point of view here the sacred dance was an act of imitative magic. Thus, by a dance in which the chief characteristic was high leaps it was believed by many peoples that the corn would grow high. It is probable, as Frazer suggests, that this was at any rate one of the purposes with which the Salii, the priests of the old Italian god of vegetation, danced high and leapt. As an act of imitative magic, again, the sacred dance had among some peoples the purpose of helping the sun to run his course. For example, this was probably at one time of its history the object of “Ariadne’s Dance”; and the dance known by the name of the “Labyrinth” may well have been believed to assist the stars in their courses. These, and many other examples, are dealt with in the following pages.
(f) Further, there are instances on record of the sacred dance having the purpose of hallowing or consecrating a victim for sacrifice, as in the case of the Arabs performing a processional dance round a camel destined for sacrifice, or of the Israelites making the circuit round the altar, or of the Kayans of Sarāwak circling round their sacrificial pigs. In all such cases it is an act of consecration by means of the magic circle.
(g) As an adjunct to initiation ceremonies the sacred dance was also believed to serve some useful purpose. Presumably it was an act of homage to the god or goddess who was supposed to be present. This is suggested by the dancing at the Brauronian ceremonies of Artemis which, according to Farnell, was a kind of initiation ceremony by which young girls were consecrated to the service of this goddess.
(h) There are some grounds for the belief that the sacred dance was sometimes performed with the purpose of assisting warriors to gain a victory in battle; here, too, it was an act of imitative magic. It had, in this connexion, the further purpose of appeasing the spirits of slain enemies.
(i) As a marriage rite the sacred dance, at any rate during some time of its history, fulfilled, as was believed, one or two important purposes. The reference to the “Sword-dance” in the Old Testament is in all probability a relic of the antique custom of combating the vague dangers which were supposed to menace those entering upon the marriage state. These dangers, undefined but nevertheless very real to those who believed in their existence, arose not only from the fact of the new conditions of life that were beginning, but also because of a reciprocal fear on the part of the sexes, and a close contact between them emphasized this. Another way of combating, or at least averting these dangers, was by means of a change of identity; hence the once world-wide custom, still in existence in some countries, of the bridal couple assuming “royal” state, and being treated as king and queen during the period of the wedding festivities.
Further, there are some reasons for thinking that the sacred dance as a marriage rite sometimes had the purpose of bringing about a fruitful marriage; there are certain ceremonies during the period of celebration in which the dance figures prominently which point to this, and the analogy of the dance for making the crops grow offers some corroboration.
(j) There are special purposes for which the sacred dance was performed as a mourning or a burial rite. At times these are of a curiously contradictory character. The ghosts of the dead number among them those who are kindly disposed towards the living, and those who are malevolent in their attitude towards them; the latter are supposed to be able to do harm. Speaking quite generally, it appears, upon the whole, that the less advanced the cultural stage the greater the tendency to regard the spirits of the departed as malevolent. Since the various races from which illustrations of the sacred dance as a mourning rite are gathered were, or are (as the case may be), in different stages of civilization, it follows that the purposes of the rite vary; for the belief regarding the attitude of the dead towards the living has a good deal to do with the purpose for which the sacred dance was performed. Thus we find that it sometimes has the object of driving away the ghost of the departed; or else there will be a dance on the grave for the purpose of preventing the ghost from roaming. At other times it is the means of scaring away evil spirits who are believed to congregate in the vicinity of a corpse. Very strange, but interesting, is the custom among some races of personating the dead in the sacred dance; this is supposed to be a potent means of bringing him back, and he is believed to join the survivors in the dance; he is present, but invisible, in the man who personates him. This reminds one of the union with a supernatural spirit by imitating him in the dance, to which reference has been made above; the same idea underlies each. But the purpose of the sacred dance as a mourning or burial rite which appears as the most usual is that of honouring the departed. This is doubtless very frequently simply a mark of affection; but at other times it is in the nature of a propitiatory act whereby the spirit of the departed is persuaded to refrain from molesting the living.
Many illustrations of these various purposes of the sacred dance will be offered in the following pages.