Let's add some goddess flava...

Every Woman a Goddess

Dance is an ancient and instinctive expression of the life force, and probably predates drawing and painting as a form of creative activity. It is a form of magic: the dancer becomes amplified into a being endowed with supra-normal powers, and her personality is transformed. Dance is also an act of creation. It brings about a new situation and summons into the dancer a new and higher personality.

Underlying this celebration of dance is the distinct Indian attitude to the body and the senses. Neither is a temptation nor snare. The relationship of the body, senses, mind, intellect and soul is articulated in the Upanishads and is seminal to the world-view where the body is regarded as the abode of the divine and the divine descends in the body. Logically, the body beautiful is the temple of god and dance is a medium of invoking the divine within. Each form of dance - the stance, the movement and the context - is imbued with deep spiritual and symbolic significance. Dance reflects a state of being at the highest order of spiritual discipline (sadhana) and is hence considered a yoga. Its performance is a ritual act, a sacrifice of the personal self to a higher transcendental order. It is the medium which evokes the supreme state of bliss (ananda) and also the vehicle of release (moksha).

The metaphor of dance also lies at the heart of many creation myths. The life force expressed in the act of movement becomes a symbol of creation. Through the medium of dance, a woman embodies the progenitive powers of cosmic energy, through whom, according to an ancient dance treatise 'the entire phenomenal world is kindled into life.'

It does not come as a surprise therefore that in ancient times, a woman dancer was considered an inseparable part of any ritual worship in temples. Every temple of consequence had attached to it one or more dancers. Such women were known as Devadasis. These sacred dancers were symbolically married off to the presiding deity of the temple. Thus an 'ordinary' human woman was found holy enough to be married off to a god, the Lord of the temple. The transformation of an ordinary girl into a Devadasi was marked by important rituals, after the completion of which the woman was considered 'an ever auspicious woman' (nityasumangali). The traditional view holds that all women, by their very nature, share the power of the goddess. The devadasi initiation rites celebrate the merger of her individual female powers with those of the goddess. It is this quality of 'eternal auspiciousness' in a woman that brought into existence this tradition since the earliest times.

The importance of the devadasis can be gauged from the fact that their presence was deemed necessary at the slightest event of importance taking place in the temple, for example bathing the deity in the morning, or waving the sacred fire lamp in front of him. An important ritual was the participation in the twilight worship held at sunset. The 'junction' of twilight, when the day slips into the night, is considered extremely dangerous, and so the gods need all the support and attendance they can get. The ritual waving of the lighted lamp by a devadasi was considered the most effective method of warding off an inauspicious state of the divine. Thus their participation in the affairs of the temple was not restricted to dancing on important religious festivals and events, without which the celebrations were thought of as incomplete, but also managing the day-to-day activities along with the officiating priest. But dance of course remained their most accomplished contribution; indeed the life of a devadasi required a strict adherence to dancing schedules and practice. Dance is potentially both sensual and hypnotic. Its passioned performance helped to evoke the atmosphere of the temple as a place removed from the mundane world, the temple as a celestial abode of the deity.