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The Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology, and the Origins of European Dance. By Elizabeth Wayland Barber. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. Pp. xiii + 439, dedication, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 hardcover.)
Elizabeth Wayland Barber writes about dancing as a means of influencing the progress of life-of assuring that families and land are fertile and that communities draw together in mutual purpose. She begins The Dancing Goddesses with an exploration of female forest and water spirits prominent in the folklore and folkways of Eastern and Central Europe. These ruslaki, willis, and mermaids are the spirits of young women who died before having children and whose unused fertility might be tapped by others. Barber traces the presence of these female spirits through stories, courting and marriage customs, images, and dances. Having called them forth, she moves back in time, from the medieval period to the beginnings of agriculture, in a quest to understand and explain pre-Christian belief systems according to which dance, the act of moving together in time, produced change.
In writing about dance, Barber merges two life-long passions. She uses...