The sacred dance

Our study is concerned with the “sacred” dance; that this epithet applied to the dance, at any rate during the earlier phases of its history and as still practised among many un...

an inductive study of the ideas and customs of savagery will show, firstly, that an awareness of a fundamental aspect of life and of the world, which aspect I shall provisionall...

So far as the Old Testament is concerned this subject of the dance in religious ritual illustrates a fact which biblical study, on the comparative basis, is bringing more and mo...

Various means were employed to bring about this ecstatic state, such as alcohol, and other drugs; but there can be little doubt that the most frequent, and certainly the most pr...

How large a _rôle_ dancing in its various forms must have played among the Israelites is shown by the fact that, either in the restricted or in the more extended sense, no less...

An illustration of the processional type of dance among the Israelites which immediately suggests itself is that of “David and all the house of Israel dancing before Jahwe with...

instruments, pipe, harp, and drum[108]; a similar representation occurs on a painted Etruscan vase (cxxxii. 4), while on a thin golden plate from a grave near Corinth[109] women...

And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my f...

The ritual encircling dance, whether in procession with measured tread or in the form of a dance-step—and both are varieties of what is essentially the same thing—is perhaps the...

An important department of our subject is that of the type of dance performed by the early prophets of Israel. We say the “early” prophets because the one account which the Old...

_Mazzôth_[233], or the feast of Unleavened Bread; this was a spring feast held when the sickle was first put to the standing corn and the first-fruits of the new crops were offe...

It is a natural and obvious thing that there should be expressions of joy on the occasion of victory; and, as dancing was one of the ways whereby joy was expressed, it is equall...

In the Old Testament there are quite a number of references to marriage[308], but there is very little about the ritual in connexion with or about the festivities which took pla...

There is no instance to be found in the Old Testament of dancing being performed as a mourning or burial rite; that must be acknowledged; yet in spite of this there are strong r...