Another way to gain spiritual insight is through dance and music. Many Native American ceremonies involve dancing. Anthropologists have found that there are very few things which appear in all cultures of the world.
But one of those few things, which has been observed in every single culture that anthropologists have studied, is music and dance. In occupation sites of early humans, archeologists have found flutes and other evidence of music, and ancient rock art has shown human figures posing in what looks like dance moves. There is no logical reason why music and dance should be so important.
The question is, why is something that seems so useless, so universal?
This was one of those great mysteries that I never understood. I knew that I myself enjoyed music and dance, but I never logically understood it.
I also never understood why so many cultures have the dancers wear masks while performing the dance.
I think I gained some insight into this phenomenon when I was living in
One night I was in attendance at a Reyog practice, and I was taking photos of the dancers. The main character in Reyog dance is the Tiger King. The dancer that performs this role has to hold a heavy wood tiger mask (with a stuffed peacock on top of his head), holding this heavy mask by a wood insert that he clinches in his teeth. After this practice had gone on a long time, the Warok (or spiritual person) who was directing the dance practice, suddenly grabbed my camera out of my hands and dragged me onto the dance floor. He took the Tiger mask off the dancer and put it over my head, forcing me to grasp the wood insert with my teeth. Then the music started up, and everybody whooped and clapped as they encouraged me to dance.
I did not really know the steps to the dance of the Tiger King, but I started doing some American Indian dance steps that I had learned while living at the Pine Ridge Sioux reservation. The Ponorogans went crazy over this, snapping photos of me dancing with the other dancers.
At first, I thought my dancing was just for fun, though I could not laugh because I was holding the heavy wood Tiger mask with my clinched teeth. But as I continued dancing, something very strange happened to me. As I moved around dancing in the dark night, the light of the fire and several torches punctuated the darkness, and the movement of the other dancers broke up my view even moreso.
As I peered out of the little long and narrow slits of the eyeholes in the Tiger mask, my head and body movements allowed me to see only small parts of the scene. But as the mesmerizing music built in intensity, and I got more and more into the dance, it was like something flipped in my brain.
No longer was I peering through narrow slits into the physical scene, but I felt as if I was going beyond the surface world to peer into a deeper reality. The flashes of light and darkness, the swirling movement of the other dancers, now merged into a colorful reality that took me far beyond the dance floor of that small village in east Java.
It felt like a hallucinogenic experience, but without any drugs. The dance experience itself, and the different view of movement from behind the mask, had transported me into another, somehow more real, reality.
After this experience, I think I began to understand why dancers in so many cultures wear masks. The mask is not primarily for the viewing of the audience, but for assisting the dancer in moving beyond the limits of the rational world into the spiritual world beyond. I really felt like this was a spiritual experience.
I think modern religion has forgotten the spiritual significance of dance. Today, dance is relegated either to simple entertainment, devoid of religion, or it is done only with a potential sexual partner in a sexualized coupling.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is limited if we ignore a major purpose of dance in human history. Even the masked balls of early modern
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