IV
A good example among the Greeks is that of the sacred dance performed at the celebration of the Haloa, which, according to a scholion to Lucian[258], was
a feast at Athens containing mysteries of Demeter, and Kore, and Dionysos on the occasion of the cutting of vines and the tasting of wine made from them.... The Haloa gets its name, according to Philochorus, from the fact that people hold sports at the threshing-floors; and he says it is celebrated in the month Poseidon[259].... The sports held were, of course, incidental to the business of threshing; but it was these sports that constituted the actual festival. To this day the great round threshing-floor that is found in most Greek villages is the scene of the harvest festival. Near it a booth (skēnē) is to this day erected, and in it the performers rest, and eat and drink in the intervals of their pantomimic dancing[260].
In connexion with ritual dances in honour of Demeter, Frazer draws attention to the remains of “the magnificent marble drapery which once adorned the colossal statue of Demeter and Persephone in the sanctuary of the two goddesses at Lycosura, in Arcadia”; on this are carved rows of semi-human, semi-bestial figures dancing and playing musical instruments; the bodies of these figures are those of women, but their heads, paws and feet are those of a horse, a pig, a cat, or a hare, and apparently an ass[261].
“It is reasonable to suppose,” he says, “that these dancing figures represent a ritual dance which was actually performed in the rites of Demeter and Persephone by masked men and women, who personated the goddesses in their character of beasts[262].”
The story of the two daughters of Eteokles who fell into a well while dancing in honour of Demeter and Kore, and were turned into cypresses, probably owes its origin to the desire to account for the reason why sacred dances were performed under these trees, in which the numen of one or other of these goddesses was supposed to reside[263]. The story is given in Geoponica, XI. 4:
The cypresses have two names, and they are indeed called Charites on account of their delectable quality, and Cypresses on account of their bearing and producing branches and seeds in such regular order. They were the daughters of Eteokles; and when dancing in imitation of the goddesses, they fell into a well; and the earth, commiserating their misfortune, produced flourishing plants like damsels[264].
It is unnecessary to give further examples; generally speaking, among the Greeks dancing at festivals, so far as their religious character is concerned, was performed in honour of some deity. A magical purpose is sometimes to be discerned, though rarely[265]; the ecstatic dance seems sometimes to have had this object, and this, as one would expect, is only the case in the earliest period of Greek religion[266]. We have dealt in [Chap. VII.] with the ecstatic dance and its objects.