So he became a dancer to God.
—T. S. Eliot Dance and spiritual practice sometimes relate strongly to each other. No one how-to or do-it-yourself manual can tell everyone how to achieve transcendence through an altered state. For some, the best means of attaining an out-of-body experience comes through the body itself, through the ecstatic ritual of dance. The liturgy of Christian worship may seem excessively verbal and slow-moving, even stalled, but in every single one of its expressions it involves motions as well as words. We would not go too far to say that the prayer books of many denominations seek to formulate for worshipers a coherent message from both a choreography of ritualized steps and a content based on set texts. Analyzed against this backdrop, the juggler had landed in a quandary. As an illiterate lay brother, he was not permitted to participate in the sequence of motions, and he could not understand the foundational texts. The scriptures and formal ceremonies were unintelligible to him. Although not anti-intellectual, he was inalterably unintellectual. What was to be done? His achievement came in dreaming up a silver bullet all his own. His leggy liturgy was a worship with movements and language of his own creation. A clash and crisis follow, since his veneration through dance is initially indecipherable to the other monks. We have competing, mutually uncomprehending, and uninterpretable illiteracies, the one of texts and the other of dance.
Despite the distinctly detail-oriented description that the poet of Our Lady’s Tumbler furnishes, we cannot reconstruct the tumbler’s jumps in their entirety. We are unable to state with assurance how a single move in it would look, or even to establish for sure whether the act was properly a dance, a gymnastic routine, a fusion of the two, or something different again. We do know that a multitude of religious systems, distributed widely across time and space, have allowed for the physical expression of ritual adoration—for sacred performance. In ancient Greece, the athletic competitions of the Olympic Games were tied so tightly to religious festivals in honor of Zeus that they ceased only when the Christian emperor Theodosius banned such pagan cults.
In pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, ballgames constituted symbolic and ritual actions while they also served the purposes of politics and entertainment. In Buddhism, monks still dance to offer their bodies to the Buddha.
This is obviously not to say that all dances have been accepted in any religion, and even less that any type of such rhythmic stepping has been rubber-stamped across the full religious spectrum. From the Fathers of the Church through the Middle Ages, Christianity showed itself highly disposed to condemn dancing. Many ecclesiastical councils and synods, as well as texts concerned with penance, leave the distinct impression that priests wished to extirpate dance. The taboos held with remarkable hardiness against any movement remotely resembling it during divine service,
especially in sermons and sacred processions. By the same token, dancing elicited frowns and furrowed brows when it took place in hallowed sites, such as churches, churchyards, and cemeteries. By both timing and place, the conduct of the lay brother in Our Lady’s Tumbler was glaringly provocative to orthodox views within Christianity.
In almost every way imaginable, but particularly in this one regard, he challenges the inelasticity of the dissociation that the Church sought to impose between lay and clerical culture.
During the same span of a millennium and a half, Christians never stopped gyrating for long. Despite hostility to the medium, some of the recurrent denunciations themselves confirm that dancing took place. In fact, even priests engage in ritual dances sometimes.
In special cases, the physical activity could lead to mystical experiences. Through balletic performance the tumbler could have attained a state of altered consciousness that is achieved through the manner of movement known as trance dance. This type of effortful motion facilitates entry into ecstasy. Such a condition of heightened being is achieved, above all, in religious rituals. A particularly ancient manifestation is the leaping for which the followers of the Greek god Dionysus were known in Greece. It was associated with the choral song or chant known as the dithyramb, which to this day is associated with wildness and irregularity. In dances associated with possession, the participants may undergo visitations from spirits that take hold of them. Incidentally, they may do spectacular feats beyond their normal abilities.
The line between religious ritual and entertainment is often porous, especially in the case of fire-walking (see Fig. 2.4). As captured in an image of Fijian men from the 1960s, this sort of religious ritual features barefooted people who lope unharmed over white-hot stones or coals. The tumbler’s performance resembles the custom of the Pacific islanders mainly in his ability to locomote through what a person in a normal state might have experienced as extreme discomfort. The joys of his movement and his worship are analgesic in the same way as religious ecstasy protects pyro-peripateticists.
Medieval asceticism and mysticism abound in manifestations of devotion that originate in self-inflicted suffering. The order of white monks is devoted in large part to the expression of piety through penance. Their goal is to merit intercession, not merely for themselves but also for others. Cistercianism included its fair share of devotees who inflicted penitential pain upon themselves. Alongside exaltation and exultation, the lay brother would have braved with gritted teeth the pain of penitential prayer and worship. The tumbler’s self-imposed physical torment, although whipless, faintly resembles that of radicals in the late medieval movement known as flagellantism who lashed themselves with scourges or cat-o’-nine-tails (see Fig. 2.5). In turn, the European flagellants bring to mind the pious in the yearly ʿAshūrāʾ ritual in Twelver Shiʿism, who march through the streets flogging themselves in remembrance of al-Ḥusayn, the Prophet’s martyred grandson. Loosely similar to both groups, the gymnast puts himself on a treadmill of self-annihilation through physical expression of devotion.
By continuing despite exhaustion, he kills himself through the enactment of his love for Mary, working or worshiping himself to death. In the story of Our Lady’s Tumbler,
the acrobat suffers the reality suggested by the etymology of contrition, which derives ultimately from a Latin participle for “broken” or “ground down.” He is stomped down through the stamping of his own feet.
Fig. 2.4 Postcard depicting Fijian fire-walking (Suva, Fiji: Stinsons, 1967).
Fig. 2.5 Trade card depicting a flagellant procession in Avignon, 1574 (London: Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company, 1903).
Fig. 2.6 Pieter Brueghel the Younger (attributed), The Pilgrimage of the Epileptics to Molenbeek, late sixteenth to early seventeenth century. Oil on panel, 29.2 × 62.2 cm. Image from Wikimedia
Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dance_at_Molenbeek.jpg
The late Middle Ages and early modern era witnessed their own distinctive manifestations of dances in dazes. These phenomena peaked in number and intensity from the late fourteenth down through the seventeenth century. In these events, packs of people would go berserk and engage in a frenzied mass hysteria of dancing in the streets. Such manic episodes hinged upon collective dance that was associated with music, sometimes allegedly either precipitated or palliated by the playing of instruments (see Fig. 2.6). The causes of the flare-ups remain disputable. One explanation that has gained traction lays the blame on poisoning, the culprit being either toxins from infected foodstuffs or bites from spiders or scorpions. Another line of reasoning sees the illness as having no real physiological etiology. Instead, the impulse would be psychogenic or psychosomatic. Supposedly this balletic “monkey see, monkey do” on a grand scale resulted from shared stress.
In contrast to the group dances of the laity, the tumbler’s performance is the solo act of an individual. So far as he is aware, his audience has just one member. His disporting is neither competitive nor spectator sport. Only the Virgin Mary watches him, through the proxy of the Madonna. He does not join others in ad hoc line dancing, but instead remains in solitude. What he does by himself is pray, but for his soliloquy he resorts not to verbose utterances, but to physical maneuvers. He apostrophizes the Virgin through his steps, without realizing that she sees and esteems what he accomplishes. Although not lonesome, the tumbler dances alone. The aloneness of his dance sets it far apart from collective dances, whether in rings or not. If such a thing as penitential dancing existed, it would be his atonement in this way. His dancing is also distinctive in not entailing possession by a spirit. On the contrary, it turns upon
performance before an image that leads to the appearance of a presence. But the balletic routine of the individual performer does set the stage for a death that makes him loosely comparable to the victims of the mass dance frenzies. He dances himself into oblivion. Before the tumbler dies, his practice results in a loss of self. Whether his state amounts to mania in any way equivalent to the madness of the maenads or bacchantes in Greek mythology remains open to debate. Likewise requiring further discussion is whether the leaping and falling match up with spiritual exaltation and depression.
Is the leaper subject to mood swings in tandem with his physical undulation? One surety is that late in the game he suffers, both physical and psychological, prostration as he buckles before the Madonna.
Christianity is the religion that enters the equation in Our Lady’s Tumbler and its diverse progeny. The tumbler coordinates his personal expression of devotion with the liturgical song of the monks who chant in the church above the crypt. Similarly, he aligns dance from the lay realm with monastic ritual. Both the liturgy and the performance of the tumbler prescribe movements that function as a language of signs.
Even so, we must not assume that the jongleur’s routine could correspond reductively, step by step, to an utterance or a text. In part, dancers dance to express what cannot be conveyed verbally, rather than to translate verbal pronouncements into physical actions. In this case, the tumbler makes into motion the emotion that moves more learned monks to transact the set words and gestures of worship.
The tumbler shares with the victims of dancing mania a compulsion to dance until he is emptied of all his cyclonic energy and crumples. Indeed, he could be said fairly to have danced himself into his grave. The outcome of self-immolation through this activity reappears in the nineteenth-century French ballet Giselle, or The Wilis, set in the Rhineland during the Middle Ages (see Fig. 2.7). Its star-crossed title character dies of a broken heart after catching wind that her lover is betrothed to another. The Wilis, who summon the peasant girl from her grave, target her beloved for execution, but her love extricates him from their grasp. In legend, these nightwalkers are the ghosts of young ladies who, having died before their wedding days, cannot remain at peace in their tombs. To fulfill the unbridled passion for dance that they could not sate during their lives, they dance in troupes at midnight. Woe betide the young man who meets these seductive spirits, since he must dance with them until he drops dead.
To look beyond the motif of death through nonstop dancing, the routine of the jongleur anticipates approximately the enthusiastic vocalization and bodily movement that have been incorporated into the worship of various religions. For example, adherents of the American religious sect known as the Shakers sang and danced. Similarly, worshipers in some churches in the Southern United States engage in “praise dance” as a channel for sacred expression. Outside Christianity, the fevered steps of the tumbler bear comparison with the corkscrewing moves of dervishes. Such Muslim Sufi mystics wandered from place to place; stood apart from normal people in their dress, behavior, and language; and expressed their piety through a vigorously
athletic mélange of music and motion. Like them, the jongleur loses himself in a physicality of bodily movements and touch (by Mary), but, alone when he does his routine, it constitutes at once a private ritual and a one-person festival. More especially, the apparition of the Virgin herself from heaven relates to the collective delusions in medieval dancing mania. Are the collapses of the tumbler merely the unintended outcome of overexertion, or are they the purposeful results of performances designed to achieve ecstasy through whirling? We would do well to recall the etymology in Old English of giddy, which referred literally to scatterbrained possession by a God, and dizzy, which meant “foolish” or “witless.” Older still is the Greek enthusiasm, from a word meaning “possessed by a god.” Thus, our God-filled character was not a madcap innovator in doing his vertiginous dance before the Madonna.
Fig. 2.7 Front cover of Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Théophile Gautier, Giselle, ou les Wilis, illus. Célestin Nanteuil (Paris: J. Meissonnier, 1841). Image courtesy of Bibliothèque
nationale de France, Paris. All rights reserved.
The tale does not advocate the abandonment of conventional worship. Rather, it reminds us that traditional veneration exists as a conduit for a spirit of reverence, devotion, love, joy, and hope. All of us must decide for ourselves where soul or mind begins, and where body stops. Likewise, we must determine, for both ourselves and the tumbler, what constitutes thought and feeling, reason and faith. Finally, we should cogitate about song and instrumentation. If music of any sort is set aside, the performance is a form of acrobatics; if the rhythm and melody are internalized, dance results. (Break dancing, which is often held to have originated in the mid-1970s, is only the latest and best-known style of acrobatic dancing, with its spinning headstands, fancy footwork, tumbling, and pantomime.) Laying down a boundary between the two can be ticklish, even impossible.