Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
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This form of confrontation might well have carried over into communal forms of hunting, in which game animals are driven by the human group into nets or cul de sacs or over cliffs. Many of the game animals hunted by prehistoric humans—like bison and aurochs—were themselves dangerous, and to confront them required courage. In communal hunting, the entire group—men, women, and children—advances against a herd of game animals, shouting, stamping, and waving sticks or torches. The archaeological evidence suggests that this form of hunting goes back to the Paleolithic era and possibly predates the practice of stalking individual animals by small groups of men.10 As in collective defense against predatory animals, synchronous movement could have augmented the human group’s effectiveness—making it appear to be a single, oversized antagonist.
Various features of the prehistoric dancing revealed in rock art are consistent with this hypothesis. The prehistoric dancing figures often sport high headgear or head-expanding masks, often in the form of animal faces; they wave branches above their heads. One can imagine danced rituals originating as reenactments of successful animal encounters, serving both to build group cohesion for the next encounter and to instruct the young in how the human group had learned to prevail and survive.
Over time, as communal hunting waned and the threat of animal predators declined, the thrill of the human triumph over animals could still be reinvoked as ritual. Through rhythm, people had learned to weld themselves into a single unit of motion meant to project their collective strength and terrify the animals they hunted or that hunted them. Taken individually, humans are fragile, vulnerable, clawless creatures. But banded together through rhythm and enlarged through the artifice of masks and sticks, the group can feel—and perhaps appear—to be as formidable as any nonhuman beast. When we speak of transcendent experience in terms of “feeling part of something larger than ourselves,” it may be this ancient many-headed pseudocreature that we unconsciously invoke.
The God of Ecstasy
Once we leave the realm of speculation that is prehistory and enter the historical period, beginning roughly five thousand years ago, written records and abundant works of art provide a firmer basis for understanding human cultures. We know from these writings and artifacts that danced rituals persisted into the early phases of civilization—a condition marked by the rise of agriculture, cities, social hierarchies, and, eventually, writing. Vase and wall paintings depicting lines and circles of dancers have been found in ancient Mesopotamian, Greek, Indian, and Palestinian archaeological sites. Rural people in ancient China danced in separate lines of men and women, and observed ecstatic rituals well into historical times. As the French scholar of Chinese history Marcel Granet reported:
The festivals of the winter season had a dramatic character. Extreme excitement was general. Even in the day of Confucius, those who took part were all “like madmen” (meaning that they felt themselves filled with a divine spirit) … Dances, to the sound of clay timbrels, induced a state of ecstasy. Drunkenness brought it to perfection. The exorcists [a kind of shaman] wore the skins of animals. Animal dances were performed.11
In the ancient Near East, the Old Testament makes it clear that the ancient Hebrews enjoyed a robust tradition of festive dancing, usually associated with feasting and wine-drinking. In Exodus, for example, Miriam the prophetess takes “a timbrel [tambourine] in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances.” When the Israelite forces returned from their victory over the Philistines, “the women came out of all cities of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet king Saul, with tabrets, with joy, and with instruments of musick” (1 Samuel 18:6). It is not clear whether the officially approved rites and dances achieved an intensity that could be called ecstatic. One historian has concluded that “orgiastic, vigorous ecstasy is alien to the Israelite prophets,” who instead experience “a calm, sometimes paralytically calm, seeing and hearing of the word of YHWH.”12 But as Garfinkel observes, the Hebrew word hag means both “festival” and to “go in a circle”—suggesting that the primordial form of many traditional Jewish festivals was the circle dance.13
There was, without question, a tradition of collective ecstasy among the Hebrews, but it was hardly officially approved. In fact, we know of it only through its opponents, the worshippers of Yahweh who wrote the Old Testament. This was the old polytheistic religion associated with Israel’s indigenous Canaanites, centered on Mesopotamian deities like Baal and the goddesses Anat and Asherah, and featuring what seem to have been mass ecstatic rites, the nature of which we can only guess at. Idolatry, drunkenness, and sexual orgies are described or hinted at, and possibly human sacrifice; at least that seems to have been the crime committed by King Asa’s goddess-worshipping grandmother, who lost “the honor of being a great lady because she had committed a horror for Asherah.”14 How much of these charges was slanderous there is no way of knowing, but something was going on, generation after generation, that horrified Yahweh’s faithful. Centuries after Moses delivered the commandment to worship only the one God, Yahweh, the prophets were still railing against the old religious ways. The Hebrews couldn’t keep themselves from backsliding and were apparently performing the forbidden goddess-centered rites as late as the fifth century BCE.15
But it was the Greeks, the supposedly most rational and “Western” of ancient peoples, who left us the clearest evidence of ecstatic ritual behavior, verging on the dangerously disruptive. Dance, whether of the ecstatic or more stately variety, was a central and defining activity of the ancient Greek community: line and circle dances, dances of young men or young women or both together, dances at regularly scheduled festivities or what appear to have been spontaneous outbreaks, dances for victory, for the gods, or for the sheer fun of it.16 In myth, Theseus leads the young men and women he has freed from the Minotaur in a circle dance performed with “crane steps,” imitating the high-stepping wading bird.17 In Homer’s account of the heroic age, we learn that young Greeks danced “at marriages, at vintage, or simply to give vent to their youthful exuberance—choreia [dance], the Greeks think, must come from chara, ‘joy.’”18 Achilles’ shield bore the image, not of some terrifying predator, but of a scene that must have seemed, to his homesick comrades in arms, quintessentially Greek.
There were youths dancing, and maidens of costly wooing, their hands upon one another’s wrists … And now would they run round with deft feet exceeding lightly … and now anon they would run in lines to meet each other. And a great company stood round the lovely dance in joy; and among them a divine minstrel was making music on his lyre, and through the midst of them, leading the measure, two tumblers whirled.19
Dance was a ubiquitous theme of ancient Greek art. Dancing figures commonly graced their vases, and the great dramas of classical times were musical performances in which the chorus danced as well as sang. In fact the word tragedy is derived from words meaning goat and song, and the chorus was originally composed of men dressed in goatskins to resemble the satyrs—half men and half goat—who danced attendance on their master, the god Dionysus.
To an extent we can only guess at today, the religion of the ancient Greeks was a “danced religion,” much like those of the “savages” European travelers were later to discover around the world. As Aldous Huxley once observed, “Ritual dances provide a religious experience that seems more satisfying and convincing than any other … It is with their muscles that humans most easily obtain knowledge of the divine.”20
Lillian Lawler, writing in the 1960s, leaves no doubt that ecstatic dancing was indigenous to the mainstream Greek tradition, in, for example, the worship of Artemis, goddess of childbirth and the hunt. Tympana, or kettle drums, have been found at the shrine of Artemis Limnatis in southern Greece, and this instrument, Lawler claims, was “helpful in inducing frenzy.” Dances to Artemis were known to be especially wild in Sparta—though whether in a religious or sexual sense we do not know, only that women and girls danced wearing “only one chiton,” or the eq
uivalent of a slip.21
Within the ancient Western world, many deities served as the objects of ecstatic worship: in Greece, Artemis and Demeter; in Rome, the imported deities Isis (from Egypt), Cybele, the Great Mother, or Magna Mater (from Asia Minor), and Mithras (from Persia). But there was one Greek god for whom ecstatic worship was not simply an option; it was a requirement. To ignore his call was to risk a fate far worse than death or even physical torture; those who resisted him would be driven mad and forced to destroy their own children. This god, source of both ecstasy and terror, was Dionysus, or, as he was known to the Romans, Bacchus. His mundane jurisdiction covered vineyards and wine, but his more spiritual responsibility was to preside over the orgeia (literally, rites performed in the forest at night, from which we derive the word orgy), where his devotees danced themselves into a state of trance. The fact that the Greeks felt the need for such a deity tells us something about the importance of ecstatic experience in their world; just as their pantheon included gods for love, for war, for agriculture, metalworking, and hunting, they needed a god to give the experience of ecstasy a human form and face.
Far more so than most of his fellow deities, Dionysus was an accessible and democratic god, whose thiasos, or sacred band, stood open to the humble as well as the mighty.22 As Nietzsche envisioned his rites: “Now the slave emerges as a freeman; all the rigid, hostile walls which either necessity or despotism has erected between men are shattered.”23 It was Nietzsche, of all the European classical scholars, who emphasized the Dionysian roots of ancient Greek drama, who saw the mad, ecstatic inspiration behind the Greeks’ stately art—who, metaphorically speaking, dared consider not just the deathless symmetry of the vase but the wild dancing figures painted on its surface. What the god demanded, according to Nietzsche, was nothing less than the human soul, released by ecstatic ritual from the “horror of individual existence” into the “mystical Oneness” of rhythmic unity in the dance.24
Women, above all, responded to Dionysus’s call. In fact, the association between the god and his band of female devotees is so strong that it’s worth underscoring the fact that men also worshipped him, whether at village festivals to celebrate the new wine or by piously getting drunk together in honor of the god. But Dionysus had a special appeal to the women of the Greek city-state, who were ordinarily excluded from much of public life. While men plotted wars or devised philosophies, women’s activities were largely confined to the domestic sphere, and boys still young enough to be kept in the women’s quarters were said to live “in darkness,” barred from the pleasures and challenges of public life. In many Greek cities, women were not even allowed to drink wine.25
The most notorious feminine form of Dionysian worship, the oreibaia, or winter dance, looks to modern eyes like a crude pantomime of feminist revolt. In mythical accounts, women “called” by the god to participate drop their spinning and abandon their children to run outdoors and into the mountains, where they dress in fawn skins and engage in a “frenzied dance.” These maenads, as Dionysus’s female cult members were called, run through the woods calling out the name of the god, or uttering the characteristic bacchic cry “euoi,” they toss their hair and brandish their thyrsos—sticks to which pinecones have been attached. Finally, they achieve a state of mind the Greeks called enthousiasmos—literally, having the god within oneself—or what many cultures in our own time would call a “possession trance.” These were not solely mythical events; in some times and places, the oreibasia was officially condoned and scheduled for every other year, in the dead of winter. Pausanias, who wrote in the second century CE, tells of a party of maenads who reached the eight-thousand-foot summit of Mt. Parnassus—an impressive athletic achievement, especially if performed in the winter—and Plutarch wrote of an occasion when a group of female worshippers were cut off by a snowstorm and had to be rescued.26
Dionysus was no respecter of ethnic boundaries. According to the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, the worship of gods resembling Dionysus ranged over five thousand miles, from Portugal through North Africa to India, with the god appearing under various names, including “Bakkhos, Pan, Eleuthereus, Minotaur, Sabazios, Inuus, Faunus, Priapus, Liber, Ammon, Osiris, Shiva, Cerenunnus,” and, we might add, the delightfully named Etruscan analog of Dionysus: Fufluns.27 In his brilliant rendition of the Indian epics, for example, Roberto Calasso describes the Hindu god Shiva as “this stranger, this woman-stealer, this enemy of our rules and ties, this wanderer who loves the ashes of the dead, who speaks of things divine to the lowest of the low, this man who sometimes seems crazy, who has something obscene about him, who grows his hair long as a girl’s.”28 Like Dionysus, Shiva bore an association with wine, his cult being “particularly widespread in the mountains where the vine is cultivated,” according to a Greek who lived in India in the fourth century BCE.29
In India, Krishna, too, exerted a Dionysian effect on women—especially those who worked as gopis, or cowherders, “charm[ing] them beyond caring by the sound of his flute in the forest, so that they left their homes, husbands, and families and fled to him in the night.”30 Inspired by Krishna’s example, the sixteenth-century religious teacher Caitanya built up a following of “women of … casteless groups, washerwomen or women of low castes.”31 “They danced ecstatically and sang; they were as if mad,” Victor Turner reported, going on to comment that “it is hard to think that there is nothing in common between the ecstatic communitas of Dionysus and that of Krishna. Indeed, Ovid’s puer aeternus [eternal boy, referring to Dionysus] came from … ‘Dark India girdled by the farthest Ganges.’”32 Other scholars, though, locate Dionysus’s origins in the prehistoric cultures—Cretan and Mycenaean—of Greece itself. The fact that he was often depicted as a homed god, or part animal, suggests that he may have been one of the older Greek gods, rather than a relatively recent import from India.
Maenadism, as the Greek women’s frenzied worship of Dionysus is called, seems not to have been inspired by the common feminine concern with fertility. This can be ruled out as an aim, the classicist E. R. Dodds argued, by the fact that the rite was observed biennially, rather than once a year, and that it was conducted in winter, on “barren mountain-tops,” rather than in the burgeoning fields of the spring that were the usual site for fertility rituals.33 Nor was there apparently anything sexual about the rites. In ancient vase paintings, the female worshippers are often depicted in the company of lascivious male satyrs, but the women fight them off with such weapons as a staff, a thyrsos, or even a “writhing snake.”34 The most famous literary account of maenadism, Euripides’ play The Bacchae, clearly refutes the notion that sex or even drunkenness was involved. Instead, an eyewitness reports to King Pentheus, who is obsessed with prurient curiosity about the maenads’ secret rites, that he came across the women sleeping: “They lay just as they had thrown themselves down on the ground—but with modesty in their posture; they were not drunk with wine, as you told us, or with music of flutes; nor was there any love-making in the loveliness of the woods.”35
No, the single most shocking feature of maenadism—to Euripides no less than to his readers today—was its reputed violence. At the height of their frenzy, the women worshippers were said to catch wild animals in the woods, tear them apart while still alive, and eat them raw. There are even words in Greek to describe these actions: sparagmos, for the rending of a living creature, and omophagia , for the eating of the raw meat, torn from the bones by hand. The victims included small creatures like snakes, but also deer and bear and wolves, and, in myth or fiction anyway, sometimes even humans; the plot of The Bacchae hinges on the revelers’ mistaking their own king for a lion and tearing him limb from limb.
Such treatment of animals may have been less repulsive to the Greeks, who practiced routine animal sacrifice, than it seems to us. The potentially shocking feature of the maenads’ behavior is that they, of course, are female. Usually they are said to kill their prey by hand, but in at least one depiction (on a pyxis, a container for s
alves), according to Lillian Joyce, two maenads, their hair flying out behind them, “suspend a deer belly up with its head hanging limply. This is the moment before the victim will be torn into pieces. The violence of the scene is revved up to a degree by the presence of the sword, a traditionally male implement.”36
Clearly, the maenads’ animal victims did not offer themselves up willingly for capture; the women who ran off into the mountains to worship Dionysus were also hunting. Lillian Portefaix has suggested that maenadism may have been a reenactment of archaic communal hunting—before metal weapons and the male monopolization of hunting skills—when a group of people or women alone would chase and surround their prey, killing it with whatever implements lay at hand and perhaps eating it on the spot.37 If I am right about the origins of danced rituals in communal hunting and other confrontations with animals—and the violence of the maenads is certainly consistent with this hypothesis—then maenadism would seem to be a very primordial form of festival: one in which dancing, revelry, feasting, and costuming still bore traces of the collective human encounter with animals.
It may be relevant here that, in myth, Dionysus occasionally takes the form of Zagreus, the great hunter. In their reenactment of prehistoric communal hunting, his worshippers were boldly subverting the division of labor between the sexes that prevailed in historic times. The maenad was beautiful and feminine, portrayed in vase paintings with long flowing hair and sometimes an exposed breast, which a fawn might suckle at. But she was also a hunter, who had acquired male strength and usurped the male monopoly over violence. In this way, the Dionysian rites offered the kind of “ritual of inversion” that could be found in the Roman festival of Saturnalia, European carnival, and the festivities of so many other cultures, in which members of subordinate groups—in this case, women—temporarily take the roles of their social superiors. During Saturnalia, masters had to wait on their slaves; carnival allowed peasants to impersonate kings; and Dionysian worship gave women license to hunt.