I Cant Be The Only Pagan On Tumblr Who Enjoys Dance As A Devotional Or Ecstatic Practice.

I can’t be the only Pagan on tumblr who enjoys dance as a devotional or ecstatic practice.

That’s me last night, spinning hoops. I went to a dance club with a fellow Pagan last night. We both have described trancing out while dancing… feeling the sensation of being lifted, of my particles spreading out and pulsing to the rhythm of the music… of blissful union with divinity. 

I used to be able to reach this state with drums and fire only. Primal. But lately, lights and smoke and the pounding energy of other revelers have been able to get me there. It’s incredible energy. As I gaze into the lights after my third drink, my heart says a prayer to Dionysus, and I feel I am a maenad, tearing at the walls of mundane life, letting my soul (and voice!) scream and yell, and twirl and clap, and spin, and spin, and spin…

Is anyone else an ecstatic or devotional dancer? Anyone else make revelry of some sort a part of your practice? 

Dionysos finds his Maenads among women who can’t stand any longer being locked into the domestic enclosure. They become wild women who break their chains in order to follow Dionysos the Liberator.

Ginette Paris, Pagan Grace: Dionysus, Hermes, and Goddess Memory In Daily Life

I DID IT. I DID THE THING.

Attributed to Anne-Louis Girodet (1767-1824),Title Unknown (Detail) Oil on canvas, 18th/19th Century

Anthesteria’s second day: Khoes, the Day of Pitchers, Feast of Swinging

First she offered him her cup, and he filled it with his divine wine. Then He returned to Her the crown of His love, and the two ascended together into the heavens where Her crown is still seen among the stars…

Anthesteria started yesterday with a festival of flowers, a procession from the waters to the city, a Masked Man adored by wild women and satyrs and other, stranger folk.  But today… today it starts to get weird.

It could be the drinking, yes.  The pithoi jars have been opened, the wine has been mixed and blessed, there is no shortage.  Rampant and massive public drunkenness rules the streets, wine flows like water.  Drinking contests are set up, men and women celebrate the swinging rites of Aiôra and set up swings to play upon like children, hanging dolls and masks also to swing from the trees like Erigone of old.  

But what really makes the day of Khoes weird… are the ghosts.

Not the beloved personal dead whose faces we know and love or fear, but the public dead are these ghosts, our Keres.  The spirits of those nameless crowds of people whose lives moved here before ours, whose stories played out and ended, whose pasts fill our community with untold tales and unwhispered names.  They move through us every day, but on this day, maybe with the help of the wine, we FEEL them.  We hear the soundless echoes of their footfalls, their shouting, their laughter, their quiet murmuring talk.  We feel full to bursting with all those who lived in our home, our neighborhood, those who walked our streets, those who gathered in the parks we go to.

And to make it just that little bit weirder, along with the ghosts and the dry dusty whispers of death and time, we feel the stirrings of a powerful sexual tide moving through us, individually and communally.  It binds us generally if not specifically — each of us has lusted, hungered, longed for touch and heat and passion and release.  Even the ghosts, now cold and untouchable.  The serpent stirs in us, the hot fluids rise, the erotic awareness of bud and flower and stem and root fill every glance at the sacred flowerbeds.  We have drunk the wine, we have felt the wildness rise in us.  We want to dance, and laugh, and kiss, and caress, and fuck, and explode.

Like a fever, it spreads, then reaches a peak as the evening slides languorously into night.  In the most sacred places, the most innermost of temples, the greatest rite is performed, the sacred marriage between the God and the Basalinna, the Sacred Queen.  A man and a woman writhe together and become one — a priest and priestess — a maenad and a satyr — Dionysus and Ariadne.  And the city shudders in the night with prismatic visions of wine-saturated paradise and release.

Liberation.

Eleleu!  Eleleu!  Iou!  Iou!  Hail and welcome the Reveller.