Dancing in the Streets Read online

  On the other hand, in many of the cultures in which it occurs, glossolalia is associated with what appear to be “altered states of consciousness”—among shamans, for example, or members of certain African charismatic Christian cults that also practice ecstatic dance. An ethnographic account of a Caddo harvest ritual in North America describes an old man delivering “a harangue of pure jargon in a hasty, high-pitched voice without saying an intelligible word.”32 In the 1970s, the linguist and anthropologist Felicitas Goodman surveyed glossolalic utterances in a number of different cultures and found what she thought was a universal intonational pattern within them, suggesting some common underlying mental state. In our own time, Christian tongue-speakers sometimes report feelings of bliss, as in the case of the Reverend Darlene Miller of Knoxville, Tennessee: “It’s a beautiful, peaceful, comforting feeling. You know the presence of God, the power of God. It is sweet, beautiful, a rushing sensation, a power of God throughout the body. It has to come forth in the audible voice of tongues. The body cannot control it.”33 Or to quote a modern Catholic charismatic, who first experienced glossolalia when praying alone: “And then it happened. Very quietly, very softly, I began to praise God in ecstatic language. And in that instant I understood that in giving myself to God, I was not consumed but fulfilled, complete. The Spirit was singing for me the inexpressible love I felt.”34

  In the ancient Mediterranean world, glossolalia was well known before the Christians and clearly associated with ecstatic experience, in particular with ecstatic prophecy. The Pythia, the priestess who delivered oracles at the Greek shrine at Delphi, ingested what were said to be laurel leaves—by chewing them or inhaling the smoke—before delivering predictions, which usually came out in unintelligible form, requiring detailed interpretation by priests. Apollo was supposed to be the source of her insights, except in the winter months, when Dionysus took over this responsibility. It is probably from the Delphic oracle that the early Christians got the idea of glossolalia as an appropriate way of expressing the feeling of being “possessed” by a deity or overcome by religious emotion.

  This is not to diminish the experience of early Christians or to say that they simply copied the Pythia and other Greek ecstatic adepts. But along with so many other bits of Greek culture, the early Christians may have absorbed the idea that glossolalia was a good way to communicate the fact that one has entered an extraordinary mental state, presumably granted by the deity. Some may indeed have “faked” it, that is, learned to make glossolalic utterances while in a normal, nonecstatic state of consciousness. And almost everyone could control its onset and duration—otherwise Paul’s injunction against excessive tongue-speaking would have been meaningless. Wayne A. Meeks argues that glossolalia was a more or less controlled and ritual element of early Christian worship, occurring “at predictable times, accompanied by distinctive bodily movements,” perhaps triggered by other ritual events, and serving to both increase the prestige of the gifted and heighten the solidarity of the group.35

  Without question, the early Christians themselves understood glossolalia as a sign of god-given ecstasy. To the second- and thirdcentury church leader Tertullian, for example, it was even a criterion of God’s favor, and he challenged the Gnostic heretic Marcion to match him if he could: “Let him produce a psalm, a vision, a prayer—only let it be by the Spirit, in an ecstasy, that is, in a rapture, whenever an interpretation of tongues has occurred to him.”36 Very likely, early Christians expected their meetings to be productive of extraordinary feelings—of communion, rapture, or bliss. Meeks suggests that the experience of baptism was another occasion for the experience of at least “mild dissociation,” because when the baptizands—naked and dripping—cried out “Abba!” (the Aramaic word for “father”), they signaled that “the Spirit” had entered and possessed them.37

  So it is fair to say that first- and second-century Christianity offered an experience in some ways similar to that provided by the Greek mystery cults and the “oriental” religions in Rome—one of great emotional intensity, sometimes culminating in ecstatic states. Unlike worshippers of Cybele, Christians did not slash themselves with knives (though a few, like Origen, did castrate themselves); and unlike Dionysus’s followers, they did not dash into the mountains and devour small animals. But they sang and chanted, leaped up to prophesy either in tongues or in normal speech, drank wine, and probably danced and tossed their hair about.

  Generalization is unwise here, since there may have been as many forms of Christian worship as there were Christian cells or congregations. It seems likely that Paul’s home congregation was unusually staid, with the tongue-speaking restricted to leaders like himself and the speaking in general left to male members of the group. At the other extreme of early Christian worship, there were the Montanists in Phrygia, led by Montanus and two female prophets, Priscilla and Maximilla, who prophesied in a state of trance and were said to indulge in ecstatic practices resembling those of the “oriental” religions. Montanus himself may have been a former priest of Cybele. It is worth mentioning, given the persistent tendency to confuse communal ecstasy and sexual abandon, that the Montanists were far more sexually puritanical than other Christians.38 Perhaps made more appealing by its ecstatic practices, the Montanist movement spread rapidly throughout Asia Minor in the second century and boasted Tertullian as its most prominent recruit.

  Of the “oriental” cults that swept through the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, Christianity is the only one to have survived in any form. The reason for its success, at least in the first two centuries, probably lies in a quality that the other cults never attained and, as far as we know, never even tried to attain: namely, a sense of community that could outlast the emotional charge of the ceremonies and rituals themselves. Burkert points out that the pagan mystery cults led “to integration into a ‘blessed chorus’ for celebrations … Yet festive togetherness of this kind does not outlast the festival; the chorus dances for a day or a night and is disbanded thereafter.”39 No doubt these cults had some sort of administrative structure to provide continuity—Isis and Cybele even had temples and priests—but the concept of a lasting community of the faithful takes hold only with Christianity. While the poor might find a few hours of ecstatic release in the cult of Dionysus or the Great Mother, they found concrete material support among the Christians, or at least a free meal, sponsored by their more affluent brethren, at every worship session. Single women and widows might achieve a temporary feeling of liberation in the pagan cults, but Christianity offered them an ongoing network of support, material as well as social.40 A Roman commentator observed, perhaps a little enviously, that Christians “recognize each other by secret marks and signs … everywhere they introduce a kind of religious lust, a promiscuous ‘brotherhood’ and ‘sisterhood.’”41

  Christian solidarity stemmed in part from Jesus’ sweet and spontaneous form of socialism, but it had a dark, apocalyptic side too. He had preached that the existing social order was soon to give way to the kingdom of heaven, hence the irrelevance of the old social ties of family and tribe. Since the final days were imminent, it was no longer necessary to have children or to even cleave to one’s (unbelieving) spouse or kin—a feature of their religion that “profamily” Christians in our own time conveniently ignore. Christians had only one another, clinging together in a community forged in part on eschatology. And through much of the first two centuries of the Common Era, their sense of doom was justified. The Romans hated the Christians for their clannishness, which exceeded that of the non-Christian Jews, and Roman persecution, in turn, pulled Christians ever more tightly together.

  But as Christianity evolved from suppressed cult to official Church, it shed both the loving solidarity and the communal ecstasies that enriched its early years. In Paul’s time, Christianity possessed no formal “structure of ministry and governance”—no hierarchy, in other words, and no gradient of prestige other than that derived from individual charisma.42 By the end of the first centu
ry, however, formal officers—bishops and deacons—make their appearance, and in the early fourth century, the emperor himself was converted, making Christianity the Roman Empire’s official religion. Little is heard of glossolalia after Paul’s time, and, starting in the middle of the fourth century, the Church began to crack down on religious dancing, especially by women. Basileios, the bishop of Caesarea, railed against the unseemly behavior of Christian women at the celebration of the Resurrection, and in terms suggesting that the Pauline insistence on head coverings had indeed been aimed at the suppression of ecstatic dancing in church.

  Casting aside the yoke of service under Christ and the veil of virtue from their heads, despising God and His Angels, they [the women] shamelessly attract the attention of every man. With unkempt hair, clothed in bodices and hopping about, they dance with lustful eyes and loud laughter; as if seized by a kind of frenzy they excite the lust of the youths. They execute ring-dances in the churches of the Martyrs and at their graves … With harlots’ songs they pollute the air and sully the degraded earth with their feet in shameful postures. 43

  Whether the women’s dances were really lewd or only appeared so to Baseleios, we have no way of judging, but there was a clear effort in the fourth century to “spiritualize” church dancing and eliminate what the Church authorities saw as its grosser, sensual aspects. In the fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus strained to distinguish an acceptably solemn form of dancing from the boisterous and suggestive alternatives.

  Let us sing hymns instead of striking drums, have psalms instead of frivolous music and song … modesty instead of laughter, wise contemplation instead of intoxication, seriousness instead of delirium. But even if you wish to dance in devotion at this happy ceremony and festival, then dance, but not the shameless dance of the daughter of Herod.44

  By the end of the fourth century, the fiery and intolerant John Chrysostom, the archbishop of Constantinople, virtually ended the discussion with his pronouncement: “For where there is a dance, there also is the Devil.”45 Very likely, some Christians merely continued pagan religious practices outside the purview of the Christian Church, because as late as 691 CE, we find the Council of Constantinople inveighing against the worship of Dionysus with the decree that “no man shall put on a woman’s dress nor a woman, clothes that belong to men, nor shall any disguise themselves with colic, satyr, or tragic masks, nor call out the name of disgusting Dionysos while pressing grapes in the press or pouring wine in vats.”46

  Social scientists of the twentieth century have tended to portray the early Church’s assault on ecstatic, or even festive, forms of worship as part of an inevitable process of maturation. In his classic 1971 book Ecstatic Religion, I. M. Lewis observed that “new faiths may announce their advent with a flourish of ecstatic revelations, but once they become securely established they have little time or tolerance for enthusiasm. For the religious enthusiast, with his direct claim to divine knowledge, is always a threat to the established order.”47 When a religion becomes established, possession experiences are discouraged and may even be seen as a form of “satanic heresy.” Lewis goes on: “This certainly is the pattern which is clearly and deeply inscribed in the long history of Christianity.”48 Max Weber, in The Sociology of Religion, approved of this process of settling down, if only from the “viewpoint of hygiene,” since “hysterical suffusion with religious emotionalism leads to psychic collapse.” 49 For him, the great developmental task facing each new religion was the substitution of a “rational system of ethics” for the earlier wildness of ecstatic inspiration. China had achieved this in the first century BCE, he observed, replacing its charismatic and festive indigenous religion with the cool rationality of Confucianism; and Christianity had done the same.50 The only major difference between the Chinese and the Roman Christian cases was, in Weber’s view, that Christianity had always upheld a “rational ethic”—“even in the earliest period, when all sorts of irrational charismatic gifts of the spirit were regarded as the decisive hallmark of sanctity.”51

  But how “rational” was the ethic that Christianity began with? There is nothing rational or calculated about Jesus’ command to turn the other cheek to the man who smites you, or to sell all that you have and give to the poor. As Jesus commands: “And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain” (Matthew 5:40–41). Christians in our own time wriggle mightily to evade these teachings,g which, from a cold, capitalistic perspective, look like sheer madness. But Jesus’ instructions may have made perfect sense to the early acolytes, who spoke in tongues and drank and danced together with their hair streaming. What are possessions, what is individual pride, to people who can routinely achieve ecstatic merger through their communal rites? The early Christian patriarchs may not have realized that, in attempting to suppress ecstatic practices, they were throwing out much of Jesus too.

  Weber was wrong, too, to suggest that Christians just tired of their strenuous and “hysterical” forms of worship; over time, these practices were increasingly forbidden to them. As the early Christian community became the institution of the Church, all forms of enthusiasm—in the original sense of being filled with or possessed by a deity—came under fire. And when the community of believers could no longer access the deity on their own, through ecstatic forms of worship, the community itself was reduced to a state of dependency on central ecclesiastic authorities. “Prophesying” became the business of the priest; singing was relegated to a specialized choir; and that characteristic feature of early Christian worship—the communal meal or feast—shriveled into a morsel that could only tantalize the hungry. But it was to take many centuries before large numbers of Christians came to accept this diminished form of Christianity.

  4

  From the Churches to the Streets: The Creation of Carnival

  Almost a thousand years after the early Church fathers issued their first condemnations of dancing in churches, we find the leaders of Catholicism still railing against ecstatic and “lascivious” behavior at Christian services. Judging from the volume of condemnations from on high, the custom of dancing in churches was thoroughly entrenched in the late Middle Ages and apparently tolerated—if not actually enjoyed—even by many parish priests. Priests danced; women danced; whole congregations joined in.h Despite the efforts of the Church hierarchy, Christianity remained, to a certain extent, a danced religion.

  In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Catholic leaders finally purged the churches of unruly and ecstatic behavior. They must have known that they could not prohibit such behavior in the society at large. If the people were so determined to frolic, condemnations and bans would not suffice; some kind of compromise had to be worked out—some kind of balance between obedience and piety on the one hand, and riotous good times on the other.

  The form that this compromise took helped shape European culture for centuries: Simply put, the laity could dance on Church holidays and otherwise amuse themselves more or less to their hearts’ content; they just could not do so in churches. Extruded from the physical realm of the church, the dancing, drinking, and other forms of play that so irritated the ecclesiastic authorities became the festivities that filled up the late medieval and early modern Church calendar: on saints’ days, just before Lent, and on a host of other occasions throughout the year. In its battle with the ecstatic strain within Christianity, the Church, no doubt inadvertently, invented carnival.i

  Elements of carnival had of course existed for centuries. “In the early and central Middle Ages,” observes the French historian Aron Gurevich, “carnival had not yet crystallized in time and space; its elements were diffused everywhere, and hence there was no carnival as such.”1 In his study of festive traditions in England, Ronald Hutton found that, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, many of the elements of festivity—such as dances around maypoles and the mockery associated with a “lord of misrule,” the English versio
n of a “king of fools”—were themselves relatively recent; in fact “many had been either introduced or embellished only a few generations before or even within living memory.” Gurevich offers no clue as to the reasons for the burst of festive creativity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and Hutton, too, comes up empty from his review of the English scene: “It must be concluded, very lamely, that there is no clear and obvious reason for the apparent greater investment in English seasonal ceremony during the later Middle Ages.”2

  But the dots can be connected. The reason for the expansion of festivities may be simply that festive behavior was increasingly prohibited within the churches. Once, people could rely on official church services as occasions for dancing and perhaps drinking and other forms of carrying on. As the services became more disciplined and orderly, people had to create their own festive occasions outside of church property and official times of worship, usually on holy days. “One thing is certain,” the historian Jean Delumeau writes. “People danced in both churches and cemeteries in the Middle Ages, especially on holidays such as the Feast of Fools, the Day of the Innocents, and so on, [until] the Council of Basel … ruled against this practice.”3 There may have been no burst of festive creativity in the late Middle Ages—only a change of venue.