An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Dancing, its Use in Witchcraft

Dancing is one of the activities, like poetry and music, which are essentially magical. All primitive people have ritual dances, not only for enjoyment, but with some purpose behind them. They dance for life, and they dance also for death; as the Irish still do for ’wakes’, to give the deceased person a good send-off on their journey to the Other World.

Dancing is very often imitative magic. The witches danced on riding-poles, leaping to make the crops grow tall. The riding-pole between the legs was a phallic symbol, a bringer of fertility and continuer of life. The witches of Aberdeen in 1596 were accused of gathering upon St. Katherine’s Hill, and there dancing “a devilish dance, riding on trees, by a long space”. Much earlier, in 1324, an Irish witch, Dame Alice Kyteler, was accused of having “a pipe of ointment, wherewith she greased a staff, upon the which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin, when and in what manner she listed”. This kind of dancing helped to give rise to the legend that witches rode through the air on staffs or broomsticks.

Another kind of witch dance is the round dance, performed around a person or around some object such as a tree or a bonfire. The aim of the round dance is to raise power. When it is done with some person, probably the leader of the coven, in the middle, then that person is directing the ’Cone of Power’ that is being raised. The Stone Age witch dance depicted in the cave-painting at Cogul is of this type. When done around a tree, a bonfire, or perhaps an old sacred stone, it can be simply for enjoyment and exhilaration, and for invocation and worship of the Old Gods by this means. Witches have the idea that the gods enjoy seeing people happy, and this is therefore an acceptable form of worship.

A third kind of witch dance is a spiral, which is danced into the centre and out again. This symbolises penetration into the mysteries of the Other World. It is sometimes called ’Troy Town’, after the old maze pattern, which was supposed to resemble the walls of Troy. Britain has a number of turf-cut mazes scattered throughout the countryside, mostly of unknown date but certainly very old. They are connected with the ancient British Mysteries. The dwelling-place of dead heroes, and of the Cauldron of Inspiration, was called Spiral Castle by the old Bards.

The idea of using a maze to represent penetration into another world was taken up by Christianity, and the maze-pattern can sometimes be found in old churches, with ’Heaven’ or ’Zion’ in the centre.

So much did the ring dance come to be associated with witchcraft, that in Sussex the ’fairy-rings’ found upon the grassy Downs are called ’hag-tracks’, from the belief that they are formed by the dancing feet of witches. They are regarded as nautral magic circles, and used to this day by country folk for various private magics; though this is done in a very quiet and secret manner.

Witches are traditionally supposed to dance back to back. This seems to have been mainly a kind of frolic. The author of A Pleasant Treatise of Witches (London, 1673), says: “The dance is strange, and wonderful, as well as diabolical, for turning themselves back to back, they take one another by the arms and raise each other from the ground, then shake their heads to and fro like Anticks, and turn themselves as if they were mad.” This sounds like a very fair description of some of our present-day dancing: the Jive, Rock and Roll, the Twist, and so on!

In fact, the witch-dancing he is talking about was probably very much like our young people’s dancing today, free and uninhibited. Respectable folks in those days danced very formal and courtly dances, and thought any other style of dancing vulgar and immoral.

It may well have been the witches who founded modern dancing; because Reginald Scot quotes Bodin as saying that “these night-walking or rather night-dancing witches brought out of Italy into France, that dance which is called La Volta”. La Volta is the dance that is believed to be the origin of the waltz, whose exciting rhythms gradually superseded the old stately minuets and pavanes, and paved the way for the livelier dances we know today.

Dancing has a very important magical effect upon people. It unites them in unison, by the rhythm of the beat of the dance. A group of people dancing in harmony together are of one mind, and this is essential to magical work. Their mood can be excited or calmed, by varying the pace of the dance. In fact, a state of light hypnosis can be induced by magical forms of dancing; or people can achieve a state of ecstasy, which in its original form is ex-stasis, ’being outside oneself’.

That is, the everyday world is left behind, with its squalor and cares; and the magical realms open. The old witch dances helped people to attain this experience, and it was the excitement and enjoyment of the wild dancing, by night in the open air or in some deserted ruin or secret rendezvous, that was one of the main attractions of the Old Religion, and made it so difficult for the Church to extirpate it.

It put colour and enjoyment into the common people’s lives, when they had little enough to look forward to but a life of hard toil and submission. Many ot its ceremonies and usages have spilled over into folk custom that is still alive and vigorous today; such as, for instance, the famous Horn Dance at Abbot’s Bromley in Staffordshire. In fact, a great many of our colourful and time-honoured folk-customs have something of the old nature-worship and wisecraft at the heart of them.

The round dance is an imitation of the circling stars, the movement of the heavenly bodies. Consequently it is a kind of imitation of the universe. It is the wheel of the seasons, the wheel of life itself, of birth and death and rebirth. To dance it is to enter into the secret and subtle harmonies of Nature, and become one with the Powers of Life. Something of this is what the witches felt, and still feel, when they dance. A dance can be a prayer, an invocation, an ectsasy, or a spell. It is world-old and world-wide magic.