Dancing in the streets: a history of collective joy
By Barbara Ehrenreich

BARBARA Ehrenreich believes that we are all natural dancers. Synchronous movement tomusicorchantingvoicesishowwe experience community and express social solidarity. Or should. It is "the biotechnology of group formation". The great jig began, she suggests, when primitive man joined forces with other humans to ward off predators by shouting and waving in unison. A bit like an Old Firm match.

But,accordingtoEhrenreich,dancing and chanting is also the basis of all religious experience. Christianity has been driven by a contradiction between the expression of this kinetic immanence and simultaneousattemptsbypatriarchalprieststo suppress it, and to redirect its energy into war, materialism and guilt.

Ehrenreich sees Jesus Christ as a Jewish Dionysus. Both liked wine, grew their hair, took people away from their families to experience religious ecstasy in the desert. The early Christians "spoke in tongues and drank and danced together with their hair streaming".

Bothmenwereanti-Establishment. "Dionysus was a lover of peace," she says, "and like Jesus he upheld the poor and rejectedtheprevailinghierarchy."This made both dangerous to authority.

As soon as Christianity became organisedandpatriarchal,aftertheRomans adopteditasastatereligion,theearly ecstatic practices were thrown out, claims Ehrenreich.Peoplewerebannedfrom dancing in church - it was a surprise to learn they ever did - and instead they were forced to listen to a droning liturgy.

But the spirit of ecstasy kept breaking out.Ehrenreichrecountsthedancing mania which hit Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries. People downed tools in the field and went off dancing for days on end. Historiansofthetimethoughtthatthe peasants had caught some kind of disease, even that the bite of a spider, the tarantula, had caused the dancing fits - hence the dance called the "tarantella".

Ehrenreichbelievesitwassimplya spontaneousreversiontothatoriginal sense of joy and social solidarity which is hard-wired into us. Dionysian outbreaks havehappenedthroughouttheages, despitetheattemptsbybishopsand Calvinist killjoys to suppress it. The most recentwasthe"rockrevolution"ofthe 1960s - though she believes this has been pollutedbycommercialismandMDMA, aka ecstasy.

Our suppression of joy and dancing has left us with isolation, depression and what the sociologist Max Weber called "anomie" or alienation. Ehrenreich traces the origins of depression to the epidemic of melancholy that afflicted Europe, and in particular England, in the 17th century, immortalised by Robert Burton's Anatomy Of Melancholy. She puts this down to the contemporary triumph of Calvinism and its suppression of joy, dancing and festive rituals.

The emergence of the self, of individualism, in the 18th century, was in her view the final triumph of the anti-Dionysians. The Protestant ethic, as Max Weber (another joyless depressive) argued, was all about entrenching capitalism and stamping out the spontaneous festivities that interrupted theworkingday.Imperialismfurther crushed the festive spirit.

This book is fun, if a little dated, with its hippyish account of Christianity and its appeal to pagan feminism. There is clearly something in the decline of community and solidarity and the rise of depression, and psychologists have long known of the therapeutic qualities of collective activities.

However, I'm not sure that many of us would willingly give up individualism and the freedom that comes with it in order to rejoin the dance. Nor would many people today willingly submit to a state of religious trance led by charismatic shamans. And anyway, millions of people dance in clubs every weekend.

And while festivals may have been suppressed 200 years ago, you can't move for them today - from Glastonbury to Edinburgh. Makes you kind of wonder where Ehrenreich has been for the past 30 years. Maybe she should get out more.

Theologians would take issue with the idea that Jesus Christ was an extension of thepaganGodofinebriation,lustand orgiasticrituals.Butthereisnothing particularly new in the comparison of Jesus and Dionysus, which has been explored by themodernscholarBarryPowell,and popularised by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy's The Jesus Mysteries.

It's another of those fascinating Biblical speculations,liketheoneaboutJesus being married to Mary Magdalene, which drovetheplotofTheDaVinciCode. Perhaps Dan Brown will base the sequel on Dancing In The Streets.

Of course, many despise killjoy Presbyterians, with their hatred of dance and joy. But there was another side to the Dionysus myth - blood sacrifice and cannibalism for a start. Dionysus was a vengeful God who, according to Euripides, sent his mad female followers, the Maenads, into ecstasies of bloody retribution, tearing Pentheus, King of Thebes, limb from limb.

This is a baby-boomer book, extolling the virtues of play power, and letting it all hang out. It is simplistic, and occasionally crass, but never boring, and undoubtedly on the side, well, of the angels.

The only thing I really take issue with is Ehrenreich'sinsistencethatmenare principally to blame for the suppression of joy."Therepressionoffestivitiesand ecstatic rituals over the centuries was the conscious work of men and occasionally women too, who saw them as a real and urgent threat."

But, hey. Dionysus was a dude, and so was Christ and his ecstatic acolytes. And what about those brave men who even today keep the spirit of Bacchus alive? Yes, I give you the morris dancers of England, the last of the true Dionysians! There's hope for us yet.