The Ancient & Martial Dances

The dance traditions of the ancient world present many mysteries but none were so widely written about or illustrated as the martial dances of the old Mediterranean. It was a world of deep symbolism and ritual. A world of sympathetic magic. And none of it was as yet neatly sorted into the myths we are familiar with today. The gods were older, their names and rites were closely tied to the secretive elements of creation and destruction. And in this archaic age between the smelting of iron and conversion to the written word we find the brotherhoods and sisterhoods--more akin to shaman than priests--who, through blood ties to the Earth Mother herself, danced the future of all civilization. It is ancestral memory of the physical language of symbolic movement that kept the old traditions and carried their root-concepts into the modern world. And so the rites of the Earth Mother, the Animal Mother, the Red Warrior and the Storm Lord live on.