a jealous god

The history of modern belly dance is incomplete and spotty, but even without tangible evidence we know that the sensuous and sexually provocative movements of this gorgeous dance form go back a long, long way. The dance is, in fact, older than history itself.

How do we know this? Because the movements of belly dance, the hip locks, shimmies, belly rolls, chest pushes, and sinuous arm movements, and the male responses to them express instincts embedded in every human psyche. They're hard to perfect, but at the same time as natural as breathing.

In ancient times, when gods and goddesses ruled the earth from their temples and sacred groves, before the one male god arose to drive out the old deities and impose his jealous paternalism, ritual marriage and its sexual fulfillment were integral components of goddess worship. Priestesses taking the part of Inanna in Sumer, Sekhmet in Egypt, and Ishtar in Babylon married and bedded their annual consorts, and it might be reasonable to assume the dance was an essential prelude to the event. The ancient temples of the goddess of fertility, love, and war might also have been centers of the sacred dance, where both ensemble and solo performances of the art occurred, and where candidates for priestesshood were trained and rehearsed.

Then came the Hebrews with their one emphatically paternalistic God who could brook no competition, and they quickly realized that his most daunting challenge came from beautiful Ishtar and her irresistible dance. Some of the Hebrew people "would not hearken to their Iudges, but they went a-whoring after other gods, and bowed themselves down vnto them: they turned quickly out of the way, which their fathers walked in, obeying the commandments of the Lord; but they did not so" (Judges 2:17). The beauty of the goddess had a hold on men which was not easily suppressed, and it took many generations and the advent of the Arab version of the one paternal God, Allah, to finally eliminate Ishtar in her many manifestations from the lands where she once ruled supreme.

But she could never be eliminated entirely because love of beauty and sexual desire are natural expressions of the most fundamental human traits, as well as expressions of the fact that we are bound to our animal bodies. And so she has returned in our own time, through the medium of the ancient dance.

I went to a celebration of Ishtar (modern form = Esther = "the star") this past Friday and watched the good, the indifferent, the unusual, and the spectacular versions of the ancient form enacted by living women (and one man!), including she who will not be named here, but is the living embodiment of Ishtar, the queen of heaven and the tribal dance.

D.B.
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