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slaves and dancing: “Their dances are not only protracted to unseasonable hours, but too frequently become the resort of the most dissolute and abandoned, and for the vilest purposes.” Christian slaves began to adopt this opinion and many even went so far as to disavow the use of the fiddle, a popular accompanying dance instrument slaves played for themselves and for their masters.
    The fiddle itself had already been considered an instrument most useful to the devil, particularly as it was favored for dance, a recreation already suspect. But for many slaves, the fiddle offered opportunities that others could never even hope for. As one slave remarked, fiddling “relieved me of many days’ labor in the fields.” It also provided slaves with the ability to travel and gain some basic conveniences such as shoes and tobacco. Assuch, for a fiddle player to give up their instrument so as to not offend God represents a great psychic rupture, and furthered the division between secular and sacred music.
    The pull of Christianity for some slaves was strong, and as one slave remarked: “When I joined the church, I burned my fiddle up.” Destroying the fiddle was a deeply symbolic act. Dancing, fueled by the fiddle, was one of the truly African traditions kept alive by slaves. For many African traditions, the entire world turns on a spiritual axis and is imbued at every level with divine purpose. How can any part of life be separate from the spirits in every stone, animal, and plant? Nevertheless, the extreme violence that wrenched African people from their homelands and traditions created a vacuum filled easily by the white Christian myth equating slavery with God’s will. Christianity was hope in a hopeless foreign land. Whether through whispers in a hush harbor or simply in the way in which culture is encoded in the memory of generations—even when the origin of the memory may be lost—being human, slaves found a way to retain their impulse to dance. The shout was a bridge between the two worlds.
    While the gods and their names were abandoned or forgotten with each generation, the manner in which they were worshipped was etched deep into the slaves’ spiritual DNA. It was the shout where the genetic marker was most pronounced. Listening to shouts today, the tension between the ancient tribal rhythms and the biblically themed lyrics is a powerful reminder of how the Christian training of the slave coalesced with the sounds and gestures of a religion finding expression in spirit possession, magic, and divination, the very things governingwhites, which the Church had hoped to drive from the slave to instill not only docility and obedience, but to ensure that the devil had not hitched a ride on the slave galleys. Yet something akin did come with the Africans, but it was not the devil. It was a spirit far older.
    While the theology of the African dance and the ring shout of the Christian slave revealed different divine interactions with humans, the structure and rhythm of the shout are deeply African and reflect a vital non-Christian religious spirit. Significantly, the ring moves counterclockwise, a tradition likely drawn from an African cosmology where the spirit world moves in a circle, eternally. There is no final revelation, no second coming that wraps up human history in a heavenly bow. “Rather,” as Jon Michael Spencer explains, “a person begins as this-worldly spirit and returns to the world of the spirits for continued life after death.” This cycle never ends. The slave shout is a way for the slave to be obedient to God through self-agency regarding the work of their own souls. The master does not determine their fate; the slave follows the eternal shape of the universe, a force no white man can stop or control.
    The power of the spirit world is most dramatically revealed in the African traditions that allowed the faithful to be overtaken—possessed—by the