They sing a two-part hymn in front of the altar, forming in two eights, facing each other, the clergy kneeling in a semi-circle round them.
Assuredly I cannot do better than quote Mr. Arthur Symons’ verdict on this dance as he saw it a few years back in Seville: “And, yes, I found it perfectly dignified, perfectly religious, without a suspicion of levity or indecorum. This consecration of the dance, this turning of a possible vice into a means of devotion, this bringing of the people’s art, the people’s passion, which in Seville is dancing, into the church, finding it a place there, is precisely one of those acts of divine worldly wisdom which the Church has so often practised in her conquest of the world.”
Not too fantastically has a writer suggested that High Mass itself in some sense enshrines a survival of the ancient religious dance—that stately, magnificent series of slow movements which surely may express devotion of the most solemn and reverent kind, as well as can the colour of vestment or sanctuary, or the sounds of melody.
Since the dance is so essentially religious it must needs be burlesqued and buffooned by God’s ape. For the dance of the witches is degraded, awkward, foul, and unclean. These very movements are withershins, as Guazzo points out: “Then follow the round dances in which, however, they always tread the measure to the left.”90 “The Sorcerers,” says Boguet, “dance a country-dance with their backs turned one to the other.”91 This, of course, being the exact reverse of the natural country-dance. “Sometimes, although seldom,” he adds, “they dance in couples, & sometimes one partner is there, another here, for always everything is in confusion.”92 De Lancre writes of witches’ revels: “They only dance three kinds of brawls. … The first is à la Bohémienne … the second with quick trippings: these are round dances.”93 In the third Sabbat measure the dancers were placed one behind another in a straight line.
An old Basque legend reported by Estefanella Hirigaray describes how the witches were wont to meet near an old limekiln to dance their rounds, a ceremony regarded throughout that district as an essential feature of the Sabbat. De Lancre notes the brawls à la Bohémienne as especially favoured by sorcerers in Labourd. Sylvester Mazzolini, O.P.
