The sacred dance

by W. O. E. Oesterley

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.