Tradition and grammar: tribal morris dancers, and Paganism versus paganism
Okay, this has to be the strangest headline I’ve come across in a while: Hey nonny no, no, no: Goths and pagans are reinventing morris dancing, from The Independent, with the sub-heading, ‘Why the newcomers are putting the fear of God into the traditionalists’. The ‘traditionalists’ are those who perform morris dancing without any appreciation or awareness of its Pagan origins, which they dispute. The dance we recognise today was cleaned up and given a Christian makeover in the late 19th century, completing the divorce from its original celebratory and ecstatic Beltane purpose as a fertility dance. What’s remarkable is that it survived so many centuries in any form whatsoever when so many aspects of our Pagan past were eradicated by the Church.
tags: Beltane, capitalisation, celebration, Celts, Christianity, dance, goths, grammar, Islam, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, morris dancing, Muslims, Paganism, religion, ritual, spirituality, tradition, Witchcraft
