Mary Irvin Wright
THE GHOST DANCE—INSPIRATION
Coming down to a later period we find the Chaldean Job declaring that God speaketh “in a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men; then he openeth the ears of men and sealeth their instruction.” The whole of the prophecies are given as direct communications from the other world, with the greatest particularity of detail, as, for instance, in the beginning of the book of Ezekiel, where he says that “it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the river of Chebar, that the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God.”
In the New Testament, representing the results of six centuries of development beyond the time of the prophets and in intimate contact with more advanced civilizations, we still have the dream as the controlling influence in religion. In the very beginning of the new dispensation we are told that, while Joseph slept, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, and as a result “Joseph being raised from sleep did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him.” The most important events in the history of the infant redeemer are regulated, not in accordance with the ordinary manner of probabilities, but by dreams.
The four gospels are full of inspirational dreams and trances, such as the vision of Cornelius, and that of Peter, when he went up alone upon the housetop to pray and “fell into a trance and saw heaven opened,” and again when “a vision appeared to Paul in the night,” of a man who begged him to come over into Macedonia, so that “immediately we endeavored to go into Macedonia, assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us.” In another place Paul—the same Paul who had that wonderful vision on the road to Damascus—declares that he knew a man who was caught up into paradise and heard unspeakable words. In Paul we have the typical religious evangel, a young enthusiast, a man of sensibility and refinement above his fellows, so carried away by devotion to his ideal that he attaches himself to the most uncompromising sect among his own people, and when it seems to be assailed by an alien force, not content simply to hold his own belief, he seeks and obtains official authority to root out the heresy. As he goes on this errand, “breathing out threatenings and slaughter,” the mental strain overcomes him. He falls down in the road, hears voices, and sees a strange light. His companions raise him up and lead him by the hand into the city, where for several days he remains sightless without food or drink. From this time he is a changed man. Without any previous knowledge or investigation of the new faith he believes himself called by heaven to embrace it, and the same irrepressible enthusiasm which had made him its bitterest persecutor leads him now to defend it against all the world and even to cross the sea into a far country in obedience to a dream to spread the doctrine. In many respects he reminds us forcibly of such later evangelists as Fox and Wesley.
The cloudy indistinctness which Wovoka and his followers ascribe to the Father as he appears to them in their trance visions has numerous parallels in both Testaments. At Sinai the Lord declares to Moses, “I come unto thee in a thick cloud,” and thereafter whenever Moses went up the mountain or entered into the tabernacle to receive revelations “the Lord descended upon it in a cloudy pillar.” Job also tells us that “thick clouds are a covering to him,” and Isaiah says that he “rideth upon a swift cloud,” which reminds us of the Ghost song of the Arapaho representing the Indian redeemer as coming upon the whirlwind. Moses goes up into a mountain to receive inspiration like Wovoka of the Paiute and Bi′äñk̔i of the Kiowa. As Wovoka claims to bring rain or snow at will, so Elijah declares that “there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word,” while of the Jewish Messiah himself his wondering disciples say that even the winds and the sea obey him.
Fasting and solitary contemplation in lonely places were as powerful auxiliaries to the trance condition in Bible days as now among the tribes of the plains. When Daniel had his great vision by the river Hiddekel, he tells us that he had been mourning for three full weeks, during which time he “ate no pleasant bread, neither came flesh nor wine in my mouth, neither did I anoint myself at all.” When the vision comes, all the strength and breath leave his body and he falls down, and “then was I in a deep sleep on my face, and my face toward the ground.” Six hundred years later, Christ is “led by the spirit into the wilderness, being forty days tempted by the devil, and in those days he did eat nothing.” Another instance occurs at his baptism, when, as he was coming out of the water, he saw the heavens opened and the spirit like a dove, and heard a voice, and immediately was driven by the spirit into the wilderness. In the transfiguration on the mountain, when “his face did shine as the sun,” and in the agony of Gethsemane, with its mental anguish and bloody sweat, we see the same phenomena that appear in the lives of religious enthusiasts from Mohammed and Joan of Arc down to George Fox and the prophets of the Ghost dance.
Dancing, which forms so important a part of primitive rituals, had a place among the forms of the ancient Hebrew and of their neighbors, although there are but few direct references to it in the Bible. The best example occurs in the account of the transfer of the ark to Zion, where there were processions and sacrifices, and King David himself “danced before the Lord with all his might.”