The dancing daughter and the head of John the Baptist (Mark 6:14-29) revisited: an interdisciplinary approach

Abstract

Herod had him imprisoned for denouncing as incestuous his marriage to Herodias, the former wife of his brother. During a banquet, Herodias’ daughter dances before Herod, who is so enchanted that he promises her a favor. At her mother’s behest, she asks for the head of John the Baptist2. The king honors her request and has the head delivered to her on a plate (in disco), which she gives to her mother. When the disciples of John discover about his death, they bury his headless body. In this essay I treat the motif of the dancing girl from an interdisciplinary perspective. The figures of Salome and John the Baptist have had an incalculable impact on both exegesis and art history. Furthermore, the motif cluster of ‘beheading’ and ‘dancing’ is freighted with anthropological gender archetypes. This essay proposes an interdisciplinary hermeneutic that I have elsewhere called ‘interspaces’3. The concept of ‘interstitial space’ releases new energy enriches our motifs from textual, visual, gender and anthropological paradigms4.