Terpsichore (pronounced turp-sik-uh-ree)
(1) In Classical Mythology, the goddess of
dancing and choral song and one of the nine Muses who were daughters of Zeus (god
of sky and thunder) & Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory).
(2) In choreography; the art of dancing (should
always be lowercase).
(3) In astronomy (as 81 Terpsichore), a main belt
asteroid.
Circa 1760: From the Classical Latin Terpsichorē from the Ancient Greek Τερψιχόρη
(Terpsikhórē) (literally “enjoyment
of dance”), noun use of the feminine of terpsíchoros
(delighting in the dance), the construct being τέρψις (térpsis; térpein) (to delight; enjoyment) + χορός (khorós) (dance; chorus); it’s from terpsíchoros that English gained chorus. The Greek was térpein was from the primitive Indo-European root terp- (to satisfy) source also of
Sanskrit trpyati (takes one's fill)
and the Lithuanian tarpstu & tarpti (to thrive, prosper).
The adjective terpsichorean (pertaining to
dancing (literally “of Terpsichore”)) dates from 1869, and was from the Latinized
form of the Greek noun terpsikhore (Muse
of dancing and dramatic chorus). From
this came the theatrical slang terp (stage dancer, chorus girl) noted since 1937. The adjectival form terpsichorean often
appears with an initial capital letter because of its etymology from a proper
noun. Either is acceptable but the
conventions of Modern English tend eventually to prevail which suggests use of
the capital T will reduce with time but, given the rarity of the word except in
a few technical and historical disciplines, the classic form is likely to endure
among those few who enjoy its use.
In the
mythology of Ancient Greece, nine goddesses ruled over art and literature. The Greeks called them Muses and the Muse of dance
and choral music was Terpsichore. Of
late she’s been of interest to astronomers who adopted her as a metaphor for the
rhythm and ordered movement in the universe, such as mechanical oscillations. In Archaic Greece, there were but three Muses,
all associated with song and dance; it was only in the classical period they
became nine and assigned to distinct spheres: Calliope of epic poetry, Clio of
history, Euterpe of lyric poetry, Erato of love poetry, Melpomene of tragedy, Polyhymnia
of hymns, Thalia of comedy, Urania of astronomy, and Terpsichore of dance and
choral music. The daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne,
they dwelt in the land of Pieria in the foothills of Mount Olympus. In later mythology, writers tended to compare
the Muses to the sirens but while both were young nymphs famous for their
beautiful songs, the Muses sang to enrich men’s souls while the sirens were
chthonic and sang to lure them to their deaths.
The Greek historian Herodotus (circa 484-425 BC)
wrote his Ἱστορίαι
(historíai̯; in the West styled variously as The History or The Histories of Herodotus)) as an account of the Greco-Persian
Wars (499-449 BC). Although there was
once some doubt about the veracity as a historical document (reflecting more the
scepticism about medieval editors and translators than the original texts),
modern research has concluded the work is one of the most reliable histories
from antiquity. Herodotus was called “The Father of History” by the Roman
orator Cicero (103-46 BC) because of the quality of his writing but he's also
now acknowledged as the father of historiography's modern structural form. Written histories had existed prior to
Herodotus but he was the first to adopt a recognizably modern thematic
form. At some unknown time, one or more
editors reorganized The History into
nine chapters, each name after a Muse, one of which was Terpsichore: Book I (Clio), Book II (Euterpe), Book III
(Thalia), Book IIII (Melpomene), Book V (Terpsichore), Book VI (Erato), Book
VII (Polymnia), Book VIII (Urania) & Book IX (Calliope).
The Muse Terpsichore In Ancient & Modern Greece. Allegory of the Muse Terpsichore playing a harp, from the Florentine School of the eighteenth century, oil on canvas by an unknown artist (left) and Lindsay Lohan dancing The Lilo, Lohan Beach House, Mykonos, Greece, 2018 (right).
Despite the similarity, there’s no verified connection
between khorós (dance; chorus) and χώρᾱς (khṓrās), inflection of χώρᾱ (khṓrā) (location, place, spot; the proper place; one's
place in life; piece of land: tract, land, field; country (as opposed to a city
or town), countryside; country, nation. The
origin of khôra is unknown and it may
be from a Pre-Greek substrate or other regional language although speculative links
have been suggested including χᾰ́ος (kháos) (empty space, abyss, chasm) and χατέω
(khatéō) (to lack, miss, need, desire)
but few etymologists have supported either and the lack of cognates beyond the Greek
rendered research a dead end. Khōra had been adopted as the ancient
name for the land lying between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers north of
Babylon (modern-day Iraq), from the Greek mesopotamia
(khōra (literally "a country
between two rivers)), from the feminine of mesopotamos,
the construct being mesos (middle),
from the primitive Indo-European root medhyo-
(middle") + potamos (river). That use borrowed directly from the
discussions from Antiquity.
However, khôra did attract the interest of those scourges of late twentieth century linguistics: the French deconstructionists. Their attention seems to have been excited by the concept of khôra in the sense of “the territory of the Ancient Greek polis which lay beyond the city proper”. The philosophers of Antiquity, noting the idea of khôra simultaneously as (1) the physical space between city & the wilderness, (2) the time it takes to transverse the space and (3) one’s state of mind while in the space. It was very much a concept of the indeterminate, a triton genos (third kind), being neither civilization nor the state of nature and city nor wilderness and few things so appealed to the deconstructionists as the indeterminate.
Of course, one attraction of deconstruction was
that it was in itself a layer of indeterminacy and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004),
post-modernism’s most famous explorer of khôra
in the context of apophatism or negative theology, was interested not how the
word had been understood in the traditions of metaphysics & metaphorics but
what meaning could be constructed for something which is neither present or absent,
passive or active. The findings from khôra’s time on post-modernism’s autopsy
table did illustrate why deconstruction gained a special role in language
because there was surely no other way that Plato’s entirely cosmological concept
could become psycho-linguistic and produce, in all seriousness, the idea of khôra as “container of the uncontainable”. Plato (circa 425-circa 347 BC) had imagined khôra as that space through which
something could pass but in which nothing could remain so thus to a French
deconstructionist the very essence of tout
autre (fully other) and from there it wasn’t very far to the idea of khôra also as time and space interacting. At that point, in the tradition of
post-modernism, khôra meant whatever the
observer decided it meant.
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