Dance as Method and Experience: Emotional and Epistemic Aspects of Dance
This chapter elucidates philosophical and religious aspects of ancient dance discourse. It traces novel connections from the poetic and philosophical motif of the dance of the stars to later ancient dance discourse. A link is found in the genre of exhortations (protreptics) to philosophy, which influenced Lucian’s On Dancing, and in the philosophical ideal of heavenly contemplation. The latter yields a particularly interesting variation by Augustine, who finds in dance spectacles an occasion to know things through themselves. The remainder of the chapter discusses the evidence for the role of dancing in ancient mystery cults and argues that in this context dance represents a way to attain cognition through sensory and emotional experience. This path is pursued further with an examination of the early Christian dance ritual depicted in the apocryphal Acts of John.