The hemp dance

Hemp was grown across rural Europe for its fibre, and farmers wanted it tall. Across the continent people believed that a plant could be made to copy what a person did: if you leapt high, the hemp would grow high. Married women in Poland danced and jumped around Shrovetide “for hemp’s sake”; young couples in southern Germany jumped over the Midsummer bonfire, calling on the hemp to grow three ells tall.

None of this involved smoking or eating anything. It is fertility magic for a fibre crop, recorded by folklorists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It belongs in an atlas of cannabis because it is the same plant that the law later had to sort into hemp and drug.

Dancing for flax and hemp

The Polish taniec na len i konopie (“dance for flax and hemp”), also called taniec na konopie, was an agricultural fertility dance, performed especially by married women. Its timing varied: the Przemyśl museum describes the last days of Shrovetide, while the Radom museum records Ash Wednesday gatherings. Women jumped as high as possible, believing that the height of their leaps would determine how tall the hemp and flax grew.

The Przemyśl museum records their chant: “Na len, na konopie, żeby się rodziły, żeby nasze dzieci nago nie chodziły” — asking flax and hemp to thrive so their children would have clothes.

The illustration is Stanisław Grzegorzak’s 1984 carved wooden relief Zapusty w karczmie (Shrovetide in the Tavern), in the collection of the Muzeum Narodowe Ziemi Przemyskiej in Przemyśl, Poland. It evokes the traditional tavern celebrations associated with the dance; it does not document a performance of the hemp-specific ritual.

Jumping for height

The anthropologist James George Frazer collected these customs in The Golden Bough as examples of what he called homoeopathic or imitative magic, the idea that like produces like. “In many parts of Europe,” he wrote, “dancing or leaping high in the air are approved homoeopathic modes of making the crops grow high.”

Where	When	What was done, as recorded
Franche-Comté, France	Carnival	People should dance to make the hemp grow tall (Frazer)
Poland	Shrovetide or Ash Wednesday, depending on region	Married women jump for tall hemp and flax (Przemyśl and Radom museums; Benet also records Shrove Tuesday)
Swabia, Germany	Midsummer	Young men and women leap the bonfire hand in hand, praying that the hemp may grow three ells high (Frazer)
Baden, Germany	St John’s Day	Couples leap the fire crying “Grow, that the hemp may be three ells high!” (Frazer)
Swabia and Transylvanian Saxon communities	After sowing hemp	The sower leaps high in the field to encourage tall stalks (Frazer, pp. 137–139)
Germany and Austria	Often Shrove Tuesday; other dates locally	High dancing, leaping or jumping backwards from a table for tall flax (Frazer, pp. 137–139)
Germany	Sowing	Long strides, with the seed thrown high into the air (Benet; Frazer also records throwing hemp seed high in Baden)
Baden	Sowing	Planting during the “high” hours, between eleven and noon (Benet)

In Baden, Frazer adds, the parents of whoever jumped highest were expected to have the best harvest, and a man who gave nothing to the bonfire was told that his hemp in particular would never grow. Sula Benet, writing in 1975, notes that peasants also sowed hemp on the days of saints known to have been tall, and baked cakes called hanfeier to help it along.

Leaping in fields, throwing hemp seeds into the air and jumping over fires followed the same symbolic logic: upward human movement was believed to encourage upward plant growth.

Hemp at weddings and harvest

In Poland the hemp dance was also danced at weddings, by the bride with the master of ceremonies. Benet records that among the Southern Slavs a bride entering her new home stroked its four walls with a bunch of hemp and was sprinkled with hemp seed for luck, and that in Estonia a new bride went round her neighbours with older women asking for gifts of hemp, and so was “showered” with it. The harvest itself, she writes, was a time of dancing and festivity, with women in the leading role.

Naked on St Andrew’s Eve

Hemp seed was also used to see the future, especially a future husband. The eve of St Andrew’s Day (30 November) was the favoured night. Benet describes unmarried girls in Ukraine carrying hemp seed in their belts, scattering it and jumping on a heap. They called out to the saint that they were sowing hemp seed on him, and asked God to show them whom they would sleep with. The girls then took off their shirts, filled their mouths with water and sprinkled it on the seed so that birds would not eat it, and ran naked three times around the house. A similar charm with hemp seed was known in Scotland at Halloween.

These customs place hemp within communal celebration, fertility symbolism and courtship as well as farming. The tall stalks promised fibre for clothing; the seeds could also become a way to ask about marriage and the future.

Same plant, new rules

Neither Frazer nor Benet says how widely these customs were still kept when they wrote, and Frazer describes several in the past tense. The plant they served is now sorted by its THC content. Poland’s 2022 amendment defines fibre hemp as plants with no more than 0.3% of THC and THCA together. In Ukraine, illegally sowing or growing up to ten hemp plants is an administrative offence punished with a fine. Germany’s Cannabis Act has allowed adults to grow three plants at home since 2024.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}