Introduction : dancing as life

Geographical maps

pt. I. Dancing the year : the ritual cycle of fertility

1. Swan maidens, mermaids, and tree spirits : introduction, through folktales, to some dancing goddesses (vily, rusalki, willies, etc.) of eastern European folklore

2. Marking time : how nonliterate farmers devised and kept their agricultural (seasonal) calendar

3. To bring the Spring : fertility rituals of early spring

4. Dancing up a storm : dance ritual of leaf-clad orphans to end drought

Problems of rain and hail

5. Crazy Week, Rusalia Week : fertility rituals of Semik, Trinity, and Rusalia Week

Dance brotherhoods of Rusalia; perils of Mad Wednesday

6. Flowers with powers : plants the willies love and hate

Plants to heal, protect, and bewitch

7. Midsummer Rusalii : fertility rituals of St. John's Night

Herbs, water, fire

Child's sleeve dance

8. Friday, St. Friday : curious history of the weekday sacred to female deities

9. The Twelve Days of Christmas : midwinter Rusalii, during intercalary Twelve Days

Propitiating good and bad spirits for the New Year (and whence came our Yuletide customs)

pt. II. Bride-dancing for fertility : The Frog Princes

10. Cosmic arrow : finding a bride

11. Bride testing : rituals testing a girl for marriage (Can she make the food and clothing?)

12. Trial by dance : is she strong enough to do all the farmwork, too?

The Magic Sleeve Dance : more relics of dancing swan maidens

14. Second Skins : shape-changing spirits

15. The hut on chicken legs : old witches keeping ritual knowledge, training young women

16. Koshchey the Deathless : shamans and wizards, battling for communal good

pt. III. Dancing back through time

17. Medieval traces : medieval evidence for rituals and beliefs

18. Roman showbiz : Roman evidence for the rituals

19. Dancing with the Greeks : classical and archaic Greek evidence

Dionysos and Thrace

20. Back to the Bronze Age : Minoan and Mycenaean evidence

From Indo-European horse rituals to a hobbyhorse

21. Dancing at the dawn of agriculture : evidence that this whole belief system began with the first farmers of Europe, 6000-3000 BC

pt. IV. Gotta dance!

22. Keeping together in time : what cognitive science has learned about human dance

Trance-dancing and firewalking

23. Dancing the time warp : possibilities of reconstructing the dances

Epilogue: dancing divinity

Parallel stories from Greece and Japan of angry fertility goddesses made to laugh by obscene dance : dance restores life

Appendix: Bracelets from Kiev with ritual motifs.