Or there were dances belonging to the ceremonies of Initiation—dances both by the initiators and the initiated. Jane E. Harrison in Themis (p. 24) says, “Instruction among savage peoples is always imparted in more or less mimetic dances. At initiation you learn certain dances which confer on you definite social status. When a man is too old to dance, he hands over his dance to another and a younger, and he then among some tribes ceases to exist socially.... The dances taught to boys at initiation are frequently if not always ARMED dances. These are not necessarily warlike. The accoutrement of spear and shield was in part decorative, in part a provision for making the necessary hubbub.” (Here Miss Harrison reproduces a photograph of an Initiation dance among the Akikuyu of British East Africa.) The Initiation-dances blend insensibly and naturally with the Mystery and Religion dances, for indeed initiation was for the most part an instruction in the mysteries and social rites of the Tribe. They were the expression of things which would be hard even for us, and which for rude folk would be impossible, to put into definite words. Hence arose the expression—whose meaning has been much discussed by the learned—“to dance out ([gr ezorceisqai]) a mystery.” (1) Lucian, in a much-quoted passage, (2) observes: “You cannot find a single ancient mystery in which there is not dancing ... and this much all men know, that most people say of the revealers of the mysteries that they ‘dance them out.’” Andrew Lang, commenting on this passage, (3) continues: “Clement of Alexandria uses the same term when speaking of his own ‘appalling revelations.’ So closely connected are mysteries with dancing among savages that when Mr. Orpen asked Qing, the Bushman hunter, about some doctrines in which Qing was not initiated, he said: ‘Only the initiated men of that dance know these things.’ To ‘dance’ this or that means to be acquainted with this or that myth, which is represented in a dance or ballet d’action. So widely distributed is the practice that Acosta in an interesting passage mentions it as familiar to the people of Peru before and after the Spanish conquest.” (And we may say that when the ‘mysteries’ are of a sexual nature it can easily be understood that to ‘dance them out’ is the only way of explaining them!)
(1) Meaning apparently either simply to represent, or, sometimes to DIVULGE, a mystery.
(2) [gr peri ‘Orchsews], Ch. xv. 277.
(3) Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, 272.
Thus we begin to appreciate the serious nature and the importance of the dance among primitive folk. To dub a youth “a good dancer” is to pay him a great compliment. Among the well-known inscriptions on the rocks in the island of Thera in the Aegean sea there are many which record in deeply graven letters the friendship and devotion to each other of Spartan warrior-comrades; it seems strange at first to find how often such an epithet of praise occurs as Bathycles DANCES WELL, Eumelos is a PERFECT DANCER ([gr aristos orcestas]). One hardly in general expects one warrior to praise another for his dancing! But when one realizes what is really meant—namely the fitness of the loved comrade to lead in religious and magical rituals—then indeed the compliment takes on a new complexion. Religious dances, in dedication to a god, have of course been honored in every country. Muller, in the work just cited, (1) describes a lively dance called the hyporchema which, accompanied by songs, was used in the worship of Apollo. “In this, besides the chorus of singers who usually danced around THE BLAZING ALTAR, several persons were appointed to accompany the action of the poem with an appropriate pantomimic display.” It was probably some similar dance which is recorded in Exodus, ch. xxxii, when Aaron made the Israelites a golden Calf (image of the Egyptian Apis). There was an altar and a fire and burnt offerings for sacrifice, and the people dancing around. Whether in the Apollo ritual the dancers were naked I cannot say, but in the affair of the golden Calf they evidently were, for it will be remembered that it was just this which upset Moses’ equanimity so badly—“when he SAW THAT THE PEOPLE WERE NAKED”—and led to the breaking of the two tables of stone and the slaughter of some thousands of folk. It will be remembered also that David on a sacrificial occasion danced naked before the Lord. (2)
(1) Book II, ch. viii, Section 14.
(2) 2 Sam. vi.
It may seem strange that dances in honor of a god should be held naked; but there is abundant evidence that this was frequently the case, and it leads to an interesting speculation. Many of these rituals undoubtedly owed their sanctity and solemnity to their extreme antiquity. They came down in fact from very far back times when the average man or woman—as in some of the Central African tribes to-day—wore simply nothing at all; and like all religious ceremonies they tended to preserve their forms long after surrounding customs and conditions had altered. Consequently nakedness lingered on in sacrificial and other rites into periods when in ordinary life it had come to be abandoned or thought indecent and shameful. This comes out very clearly in both instances above—quoted from the Bible. For in Exodus xxxii. 25 it is said that “Aaron had made them (the dancers) naked UNTO THEIR SHAME among their enemies (READ opponents),” and in 2 Sam. vi. 20 we are told that Michal came out and sarcastically rebuked the “glorious king of Israel” for “shamelessly uncovering himself, like a vain fellow” (for which rebuke, I am sorry to say, David took a mean revenge on Michal). In both cases evidently custom had so far changed that to a considerable section of the population these naked exhibitions had become indecent, though as parts of an acknowledged ritual they were still retained and supported by others. The same conclusion may be derived from the commands recorded in Exodus xx. 26 and xxviii. 42, that the priests be not “uncovered” before the altar—commands which would hardly have been needed had not the practice been in vogue.
Then there were dances (partly magical or religious) performed at rustic and agricultural festivals, like the Epilenios, celebrated in Greece at the gathering of the grapes. (1) Of such a dance we get a glimpse in the Bible (Judges xxi. 20) when the elders advised the children of Benjamin to go out and lie in wait in the vineyards, at the time of the yearly feast; and “when the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in the dances, then come ye out of the vineyards and catch you every man a wife from the daughters of Shiloh”—a touching example apparently of early so-called ‘marriage by capture’! Or there were dances, also partly or originally religious, of a quite orgiastic and Bacchanalian character, like the Bryallicha performed in Sparta by men and women in hideous masks, or the Deimalea by Sileni and Satyrs waltzing in a circle; or the Bibasis carried out by both men and women—a quite gymnastic exercise in which the performers took a special pride in striking their own buttocks with their heels! or others wilder still, which it would perhaps not be convenient to describe.
(1) [gr Epilhnioi umnoi]: hymns sung over the winepress (Dictionary).