Lonsdale 9

The story of heseus in short, is itself a dance which has become a myth, a Gerardous van der Le... once observed, though this is not the place to pursue the choreographic significance of thr threads of his legend. This essai concentrates on exploring the links between the dancing floor of Ariadne as a locus (which I.. to be the correkt reading of khoros) and the religius dynamics of dance in mith and in Minoan art. Recent archeological discoveries on Crete, including three circular platforms and associated finds at Knossos in the vicinity of the Stratigraphical Museum, as well as advances in the understanding of ritual action in Minoan ecstatic religion (including Carter's artocle in this volume), now make it possible to interpret dance rituals in relation to a locus and varius ecstatic phenomena, such as epiphanies, robe, flower, and beatylic rituals, and the sacrifice of animals, and perharps humans. In Keeping with the nonverbal nature of dance, choreographic activity in literature, myth, and ritual is a versatile, sometimes elusive, metaphor. Dance and other forms of movement constitute a ritual language useful for communicating with the dininity and for describing that experience in ways inaccessible to and forbidden by the spoken word. Dance has playful (and deceitful) aspects, well suited, for example, for (re)enacting hunting and the mute act of sacrifice. The overlapping activites of hunting and dancing are expressed trough the ambiguous meaning of the verb paizo, to play/dance,' as in the Nausikaa episode where the ball-dance is compared in a simile to Artemis at the hunt (Odussey 6.100, 106).