The Dance of the Seven Veils is Salome's dance performed before King Herod Antipas, in modern stage, literature and visual arts. It is an elaboration on the New Testament story of the Feast of Herod and the execution of John the Baptist, which refers to Salome dancing before the king, but does not give the dance a name.
The name "Dance of the Seven Veils" originates with the 1893 English translation of Oscar Wilde's 1891 French play Salome in the stage direction "Salome dances the dance of the seven veils". The dance was also incorporated into Richard Strauss's 1905 opera Salome.
Biblical account
According to ten verses of Matthew 14, John was imprisoned for criticizing King Herod Antipas's marriage to Herodias, the former wife of Antipas's half-brother Herod II. Herod offered his niece a reward of her choice for performing a dance for his guests on his birthday. Herodias persuaded her daughter to ask for John the Baptist's head on a platter. Against his better judgment, Herod reluctantly acceded to her request.
Josephus
The Romano-Jewish historian Josephus lists Antipas's stepdaughter's name as Salome, but makes no mention of a dance nor makes any connection between Salome and John the Baptist.
Oscar Wilde
The idea that Salome's dance involves "seven veils" originates with Wilde's 1891 play Salomé. Wilde was influenced by earlier French writers who had transformed the image of Salome into an incarnation of female lust. Rachel Shteir writes that,
Wilde was especially influenced by Gustave Flaubert's story "Herodias" in which Salome dances on her hands to please Antipas. The type of dance was common among "gypsy" acrobats in the 19th century. Wilde at first intended to follow Flaubert's version, but changed his mind. Shireen Malik says he may have been influenced by the 1870 poem "The Daughter of Herodias" by Arthur O'Shaughnessy which describes Salome dancing:
She freed and floated on the air her arms
Above dim veils that hid her bosom's charms... The veils fell round her like thin coiling mists Shot through by topaz suns and amethysts.
The poem goes on to describe brief views of her "jewelled body" as the flowing veils swirl and part.
Wilde transforms the dance from a public performance for his guests, as in the Bible, to a personal dance for the king himself. He gives no description of the dance beyond the name, but the idea of a series of veils has been connected to a process of unveiling. As Malik says, "although Wilde does not describe Salome's dance or suggest that she remove any veils, her dance is invariably assumed to be one of unveiling, thus revealing herself." Wilde's play has even been proposed as the origin of striptease. Toni Bentley writes "Wilde's bracketed brevity allowed for a world of interpretation. Can the invention of striptease be traced to a single innocuous stage direction in a censored play that could barely find a theater or audience? Can Oscar Wilde be considered the unlikely father of modern striptease?"
In one of Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations to the play, he depicts what he calls a "stomach dance" (i.e., a belly dance), in which Salome is depicted with exposed breasts and undulating belly, wearing transparent pantaloons. Wilde wrote a note in appreciation of Beardsley's design, saying: "For Aubrey: for the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance." The concept of "belly dancing" had become widely known in 1893, the year before Beardsley created his designs, when it was featured at the World's Fair in Chicago that year.
Origin of the "veil" dance
Bentley notes that the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna "performed the first documented striptease" when she descended into the Kur (underworld), ruled by her sister Ereshkigal, in search of her faithless lover Dumuzid. Inanna had to divest herself of the mysterious "seven mé " (conjecturally, her various jewels and robes) in her descent through seven successive gates leading ever deeper into the underworld until at last she stood naked in the 'land of no return.' Oscar Wilde assigned this symbolic descent to the underworld of the unconscious, a ceremony that equates stripping naked to being in a state of truth, the ultimate unveiling, to Salome." Writing from a Jungian perspective, Perera has demonstrated the same for the far older Sumerian myth of the descent of Inanna.