The Anatomy of Melancholy

I repeat this story so that you may see how powerful these enticements are when used at the right moment, and how hard even the most reluctant and sanctified souls find it to resist them. John Maior, in the life of John the Monk, who lived in the days of Theodosius, praises the hermit as a man of extraordinary chastity and most austere life. But one night the Devil happened to come to his cell disguised as a young market girl who had lost her way, and begged him, for God’s sake, for lodging.

“The old man let her in. After some ordinary conversation about her misadventure, she began to entice him with lewd talk and jokes, play with his beard, kiss him, and do worse, until at last she overcame him. As he prepared himself for the act, she suddenly vanished, and all the devils in the air laughed him to scorn.” I will not argue much about whether this is a true story or a fiction; it serves to illustrate what I have said.

Yet even if those enticements I have described, and similar baits, are insufficient, many others can themselves intensify this passion of burning lust. Dancing is by no means the least of these. It is so powerful a device that I must not omit it. Petrarch calls it “an incitement to lust,” lust’s spur, “a circle whose centre is the Devil himself.” “Many women who practise it have returned home unchaste, most no better or worse, and none improved.”

Another calls it “the companion of every filthy pleasure and enticement. It is hard to tell what mischief comes of it, what coarse talk and obscene actions,” and often such monstrous gestures, lewd movements, wanton tunes, prostitutes’ kisses and familiar embraces,

As the girl of Cadiz begins her lustful dance to song, And the girls, applauded and approved, Sink to the ground with trembling buttocks, A stimulus to flagging desire.

That it will drive the spectators mad. When the epitomizer of Trogus had fully described King Ptolemy’s debauchery, he added “drumming and dancing”—fiddling and dancing—as a chief device and instrument of his downfall: “The king was not merely a spectator but a principal performer himself.”

Nevertheless, it is common practice, and part of a gentlewoman’s upbringing, to sing, dance and play the lute or a similar instrument before she can say the Lord’s Prayer or the Ten Commandments. Their parents think it the surest way to get them husbands. They are compelled to learn, and so “they practise unchaste loves from their tenderest years.”

As it is often practised, dancing is a powerful enticement, and many are ruined by it. Thais in Lucian enticed Lamprias through a dance. Herodias pleased Herod so much that she made him swear to give her whatever she asked: John the Baptist’s head on a platter.