Here's another (more accurate?) take on the Zar:

www.serpentine.org/yasmin/Zar.htm

It strikes me as a survival of a very ancient spiritual practice....and maybe more of a kind of religious ceremony in the ancient tradition of Goddess and Tribal religions.....a kind of ancient "rock and roll." :-)

I am very familiar with Zar as well. (Wrote a book on it. *Chuckles*)

Zar and Tarantella are both "ecstatic" dance rituals which means that the dancer communes with spirits other than (her) own. Ecstatic dance is a type of transcendental dance in which a dancer goes through a very specific ritual process to commune with a foreign spirit; either in propitiation, exorcism or (in extremely taboo scenerios) communication. Unless a foreign spirit is involved in the dance/ritual the session itself is merely a basic transcendental rite (alpha ecstasis) or if it has magical purposes (evocare). Zar and Tarantella both deal with a specific type of spirit classification and thus with a very select group of named spirits.

It is very common in the last 20 years or so for spiritually progressive or occult connected people to adopt the trappings of a Zar or Tarantella ritual and put their own spin upon it; making it a healing ritual (which is actually below its capability range) or giving it a new mythology, or in the worst and most common cases... dressing up basic trance work and duping people into believing that they are doing something more. If all that happens is you dance to an Ayuub (2/4) or a Tarantella (6/8) until you feel euphoric and perhaps even black out while dancing then you'll know that all you did was basic trance work dressed up as something more. These rituals are very dirty, they last for 3, 5 or 7 days or nights, they are expensive because they involve a lot of really fine foods, clothes & jewelry but most markedly... if you don't know the name or type of spirit possessing you by the end then you have not participated in a Zar or Tarantella ritual.

People who study Zar and Tarantella and other forms of ritual Exorcism/Propitiation tend to have access to scholarly books on the subject and thus their viewpoint becomes tainted with the idea that these rituals are tied into socio ecconomic problems or primitive healing therapies. They tend to espouse the idea that the Tarantella is related to the rites of Bacchu because it's the only type of trance they know from Classical Greece. On the other side of things, the people who read about and are interested in Zar tend to declare that the Zar ritual is the descendent of an ancient ritual to Isis... because the two are both Egyptian and thats the oldest commonly known trance cult from Egypt. All of these things gloss over what Zar and Tarantella actually are and what they are designed to do.

~*Spoon*~