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.
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