The step is called the “Henna-dance step,” and the tune accompanying it is called the “Henna-staining tune[338].” Doubtless this is an elaboration of the original form of the dance, and a further purpose has been superimposed—the turning of the cup without extinguishing the candles may be differently explained, though it must be a magical rite of some kind—but the henna on the palms certainly seems to point to a means of averting the evil eye.
As to the fears at entering upon a new state, we may be pardoned for quoting Westermarck once more, for he is our foremost authority on the whole subject. He writes:
A marriage implies not only that the parties enter into new relations to each other’s people, but very frequently that one of them, through the change of domicile, is actually transferred to the other one’s family group. And it implies other changes in the social grouping of people: either party passes from one social class into another, the bridegroom from the class of the bachelors to that of the married men, the bride from the class of the girls to that of the married women. This re-grouping also finds expression in the marriage ritual, as when the hair of the bride is arranged in the fashion of married women, or she ceremonially assumes the head-dress worn by them, or when the bride dances first with the unmarried girls and then with the married women, and the bridegroom first with the bachelors and then with the married men[339].
Here the dance is clearly in the nature of an initiatory ceremony into one class from another, and it has the effect of familiarizing each party with the new status and condition; it may, therefore, be regarded as serving a kind of prophylactic purpose.
This has taken us some way from the sword-dance; but it all really arises from this; for all that has been said points to the belief in the existence of undefined dangers in marriage, and the means to counteract these; and numberless other examples are available. But our main point here is to show how frequently, for whatever reasons, the dance has a part to play in the rites performed.
III
We take now a brief glance at one or two other wedding ceremonies in which the dance figures prominently. We have seen that at Harvest Festivals dances were performed by some peoples for the purpose of making the crops grow. Either by leaping high during the dance, or by the dancers personating the spirits of fertility, or by dances of other kinds, it was believed that the desired effect could be produced. Two ideas often coalesce in such dances: that of a propitiatory act in honour of the god of fertility, and that of an act of imitative magic; but, of course, the two are not always or necessarily combined in the same dance. The purpose of this type of dance, however, is not confined to that of ensuring good crops. We are told, for example, that among the Mandan Indians on the occasion of their great annual festival, a man acts the part of a buffalo bull in the buffalo dance, “the object of which was to ensure a plentiful supply of buffaloes during the ensuing year[340].” To the same circle of ideas belongs that according to which a plentiful supply of fish can be procured by dancing[341]. Instances need not be multiplied. It is evident that the belief was, and probably still is, widespread of dancing being the means of ensuring fertility. Now if this was so in regard to crops and animals, may it not be possible that the same belief existed in regard to human beings? Even though the purpose might have been entirely forgotten the practice might still be continued. It is conceivable that this idea, though forgotten, may underlie the ceremony of “the cleaning of the wheat” to be used at the wedding feast among the Moroccans; this is performed by married women and girls; while some of them are cleaning the wheat others dance and sing, keeping time by clapping their hands; it is so necessary that the dancing should continue during the whole ceremony that when the dancers get tired others take their place[342]. Among the same people the wazara (see [p. 184]) perform a ceremonial dance in the house of the bride[343]. This may also have been the original purpose of the epithalamium among the Greeks, sung after the wedding feast in the evening before the door of the bridal chamber by a chorus of maidens who danced while they sang; Theocritus refers to this in his eighteenth Idyll (“The Epithalamium of Helen”):
And so in Sparta long ago the maids
With blooming hyacinths their locks among,
Within the halls of fair-haired Menelaus