What can be made of the fact that American early modern dancers employed the term 'pagan dance' to describe their practices, ideologies, and aesthetics when they were surrounded by a public discourse that disparaged Indigenous dance through the very same moniker? When used to describe Indigenous ritual dances, the term 'pagan dance' performed a complete cultural recontextualization upon whatever Indigenous dance that was its object – transforming each dance into a justification for a US settler-colonial and anti-Indigenous stance. However, when adopted by early modern dancers, the term 'pagan dance' could be received by the US public as a revitalisation of ancient spiritualism and a garnering of 'native' ritual knowledge. Tracking the term through American newspapers at the turn of the twentieth century, this article investigates the bifurcation of a 'pagan dance' vocabulary that conditioned dance's social and spiritual reception in the US.