Dance of the Seven Veils

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...

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?

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.'

[7] 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.

[8] Wilde may have learned of the descent of the goddess by his acquaintance with Oxford professor Archibald Sayce, who lectured and published an English translation of this text.

The dance remains unnamed except in the acting notes, but Salome's sexual fascination with John seems to motivate the request—though Herod is portrayed as pleased.

"[3] Ernst Krause argues that Strauss's version of the dance "established the modern musical formula for the portrayal of ecstatic sensual desire and brought it to perfection.

"[15] The Wilde play and the Strauss opera led to the phenomenon of "Salomania", in which various performers put on acts inspired by Salome's erotic dance.

Several of these were criticised for being salacious and close to stripping, leading to "insistent vogue for women doing glamorous and exotic 'oriental' dances in striptease".

Based loosely on Wilde's play, her version of the Dance of the Seven Veils became famous (and to some notorious) and she was billed as "The Salomé Dancer".

She stops the dance before removing her last veil when she sees John's head being delivered on a platter, as she did not want him to be killed in this version of the story.