The iconic disco scene of John Travolta dancing to the Bee Gees “You Should Be Dancing” in the 1977 film “Saturday Night Fever” by Paramount Pictures. By the way, the woman in the green dress behind him (whom he abandons for his dance solo) was Fran Drescher

(15) DISCOMANCY

Yes, I made this one up, for latter day dervishes as it were, prompted by my other invention dipsomancy – with which one suspects discomancy would commonly overlap.

Yes, it’s a playful reference to the visual or sensory ambience of participants in contemporary dance music having something of the same dramatic or ritual resonance of divination or magic.

Also shufflemancy – a contemporary neologism actually used by some people today essentially as a type of cledonomancy (or clamancy) from the random selection of music playlists.

But as usual with these playful entries, I’m joking and I’m serious – the serious part being the long history of ecstatic dance or music in magic or religion, probably going back into prehistory and often to the point of metaphysical significance of cosmos or life itself as a dance. After all, are we not all dancers to the beat of our own hearts?

Famously, there’s the depiction of Shiva as Nataraja or Lord of the Dance – and manic dancing was also the ecstatic schtick of Dionysus and the Maenads.

It’s even in the Bible – perhaps most famously with Salome and her Dance of the Seven Veils, albeit not so much in the text itself (which omits even her name), and which may or may not have its origin in myths of the goddess Ishtar.

There’s also King David dancing “before the Lord with all his might”, much to the disapproval of his wife as his dancing left little to the imagination of female viewers. That’s right – it’s the Old Testament meets Magic Mike.

In some ways, it would be a type of somatomancy, using the (dancing) human body and its movements as a source of divination or magic (by either participants or spectators). It could potentially be even a type of theriomancy, particularly for ‘dances’ that imitated or invoked animal movements, or one of the elemental forms of divination or magic for dance imitating the movements of air, fire or water. It’s not much of a conceptual leap from the martial arts style of movements for the bending in Avatar to dance.

In a nutshell, similarly to other entries, it would seem more a mechanism for invoking divination or magic from other sources – again with fun fantasy potential for different dances or dance styles accessing different sources or types of magic.

After all, there’s the whole Dungeons and Dragons class of bard for evoking magic (and other things) using music, which is pretty silly when you think about it. As Elan the bard said of his class in the webcomic The Order of the Stick – “You walk into dungeons and SING at people. Who could take that seriously?”

And I for one am all here for taking to that to the next level with dungeon dance-offs. (Although I’m pretty sure there’s prestige classes or rules for adapting bards to dance as it is in the game – even memes of orc bard dancers).

RATING: 4 STARS****
X-TIER (WILD TIER)