Lore 289: Shake It

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If I were to ask you, what are you most afraid of, you probably wouldn't answer whistles.

But hang in there because after this, you might just change your tune.

They're called Aztec death whistles and have been discovered in graves from the 13th to the 16th centuries.

And it's worth giving these a quick Google because their looks alone are startling.

You see, these tiny clay instruments are designed to look like human skulls.

Their pupilless eyes bulge out while fleshless teeth are spread in a messy grin.

And that's not even mentioning what happens when these whistles are blown.

Because here's the thing.

The high-pitched scream that emanates from these whistles does something to the human brain.

That is, it fills us with instant, uncontrollable dread.

Seriously, in 2024, a group of neuroscientists from the University of Zurich monitored listeners' brains upon hearing the death whistle's songs, and what they found was pretty weird to say the least.

Because the brain seemed unable to classify the noise at all.

It's a sort of uncanny valley thing, part natural sounding, part unnatural.

And that ambiguity causes an immediate sense of confusion and fear in all who hear it.

When asked to describe the noise, participants called it scary, aversive, and deeply unsettling.

And this is all the more chilling when you learn what the whistles were used for.

Because if archaeologists are right, the Aztec death whistles may have been played as the backing soundtracks to human sacrifices.

If you dig through the pages of history, you will learn that there are many ways to appease the gods.

Prayer and repentance are all well and good, but there are livelier options as well.

Tooting on a cursed whistle, banging a sacred drum.

Or if you want to take your veneration a literal step further, you could always hit the dance floor.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

These days, we mostly dance for art's sake, or to let loose on a Saturday night.

But for thousands of years, cutting a rug was downright sacred, and in many cultures, it still is.

Take the Tulu people of southern India, for example.

There, serpent gods are honored through a dance called Nagamindala, in which two priests embody a male and female snake encircling each other until dawn.

Or the formerly enslaved Jamaican maroons and their healing cremante dance, during which dancers become possessed by ancestors to protect the community from illness.

And speaking of possession, in Bali, performers of the sacred Songhaiyang will dress as figures like monkeys or pigs before going into a trance.

Then those spirits will enter their bodies and possess them, all while dancing, of course.

Elsewhere in Indonesia, members of one indigenous religion perform a funeral dance called babukung to protect the dead from evil spirits, while in Korea, Buddhist monks toting brass symbols dance the barachum to banish dark spirits on their own.

Now, sometimes it's less about what the dance is and more about where that dance takes place.

For example, in ancient Wales, long ago shepherds performed ritual dances within winding labyrinths carved into the hillsides.

And if you're afraid of heights, you might want to avoid this one ancient Mesoamerican tradition.

To perform the danza de los voladores, or dance of the flyers, five men climb up a 30-meter 30-meter pole.

Then, four of them tether themselves to ropes and swan dive off while the fifth one serenades them from on high with a flute and a drum.

According to myth, the dance of the flyers originated to appease the gods after a long drought.

And hey, it must have worked because it's still being performed to this day.

On the Jewish holiday of Simcha Torah, congregations sing and dance while holding the holy scrolls.

In the words of one Hasidic master, the Torah scrolls wish to dance and so we become their feet.

Christianity, on the other hand, is one of the only religions in the world that doesn't include dancing as a major devotional tool.

But that hasn't kept Christian worshipers from doing a little holy boogieing anyway.

Take good old Saint Francis of Assisi, who was said to sing and dance as he preached.

Now look, I'll be honest, I could fill 10 episodes listing sacred dances and still only scratch the surface.

But from even this small sampling, it's clear, movement is an essential piece of human culture.

Folk dance connects us to gods, spirits, and ancestors alike, not to mention one another.

And given all that power, it's no surprise that throughout history, people have tried to ban it.

Now, before you say, hey, I've seen that Kevin Bacon movie, I'm not talking about Footloose.

Although, honestly, it isn't all that off the mark.

In the classic 1980s movie, A Small Town in Utah upholds an anti-dancing law in an attempt to keep local young people in line.

And in real life, dancing bands have served a similar purpose as a means of control.

Take the history of Irish folk dancing, for example.

If you have ever seen river dance, you probably have a certain vibe in mind.

Lots of peppy jumping and kicking mostly.

But Irish folk dancing didn't start on the stage.

Oh no, it began as magic.

It's thought that the earliest ritual dancers in Ireland were ancient druids dancing around sacred trees.

Later, when the Celts arrived on the scene in about 500 BC, they added their own Central European flavor to the mix, and things continued to evolve from there.

The bagpipes were piping, the mouth harps were twanging, and then came the English.

In 1695, England began establishing so-called penal laws designed to suppress Irish culture.

Everything from the Irish language to music and yes, traditional Irish dance was outlawed.

After all, what's a quicker way to subjugate an entire people than to separate them from the very thing that makes them, well, them?

These laws stayed firm for half a century, but all that time, Irish dancers kept their tradition alive in secret.

And finally, in the mid-1700s, they were allowed back into the light.

Itinerant dance masters began traveling from country to country, staying with local families and teaching dances as they went.

And with that, Irish culture got back on its feet.

No pun intended, of course.

Desperate to prevent something like the culture bans from ever happening again, 1893 saw the formation of the Gaelic League, an organization dedicated to elevating traditional Irish culture and kicking out any British elements that might have leaked in to sully it.

How do they do this, you might ask?

Well, by placing specific formal requirements on how Irish dance was to be taught and performed, right down to the costumes those dancers should wear.

A bit ironic, right?

That to protect a folk art from laws and regulations, the Gaelic League imposed a bunch of laws and regulations.

So back to river dance.

Most of the elements we associate with Irish step dancing today were actually deliberately created by the Gaelic League.

And something similar went down in the Polynesian kingdom of Tonga, where dance had long been used to tell stories of the gods.

When Methodist missionaries arrived in the 19th century, they outlawed traditional dances as heathen.

And so Tongans started a new dance known as the Lakalaka.

This too told Tongan folktales, but looked different enough from the old dances that the missionaries didn't recognize it, allowing it to evade the ban.

Today, the Laka Laka is considered the national dance of Tonga.

Oh, and there's another spot that famously banned dancing as well.

You may have heard of it too, a little place called New York City.

Yes, in 1926, something called the cabaret law was put into effect, making it illegal for venues to host music and dancing without a rather expensive license.

Under the guise of cracking down on speakeasies during Prohibition, the law was really designed to keep black artists off the stage.

And believe it or not, cabaret laws remained on the books in New York until 2017.

Clearly, the link between dancing and power is far from new, and neither is the attempt to control that power.

But one group of people in 19th century America raised this idea to a whole new level when they took part in a dance that was meant to usher in a whole new world.

Jack Wilson was not the ranch hand's real name, despite what his white employer might insist.

And as a member of the northern Paiute tribe living in what is now Nevada, he was far from the only Native American the settlers had attempted to whitewash.

This was the late 1800s, after all, the era of Indian residential schools and mandated assimilations.

All across their ancestral lands, indigenous children were being ripped from their families and re-educated, erasing their culture bit by bit.

Meanwhile, many tribes had been herded onto reservations and forced to rely on government rations to survive.

So yeah, suffice to say this man was much more than Jack Wilson.

The true name of the tall, dark-skinned man with piercing eyes and an ego feather in his broad-brimmed hat was Wavoka, and he just so happened to be a prophet.

As a mid-30-something, Wavoka had already been the subject of whispers for years.

The man, you see, was said to have supernatural powers.

His fellow Paiute said that he could not only predict, but also control the weather, conjuring rain, snow, and fog.

One eyewitness described a demonstration Wavoka performed in which he handed a shotgun to his brother and asked him to shoot him in the chest, which his brother did.

And although Wovoka's shirt became riddled with bullet holes, his flesh remained unharmed.

The bullets merely rolled away on the ground.

Another witness claimed to have seen Wovoka levitate the body of a young Paiute girl out of her funeral pyre and up to heaven.

And on one hot day in July, he allegedly caused a 30-pound block of ice to drop from the sky.

Wovoka was also known to fall into trances.

He would lie stiff as a board with his mouth clamped shut and remain that way for up to two days.

And when he returned to consciousness, he would describe being brought up to heaven and what a heaven it was.

There, wildlife was abundant and the land was verdant.

Heaven's residents had no troubles.

They were young and beautiful and spent their days dancing and playing sports.

Oh, and one final detail.

Heaven, according to Wovoka, was populated by Native Americans and white settlers alike, all living together in harmony.

And it was during one of these trances that he received a message that would change not only his own life, but all of America.

The message was a dance, and not just any dance.

According to Wavoca, a higher power taught him choreography similar to the traditional Paiute round dance that, if performed, would call down a Messiah to transform the earth into the very same heaven Wavoka had seen in his visions.

The Messiah would renew the planet, save the faithful, and in some visions, even send the white people back to where they came from.

In addition to the physical movements, the higher power also offered some hot tips and tricks on how to live a good life.

Hacks like, love one another.

Crazy stuff, I know.

But they also included directions to send children to school, farm the land, and work for pay.

In other words, all those things in line with forced assimilation.

Now, this may seem contradictory, right?

After all, a distinctly native ritual paired with a series of commands to cooperate with assimilation didn't exactly seem like a natural combo.

But here's the thing.

It actually suggested a way the tribes could hold on to their cultural roots even in the face of this post-colonial reality.

In other words, a way to survive.

Oh, and speaking of assimilation, remember how I said reservations relied on government rations to survive?

Well, if you broke certain government guidelines, you could be penalized and lose those rations.

Guidelines such as participating in what the U.S.

Secretary of the Interior referred to as heathenish dances.

Get caught dancing once and have your food taken away, multiple times, and tribe members faced imprisonment.

The stakes were obviously high, but not even the threat of starvation would keep Wavoca's dance from spreading far and wide.

After all, what was a government penalty compared to heaven on earth?

And the dance didn't just catch on among the Paiutes, but tribes all all across the land.

First, the Bannocks, the Shoshonees, and the Utes adopted Wovoka's dance, then the Arapaho and Cheyenne nations farther away.

And soon it would make its way to the Great Plains in tribes such as the Lakota.

And like any living, breathing folk art, as it traveled, the dance began to change.

For example, although Wovoka initially preached a set time for the dance to occur in limited bouts of five days at a time, some tribes were dancing every single night.

On top of that, it wasn't just Wovoka receiving visions anymore.

Other dancers had begun collapsing into trances as well.

They too would speak of seeing a heaven similar to that Wovoka described, and there they feasted and reveled with long-dead loved ones.

And while Wovoka's Messiah was never named, some tribes who had converted to Christianity believed that the coming entity was none other than Jesus Christ.

Each tribe created their own songs to accompany the dance as well.

Songs about yearning and family and lost loved ones returning from death.

The lyrics to one included, Mother come home, mother come home.

My little brother goes about always crying.

My little brother goes about always crying.

Mother come home, mother come home.

Another song said, You shall see your grandfather, you shall see your kindred, the father says so.

Wavoka's dance, it seems, was no longer Wavoka's dance at all.

It had taken on a life of its own, spread and shifted, and become something new.

And thus was born what came to be known as the ghost dance.

In the center of the clearing was a small tree.

Offerings hung from its branches, red, white, and blue ribbons, and even an American flag.

And as the wind picked up and the ribbons began to dance, so too did the people.

Men and women and children alike, the healthy and the sick, the strong and the weak, the large and the small, those only just born, and those nearing death's door.

All had begun to circle the tree, faster, then faster still.

Energy gathered in the air and in the dancers' pounding feet as they spun around and around, even faster now, electricity building in fevered loops.

And then they began to collapse.

Some dancers stumbled away from the circle, others fell unconscious where they stood.

One woman burst from the ring, arms flailing, hair wild over her purpled face, and as she fell to the ground, every muscle in her body seemed to twitch and quiver at once.

Those who remained conscious sat beside their friends, watching over them as they slipped into trances.

Their journeys had begun.

All that was left to do now was wait for them to awaken and report back from heaven.

Welcome to a Lakota Ghost Dance.

The year was 1890, and by that point in history, it wasn't just the native population that had gotten word of Wovoka's dance.

White folks had started to take notice as well.

And suffice to say, they weren't super thrilled about that.

In fact, they were downright afraid.

You see, to the whites' horror, the ghost dance had begun to unite the tribes.

Some dances drew over a thousand participants from all different communities.

Suddenly, the traditions that white people had worked so hard to suppress were reawakening.

And not only that, the disparate tribes were joining forces.

Now, you might think white people would have approved of the ghost dance.

After all, it encouraged assimilation, right?

It was compatible with Christianity and the idea of the second coming.

Many of the dancers had even graduated from residential schools, and the dance was a way of naturally blending their two cultures together.

But the white populace couldn't see that nuance.

No, all they saw were Native Americans doing something loud and bold and frightening that the white people did not understand.

Specifically, there was a general fear among white people that the dance wasn't simply a spiritual ritual, but also a call to war.

And this anxiety was especially prominent among whites who lived near the Lakota.

You see, all too often, people forget that history does not exist in a vacuum.

No incident is independent.

Each moment is a domino knocked over by a chain reaction rippling through every moment that came before it.

And during the summer of 1890, there were some real precarious dominoes teetering around one Lakota Sioux reservation in South Dakota.

Take, for example, the fact that an impressive one out of every three Lakota Sioux were participating in the ghost dances.

Also, many of those ghost dancers were veterans of the Great Sioux War, you know, of Little Bighorn fame and Custer's Last Stand.

And this made the whites very, very, very nervous.

And it's easy to imagine the questions they might have asked.

Were these ghost dancers itching to take up arms again?

Were they gaining power?

Was all this dancing leading up to an attack?

Combine those worries to the fact that the Lakota had begun killing and eating cattle as part of the ghost dance ceremony.

And let's just say the dominoes were ready to put on quite a show.

And that last detail needs a bit more explanation, because killing and eating a cow might not seem like a big deal to us.

After all, what's more American than a farm-raised steak, right?

But the thing is, these weren't just any cows.

These animals had been given to the Lakota by reservation authorities for breeding and plowing only.

Tribal members were forbidden from slaughtering them.

And so, when they began to kill them anyway, whites saw this as a direct act of aggression, a slap in the face to the laws that they had put in place.

To the Lakota, it was an entirely different story though.

They were going hungry.

The government wasn't providing sufficient rations.

And And why shouldn't they have the same rights over their own livestock as white farmers had?

And let me tell you, that cow thing was the final flick of a finger that sent the dominoes toppling.

In October of 1890, a new superintendent took charge at a reservation called Pine Ridge and immediately flooded the area with hundreds of U.S.

troops.

It was literally the largest military force since General Lee's surrender.

all because of, let me remind you, dancing.

The soldiers ordered everyone on the reservation to report to authority headquarters.

While many did, a bunch of ghost dancers said, heck no, and set up a camp of their own out in the Badlands instead.

And it was while stationed there that they received the terrible news.

It had happened at a reservation called Standing Rock, home of famous hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull.

American agent James McLaughlin used the ghost dance as an excuse to arrest Sitting Bull, a longtime rival of his, despite the fact that Sitting Bull had never even led a ghost dance.

When police moved to take him into custody on December 15th, one of his followers shot at the arresting officers.

In response, the police immediately shot Sitting Bull in the head and chest, killing him.

The ensuing gunfights would claim a dozen more lives, and tragically, the violence was only beginning.

Back at the Badlands camp, the ghost dancers were getting nervous.

It was winter and Sitting Bull's murder had left everyone sufficiently worried.

And so they decided the safest thing to do would be to pack up all their belongings, close camp, and report to headquarters as originally directed.

And a group of U.S.

soldiers were sent to escort them.

But partway through the journey, they ordered the dancers to stop.

Suddenly, more soldiers arrived, and then more, and then they spent the night drinking and cavorting as the Lakota grew more and more uneasy.

The very next morning, on December 29th, the military demanded that the Lakota turn over any guns they owned.

Then they ransacked their camp.

They stripped the the dancers of every rifle, knife, club, anything that could be used to defend themselves.

But one Lakota man named Black Coyote didn't understand what was happening because he was deaf and he refused to turn over his gun.

As two soldiers tried to wrestle it from him, it fired into the air.

And then, chaos.

The U.S.

soldiers began to gun down Lakota indiscriminately.

Men, women, little children alike were shot point blank.

By the time the smoke cleared, nearly 300 unarmed Lakota lay dead, their blood running down into the water beside the camp, a creek called Wounded Knee.

The ghost dancers had performed their ritual to bring heaven to earth, and instead, they had found nothing but hell.

The Wounded Knee Massacre has gone down in history as one of our nation's darkest moments.

Entire families slaughtered?

And for what?

The military would have claimed that they were protecting themselves, that the ghost dancers were savage, animalistic, even less than human.

But that's a lie.

No, the government murdered the Lakota because of their humanity, because they dared to cling tight to that most human thing of all, a cultural identity.

In the face of such horror and bloodshed, you might think that the ghost dance would have died out.

But it didn't.

True believers still made pilgrimages to Wavoka seeking his guidance, and Wavoca continued to insist that the Messiah would come.

In fact, in August of 1891, he claimed the Messiah had officially arrived.

Do not tell the white people about this, he told his followers.

Jesus is now upon the earth.

He appears like a cloud.

The dead are still alive again.

I do not know when they will be here, maybe this fall or in the spring.

When the time comes, there will be no more sickness and everyone will be young again.

Sadly, Wavoka's prophecy never came to pass.

And with this, enthusiasm for the ghost dance finally started to wane, along with faith in Wavoka as a prophet.

But here's the thing.

There's one of Wovoka's prophecies that did actually come true.

You see, as an older man, he made his followers a promise.

When he died, he said, he would shake the earth to let them know he had made it up to heaven.

One final message from a man who had already shaken up plenty while he was here on earth.

Wovoka passed away on Paiute land in Nevada on September 20th of 1932.

He had lived a long and meaningful life, and finally the time had come to ascend to that heaven he had preached about for so long.

Or so his friends and followers hoped.

As it turned out though, They didn't have to rely on mere hope for long, because exactly three months to the day after his death, Wovoka sent his message, a massive 7.1 magnitude earthquake rippling through Nevada.

It was all the proof they needed.

Wavoka had made it to heaven.

And this time, even his white acquaintances couldn't deny it.

Son of a gun, remarked one, said he was going to shake this world if he made it.

And by God,

he did.

I hope you enjoyed today's waltz through the dances of the world.

It never ceases to amaze me just how many different shapes and forms folklore can take.

By the way, one of the ghost dances' goals was to hasten the return of dead loved ones.

But what happens when the dancers themselves might just be dead?

Well, I just so happen to know an old Irish folktale that might hold the answer.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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The man should have known better.

He was riding past a known fairy hill one day when a stranger on a a black horse approached him, or so the old Irish folktale claims.

This man was a member of Galway's Kirwan family, and by all rights he should have known not to engage with a mysterious rider near an entrance to Fairyland.

But then again, if he hadn't, this wouldn't be much of a story, would it?

The man and the rider got to chatting, and the rider made a strange proposition.

Let me provide you with a jockey for tomorrow's horse race, the stranger said, and I guarantee your horse will win.

And And then before Kirwan could say yes or no, the rider vanished.

The following morning, the jockey arrived.

He was rather odd and suspiciously impish, but Kirwan felt oddly compelled to let him race.

And so together, the man and his weird little jockey headed to the track.

Lo and behold, Kirwan's horse won.

He stood in a daze as the silver cup was shoved into his hands, and everyone clamored to learn where he had found the wonderful talented jockey, a jockey who, by the way, had entirely disappeared.

But someone else had arrived in his place.

It was the rider on the black horse, who cordially invited Kirwan to dinner.

The two of them trotted through the countryside to a beautiful mansion where servants lined the steps waiting to receive them.

They dressed Kierwin in a purple velvet suit, I'm thinking the kind that Prince might have worn in a music video in the 80s, and then led him to a dining hall the likes of which Kirwan had never seen.

Floral garlands spiraled around crystal columns while wine overflowed from golden cups inlaid with gleaming jewels.

Steaming gold platters sagged with every imaginable delicacy, and conversation flowed just as freely as the drinks.

And the night wasn't over yet, because once the meal concluded and the dishes were cleared out, it was time to dance.

Revelers poured into the room and danced in circles around Kirwan, the guest of honor, beckoning him to join them.

And he almost did if he hadn't looked closely.

Because the more Kierwin studied the dancers, the more he had the feeling that he knew them from somewhere else.

They were moving quickly and the lights in the room were dim, but as he squinted to make out their faces, the truth dawned on him.

He did know these people.

Or rather, he had known them, past tense, because every single one of these dancers was dead.

There, pirouetting by a marble column, was a man who had been killed in a hunting accident.

And over there, it was Kirwan's own brother who had drowned the year before.

Although the dancers were pale as death itself, their eyes burned as if aflame, and they danced with a lifelike fervor, begging Kirwan to join them.

Suddenly, coming closer was Kierwan's lost love.

She was just as beautiful as she had been before she died.

She was even wearing the pearl necklace he had given her, which gleamed around her neck as she grabbed his wrist and tried to tug him into the fray.

Her fingers burned around his wrist.

Dance with me, she whispered into his ears.

Dance with me again.

Look at me, for you once loved me.

Now, to Kierwan's credit, all of this sufficiently freaked him out.

He pulled his wrist away and he pushed through the crowd, searching frantically for his host, the writer.

Take me away from this place, he begged.

I know the dancers.

They are dead.

Why have you brought them up from their graves?

The stranger merely laughed and poured him another glass of red wine.

For courage, he said.

Not knowing what else to do, Kierwin drank the wine, and soon he fell into a deep slumber.

At noon the next day, he awoke in his own bed.

Perhaps it had all been a dream, or rather a nightmare, and he might have convinced himself of that too, if it weren't for the angry red burn encircling his wrist in the delicate shape of his sweetheart's hand.

This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with writing by Jenna Rose Nethercott, research by Cassandra Dayalba, and music by Chad Lawson.

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Huh.