This was no ordinary stag party. It was the night of the King Stag’s Masque, and we were the stags. The Stag King and his Court had summoned That Long Tall Sword, and our guests the Greenwich Morris Men, to present the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance and longsword at a New Age festival of Imbolc, the cross-quarter between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. Northampton’s EarthSpirit League was celebrating the return of spring—or at least of groundhogs—on Candlemas Eve.
The New Agers had dressed a hotel function room in a shower of silver foil streamers and wrapped the ficus trees in twinkle lights and cotton wool. The general first impression of the masque was of some sort of Narnian Renaissance Faire: swirling veils, leather masks and nylon lamé in disconcerting motley. As it turned out, it was our best performance of the season. There are some nights when you know why you dance, and this was one of them.
At first glance, it was an event ripe for the hoary old eighties’ joke: "How do you tell a Neopagan from a New Ager?" Answer: "New Agers are under the impression they are doing something new. Neopagans are under the impression they are doing something old." Downstairs before the show, we wandered past tables of books and tapes on herbal healing and spiritual paths, and eavesdropped on those admiring the silver Celtic jewelry. "Wow, those are really ancient designs!" "Oh no, these are all original works—inspired by the ancients of course." Of course. The next table, the maskmakers’, demonstrated the difference in how Neopagans and New Agers wear leather. Our Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dancers wear our natural-tanned russet deerskins rough side out, hanging loose in tattered scallops to our knees. For the New Agers shopping at the black velvet mask board, bright suede silhouettes of green men and rainbow birds brushed bright hues across polished hide.
Suddenly, a bevy of masks streamed into the dressing room, and the Stag King’s Court was upon us.
A black horse burst into view. Astride the foam-spotted animal rode a monstrous figure. A crimson cloak flamed from his naked shoulders. Crimson stained his gigantic arms. Horror-stricken, Taran saw not the head of a man, but the antlered head of a stag.
The Horned King!…The mask was a human skull; from it, the great antlers rose in cruel curves. The Horned King’s eyes blazed behind the gaping sockets of whitened bone. He uttered the long cry of a wild beast, and his riders took it up as they streamed after him.
This Court’s giddy anticipation was hardly calculated to inspire horror. There were no ugly warriors, but a bevy of wild beasts, a brace of barefoot harem girls, a band of medieval-peasant lutenists, a black-cloaked mage of a storyteller, and a pair of High Priestesses in bird masks. These organizers were huddling with our "king stag," Long Tall’s foreman Steve Howe, to plan out our entrance.
Their Stag King had no black horse or crimson cloak about his naked shoulders, but he was monstrous enough to brush a low ceiling. His arms were certainly gigantic, and stained suitably red with tattoos. His masked headdress, the antlered head of a stag, was of the same green leather as his jerkin, which laced tight up over a tighter butt. "Erroll Flynn meets Men in Tights," I thought irreverently. He looked us over not from a blazing skull, but silently through his beard, with mild curiosity, as we took up our antlers to line up for the dance. He and Steve agreed on the cue he would give us, while more masked crowds flocked into the hall. The rites were upon us.
Lucy’s eyes began to grow accustomed to the light, and she saw the trees that were nearest to her more distinctly. She knew exactly how each of these trees would talk if only she could wake them, and what sort of human form it would put on. She looked at a silver birch: it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl, with hair blown all about her face, and fond of dancing. She looked at the oak: he would be a wizened, but hearty old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his face and hands, and hair growing out of the warts. She looked at the beech under which she was standing. Ah–that would be the best of all. She would be a gracious goddess, smooth and stately, the lady of the wood.
I saw the birch tree first. Her mask was a smooth curve of silver bark, her trunk gowned black on white like inked parchment. She looked fond of dancing, as birches are; her head lifted to the first notes of the music, swaying toward the antlered line as we filed past her into the hall.
Every time I step into Abbott’s Bromley I feel as if I am riding a moving sidewalk down the centuries. The path of the dance is a leyline through time, serpentining somehow through the Victorian Age straight back to the Neolithic. The tracing shapes of the figures give the impression of doing something very old indeed, as if somewhere ahead of us the deer have just stepped down from a cave painting in Lascaux.
That Long Tall Sword dances an Abbots Bromley that traces its lineage straight through Revels to Pinewoods. Most of us are aware, though we don’t discuss it, that in that form it is no older than 1917 and popularized in the 1950s. Our dance is well within the tradition of ritual revival that Jack Shimer describes in Rhomylly Forbes’ book. "Abbots Bromley at Pinewoods was, well, it was quite precious. Quite unlike how it’s done in England, I’m told." We use the tune known to scholars as "The Robinson Tune" or "The Royal Albert tune," known to American dancers (when they distinguish it, since it is rarely danced to anything else here) as "the Revels tune" or simply "Abbots." This tune changes the character of the dance dramatically from the form first noted by Cecil Sharp: "There is no special or traditional tune for the dance. The musician told me that any country-dance air would serve…the step is very similar to the normal country-dance step…in a jaunty manner which is highly characteristic and extremely engaging."
Our dance paces in the "gothic" and "stately step" described by Douglas Kennedy in 1920 when his English dancers first used the Royal Albert tune, discovered by a local cleric but "rejected [by] the local dancers and musicians as being wrong for the dance as they now locally performed it." Kennedy and his dancers rediscovered its magic, and we wouldn’t dance it any other way. In fact, our musician leads us in, beginning to play out of sight so that the tune will "set an atmosphere of magic and mystery".
We weave that spell deliberately, consciously invoking the ritual cultures of our own continent through our deer points and unsewn skins. We weave our very selves into the spell. Braiding into the line of Abbott’s troupes from Revels and the RenFaire, we trace and retrace the line of Abbott’s Bromley men carrying their great elk antlers. Flowing into the coiling line, we invite the Norse deer hunters and the Pueblo deer dancers of the Southwest, all dancing together back up onto the cave wall in pictographs of the hunt dance. The magical tune bubbles up from the floor of time’s cave, a wellspring of magic and mystery as ancient and fresh as memory. Solemn in black guise beneath our skins, we step into the river of the horn dance. Each is submerged in its flow.
The flute’s silver stream threads its processional through a living forest of faces, bright eyes peeping through the masque. Veils brush and cling like Spanish shawls of moss. A tiny woman in rubythroated lamé hovers over the nectar cups, then flashes away into a thicket of oaken leaves like the hummingbird she has chosen to be tonight. A waterfall of lace foams over a veiled figure in harem white, perhaps a bride for a sultan’s wedding. Bare flesh strains through laces binding leathered chests and thighs, and one astonishingly spiked ceinture lifts and separates from waist to collarbone, until each breast seems to be having its own conversation. All this is glimpsed from within the dance, fleeting impressions gathered without eye contact. Most of the time my eyes are nailed to the back before me, feeling the pull behind me of the next dancer’s gaze on my spine. A cord spun from dancer to dancer, our focus skeins us into this chain of being.
Our King Stag hooks the lead antlers into a tight coil, like a clock spring winding, and we flow into lines that meet like tides. Robin Hood’s triangle tingles silver as the Wren Boy draws his bow, and bosomy Betty jingles his silver in the collecting pan. Antlers lift and clash, lift and clash, then deftly wheel into the serpentine. Across the room in another clearing, the Greenwich line is gravely tracing their pattern on the floor, invisibly engraving the dance into the parquet boards. They flow in behind us as we meander toward the door, deer vanishing into the forest of ficus trees and living birches. The horn dance tune evaporates into mist, and we into shadow.
The forest parts in the foyer, and we are no longer deer in the woods of Narnia, but simply dancers offstage. We have three minutes to dive into our rags before the King’s cue for longsword.
The Fool wore my rags to the last, so I have to be skinned into them like a six-foot sausage. Quickly now, the mage of a storyteller winds up his cloak for a last flourish. I feel the Fool’s remembered touch, and notice that for the rest of the evening my hands never touch flesh: only cool antler, polished wood, or dancing steel. It adds to my slightly disconnected sense, literally out of touch with the so-called real world. We scuffle for places and swords as the Stag King speaks his line. "Let the rite begin!"
Our weaving processional interlaces stillness into motion. This sword dance also harks back to the Victorian era, in the mining towns of the North of England, but it too has echoes of rituals danced all over Europe in the last fires of the Dark Ages. The martial beat of the tune braids us onto the floor and into a ring. One by one, the swords clash into a high basket, a tepee fire of newlaid steel awaiting the spark of the match.
Then the music changes. Swift our swords lift the basket into a clashing ring, and the crowd picks up the rhythm of the clashes with eager clapping. The sword-tips spark like a campfire, the energy of the crowd striking our steel like flint. Invisible sparks shower down on us as the swords drop into a ring of steel at our shoulders, then waists, then hips. Liquid steel swirls us out into the open ring as the dance begins to whirl, the swords slowly, deliberately drawing energy into the ring. The swords themselves are dancing now, centrifugal force creating a vortex in the center of the ring. Empty space is the one fixed point in this revolving ring of teeth and gears, and now the machine is up to working speed.
Saint George pivots under a sword and stops, and the ring revolves into single-under. Two hands notch a brace of swords like toothed gears into the dance, a tiny planet around a moving sun. Each of us, in our turn, twirls into the planet, orbits once, and revolves back into the rising sun of the ring, once more an atom of the whole.
Suddenly, Saint George’s sword sweeps down in the gate of single-over, and one by one the dancers leap between a double arch of swords and arms. In practice, we mangle this hardest figure regularly, feet and heads tangling like fabric or flesh caught in the Satanic mills of Yorkshire. But tonight, the machine is a living thing, and we leap effortlessly in perfect rhythm over swords held higher than ever. Tiny deer feet proudly prance over the lowered sword, landing in neat stag leaps back into the dancing ring, never missing a beat.
The last dancer leaps over a sword point and suddenly the hilt sweeps up, and single-under whirls us again into a tight ring with one dancer outside. Again the planets whirl, each of us a momentary moon orbiting the gravity of the dancing ring.
As if to mark the moonrise, the music swings into a minor key, from jig time to a steady reel. Points of a star pierce the ring in a V, raying outward like solar flares behind an eclipse. Edge to edge sounds the scrape of steel as each vee passes beneath the horizon arch, and the magic sparks into wildfire. Suddenly, two of our magicians bring their hands together and a dancer bursts free, weightless in escape velocity as the ring wheels into interlocking gears.
Now the sword is a bar breasting the set as we mesh the ring in pairs for double-under. Each rising sword sweeps the air like a scythe, rolling barrel hoops of gates arching over our heads and rolling back into the dance. Here are the gears again, or the heddles of a loom, feet of ancient times dancing us into those dark satanic mills where once the sword dance flourished. We are the loom, the weavers and the cloth, the swords beating tight the fabric of their dance.
Two shuttles cross beneath a sudden arch, and the new roll spins like a barrel scythe. Twin moons hold gravity’s pull a sword’s length apart, and six broad sets of shoulders lace impossibly tight beneath the three-foot arch of doubled swords. This is the eggbeater figure, straining arms and backs, risking bloody knuckles or a mangled hand if you stop to think or try too hard. The universe rolls by too fast to think. No atom of a molecule has time to intellectualize its place in the nuclear dance. We are fusion in motion, one being with a dozen arms and legs, a nucleus of dancing swords.
Fusion explodes into light. One swift open ring pulses out like Saturn’s in celestial orbit, and the star of swords over our heads drops into the lock. Six heads bend into the center in a black hole of concentration, funneling every eye in the crowd into our hands. Snick! Hilt snaps over point and the swords burst free, a steel Star of David that traps and holds all the energy in the room.
A sun of swords blossoms over our King-dancer’s upraised arm, Excalibur bursting free of the stone. We are the dancing stones of Stonehenge now, a sun of steel wheeling over our heads from hand to outstretched hand as the crowd beats like a clapping heart. A hundred beings’ energy is focused into the hollow center of the lock, the whole room rolling over our heads like stars. Twinkle lights and comets of silver lamé streak by my eyes, but my whole being is focused on the swords. We are deep in black space, giant planets held in dancing motion. We are atoms in a nucleus, tiny as sand in the great universe. We are the empty velvet sky that holds this white-hot sun of steel, blazing majestically round above us in time’s eternal wheel. Dance is eternity in motion.
The steel sun dips once in salute to the King Stag. He nods, releasing us. Instantly the ring breaks free like a crack-the-whip, and the sword-star streaks away into the darkness, a steel comet with a dancing tail.
Why do we dance the sword dance? For the same reason anyone ever has. To find, in the doing of something new, the doing of something very, very old. To dance out the music of the spheres, perhaps. To step, however briefly, into eternity in motion.
(c) Lynn Noel 1990 and 1991 for Tapestry Folkdance Center production of Summon the Sun! Carols and Rituals for Winter Solstice