The Sixth Sunday after Trinity, 11 July 2021: Austwick, Keasden
Hers is an old, old story but we moderns are still fascinated by Salome. We know her through the paintings of Gustave Moreau - over a hundred of them - in which Salome is ‘a seductive woman in gauzy fabric’, and through Gustav Klimt's cold-eyed, bare-breasted Salome, with John’s red hair running through her bony fingers. We’ve revelled in watching Rita Hayworth dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils in her 1953 film; we’ve uncomfortably watched Oscar Wilde’s play and Richard Strauss’s opera, with their ‘nauseating’ action of Salome kissing John’s decapitated head on the mouth. [1]
Salome: in popular imagination she is the quintessential femme fatale; or what one 19th century writer called ‘the symbolic incarnation of undying Lust, the Goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty exalted above all other beauties ... the monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning.’ [2]
I want to tell you something which you may find surprising, even shocking, about today’s gospel passage. There is no Salome - there never has been a Salome - in this story. Mark never names the girl who dances at Herod’s birthday party: here she is known simply as ‘the little daughter of Herodias’. [3]
The little daughter. Dancing away at the family party. If you think of family parties you’ve been to over the years, then you can imagine that this little daughter may be the toddler tumbling around the dance floor without skill but full of innocent joy, causing delight; the little daughter: she may be the youngster spinning and hopping and skipping around with wonderful abandon, raising smiles; the little daughter: she may be the bright-eyed one performing with skill and heart the moves she has so earnestly and delightedly learned just for this occasion, to the admiration of the adults watching.
The word which Mark uses to describe this girl is the same one he uses for Jairus’ daughter. Which suggests that, in our lingo, she’s a pre-teen. Today’s message is that we need to clean up our minds and change our ideas about Salome - and let this little daughter dance her childlike dance…
Some decades after Mark, the Jewish historian Josephus said that Herodias had a daughter called ‘Salome’; and from that time on, in popular thinking, the bible’s dancing little daughter somehow became an older girl, and sexualised: ‘the personification of the lascivious woman, a temptress who lures men away from salvation’. [4]
The scholar and dancer, artist and minister Angela Yarber says that,
If we chalk the plays, the opera, the paintings, and the choreography up to extreme poetic licensing, then perhaps we can return to the heart of the text. And we'll see the story of a little girl who was asked to dance by a family member at a party. I have many such memories from my own childhood [she says] as 1 cried "Watch me! Watch me!" to parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents while I leapt and twirled, filled with the childlike innocence that adults often forget … I am convinced that Salome's dance was no different. [5]
Based solely on what the text says, and even [the earliest] artistic renderings, it’s obvious that this scripture is about a little girl dancing for play and fun and then being taken advantage of by a conniving mother and uncle. [6]
This brings us to realise that as this little girl twirls and swirls in glee on the dance floor, she is oblivious to the whirlwind of lusts and desires of the adults encircling around her: sibling rivalry; the toxic love triangle of Herod, Herodias, and Herod’s brother; the murderous triangle of rivalry and desire between Herod, Herodias, and John; the action facilitated by the power of the crowd - the guests - in front of whom, despite himself, Herod felt obliged to perform the deadly task which would forever haunt him; incestuous undercurrents; the violence of misogyny.
The story does not disguise these desires, they’re too naked to be hidden; and we all know where they lead. They lead to a tiny daughter being handed a bloodied head on a plate to pass on to her waiting mother.
There is nothing in the story to suggest that the little daughter had any desire of her own to end John’s life. ‘Children don’t know how to desire and must be taught,’ writes Rene Girard. ‘Herod does not suggest anything to [her] because he offers her everything and anything. That is why she leaves him and goes to ask her mother what she should desire.’ Her mother’s desire becomes her own - an intense and urgent desire which so alters the little daughter that she rushes back to Herod with her demand. [7] She misunderstands her mother who in asking for John’s ‘head’ is really just saying she wants John dead. In her childish misreading of her mother’s words, the little daughter takes Herodias literally, looks around the dining room for ideas, and asks for the prophet’s head to be presented on a dinner plate. [8]
Suddenly this ancient tale hits home; it’s as contemporary as this week’s regional news and the story told by a young woman called Kirsty McKell. Kirsty was a 15-year old dancer in a Legends show on Blackpool's Central Pier back in 2002 when a 43-year-old performer in the same show, Clayton Sandlin, targeted her for abuse of various kinds including rape. She was someone’s little daughter caught up in an adult’s whirlwind of lusts and desires; a child who did not know how to desire and so was entirely vulnerable to Sandlin’s urges, in whose eyes Kirsty was a Salome.
After the show ended Kirsty never danced professionally again; she said the trauma destroyed her life. "My first blueprint of men has been shrouded in rape and manipulation and grooming and so I've struggled my whole life to trust men," she said. This week Sandlin was gaoled for eight years for these crimes. Only now, 20 years on, can Kirsty say she feels release from the control he has held over her life. [9]
Salome’s story is one with all the misunderstood stories of dancing girls all over the world. It is a history which needs to be redeemed. [10] Recall how elsewhere in scripture ‘Jesus encourages us to see the child - the archetypal weaker, inferior ‘other’ - as our spiritual equal, from whom we have so much to learn and receive, through whom we encounter the kin-dom of God.’ [11]
‘Let the little children come to me’, he said…. ‘If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.’ [12]
Jesus calls us to clean up our minds; to do away with those things circling inside us and in our society which create creatures like Salome out of childlike girls. To give our full and pure attention to children for children’s sake, not ours. As we do so we make space to let the little daughters dance.
Notes
[1] Wikipedia: Salome.
[2] Joris-Karl Huysmans, A rebours (Against Nature), pp. 65-66. Quoted in Ela Nutu, Salomé in Text and Performance: The Bible, Wilde and Strauss.
[3] The key word here in the original Greek is thygatros meaning a female child, or ‘little daughter’. See Angela Yarber, Painting Salome. Feminism and Religion, 12 November 2012.
[4] Wikipedia: Salome.
[5] Angela Yarber, Dance in Scripture: How Biblical Dancers Can Revolutionize Worship Today.
[6] Angela Yarber, Painting Salome. Feminism and Religion, 12 November 2012.
[7] René Girard, The Scapegoat. p.130-131.
[8] René Girard, The Scapegoat. p.136-137.
[9] Abbie Jones, Woman speaks out over Elvis performer rape ordeal. BBC North West Tonight, 6 July 2021.
[10] Angela Yarber, Painting Salome. Feminism and Religion, 12 November 2012.
[11] Al Barrett and Ruth Harley: Being Interrupted: Reimagining the Church's Mission from the Outside, In. p113.
[12] Mark 9.42.
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