downspiral, I agre with you about the high you can get from dancing -- it feels sacred to me too. But as you suggest, that's my own personal experience and I am prone to see sacred meaning in all sorts of experience. It's just more intense and directed in dance. (And of course there are the days my knee hurts, my shoulders slump, I can't seem to get into the flow of the music, and so on, which don't exactly bubble with sacred energy ...
But I just have to comment that the idea that the earth is feminine and women have power from motherhood and fertility isn't as common among so-called primitive people as is commonly believed. Hunter-gatherers (people who live the way our most remote human ancestors lived) have a wide variety of religious systems and the idea of earth=female=fertile is not usually a key concept. It's really quite Victorian, when you think about it -- it kind of surprises me that so many people accept that the main way women gain importance in society is *naturally* through motherhood, and through association with the (plowed) earth and not through other more active and individual ways of getting along in the universe. Like being the cosmic "little woman" ...
I don't feel motherly when I dance, or at least only rarely. But I also think the ways I feel when I dance are partly my own experience but partly also the ways our culture primes us to think and feel. I think religious and transcendent experience comes in different forms according to different soceities' needs and abilities to perceive. So really, what people felt in antiquity is interesting only insofar as you can really reconstruct a true world view that is fundamentally different from our own, that can really teach us -- rather than projecting our own desires.
You can tell this is one of my favorite rants ...
Joy in dance,
Andrea