Praise Him with Timbrel and Dance

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 4 pages

Four pages from The Theosophist of June 1881, republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume III. It begins as a reply to a piece of journalism and turns into a short survey of religious dancing, with the epigraph from Psalm cxlix about praising the Lord's name in the dance with the timbrel and harp.

The occasion is a satirical column in a Brahmo paper mocking the New Dispensation church of Keshub Chandra Sen, and in particular its minister, who is described as having asked the Lord's help to dance and smile perpetually and then, believing the response given, shaved his head, took the vow of poverty, put on the dress, tied a brass anklet and began to dance. The reply first defends the satirised church on a technicality — the lovely and dignified epithets its critics complain of are said to be mild echoes of what Peter and Paul lavished on each other in days of old — and then defends the dancing itself in earnest. Mystical dancing is called a practice hoary with age and pregnant with occult philosophy, and the minister is said to have done wisely in adopting it. The precedent offered is King David, who danced before the Lord with all his might and uncovered himself in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, and promised to be more vile than that. The rest of the file widens the survey: the Dance of the Daughters of Shiloh during the Jewish Mysteries, the Leaping of the prophets of Baal, the Sabaean dance said to denote the motion of the planets round the sun, and the American Shakers of Mother Lee, who sing a hymn and then form a wide circle. The argument being made is that the mystics of nearly every religion and sect have at some time adopted the exercise, which is why a modern instance of it deserves explanation rather than ridicule.

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