The Dancing Plagues

                    Detail from a 1642 engraving by Hendrik Hondius, based on Peter Breughel's 1564 drawing depicting                                                   sufferers of a dance epidemic occurring in Molenbeek that year

From the 14th to 16th centuries, Europeans were seized by a manic desire to dance – and did so in their hundreds, often until they dropped. But, asks Helen Carr, what caused this bizarre phenomenon – disease, disaster or the devil?

In Strasbourg, 1518, a local woman named Frau Troffea stepped out of her house and made her way to a narrow street nearby. At first, she would have attracted little attention from her neighbours as they went about their daily business. But that was about to change very quickly. For Frau Troffea intended to dance – and, when she started, she brought the entire neighbourhood to a standstill.

Frau Troffea didn’t dance to music, nor were her movements in any way restrained or self-conscious. Instead, she danced with a type of madness that was apparently every bit as contagious as it was unstoppable. First a trickle of onlookers joined the impromptu rave – then a flood. Soon Frau Troffea was accompanied by almost 400 revellers, dancing through the streets in a dizzying display of flailing limbs and spinning bodies.

As strange as they may appear to us today, the events of 1518 were far from unique. In fact, chronicles from the 14th to 16th centuries are full of reports of people across central Europe being seized by a compulsion to dance – and doing so in their hundreds, sometimes until they dropped dead from exhaustion. Saint John’s Dance, as this phenomenon is known (due to the fact that people often called out the name of John the Baptist as they cavorted), traumatised onlookers and triggered a fearsome backlash from a horrified, confused clergy. Today, half a millennium later, scientists are still puzzling over its causes.

The genesis of the medieval dance of death can perhaps be traced to the fallout from Europe’s greatest catastrophe. In the 1340s and 50s, the Black Death tore its way across the continent – killing up to 60 per cent of the population, wiping out entire communities and causing devastating famines.

In response to these horrors, flagellants could soon be seen processing through the streets of villages, towns and cities, singing and lashing themselves in a desperation born out of loss, starvation, and the fear of God. Then in 1360, in Lausitz, bordering Bohemia, something more extraordinary still started happening. A record from the town describes women and girls acting “crazily”, dancing and shouting through the streets at the foot of the image of the Virgin.

The Lausitz dance craze seems to have subsided quickly. But, 14 years later, the phenomenon returned – this time, on a far larger scale. That summer, crowds of people began to stream into towns around the river Rhine, including Aachen, where they started cavorting before the altar of the Virgin. Like their predecessors in Lausitz, the dancers’ movements were incoherent and frenzied, marked by manic twists, jumps and spins. In fact, it soon became clear that their actions were less a flamboyant expression of joy than a virulent, uncontrollable mania – one that gripped minds and bodies. (This explains why the affliction has also been called ‘choreomania’, from the Greek words for dancing and madness.)

Monk and chronicler Petrus de Herenthal described people gripped by choreomania to be “so tormented by the Devil that in markets and churches as well as in their own homes, they danced and held each other’s hands and leaped high into the air”.

The chronicler Bzovius’s description was more disturbing still. Dance mania, he wrote, drove sufferers into “a mad flight from their homes and communities”, before “they fell foaming to the ground; then they got up again and danced themselves to death, if they were not by others’ hands, tightly bound”. This indicates death by a type of epileptic seizure or cognitive disability.

A few weeks after dancers filled the streets of Aachen, there was an even more extraordinary outbreak – in a forest near the city of Trier. Here, the revellers were so numerous that the gathering resembled a small market town. They then proceeded to strip half-naked and set wreaths upon their heads, to luxuriate in a bacchanalian orgy that would result in more than 100 conceptions.

Some of the dancers were said to have writhed and contorted on their bellies, dragging themselves along with the crowd, likely as a result of extreme exhaustion. Many attempted to control their convulsions by binding themselves in linen and beating their torsos with small sticks. It seems that, in a haunting echo of the flagellations of 1349, they believed that a demon moved within them.

Such was the hysterical, untempered rage coursing through the dancers that, in some towns, they began attacking people who were wearing red, or dressed in the latest fashions. The authorities in the town of Liège were so troubled by the attacks that they banned the production of pointed shoes, which were in vogue at the time.

Dumbfounded by what they saw unfolding before them, church authorities rapidly denounced the dancers as heretics. Many of the revellers were dragged to the church of Liège, where they were tortured in an attempt to expel the devils or demons within them. Priests poured water down their throats while mocking and bullying them. If that didn’t work, they attempted to slap them back to their senses, before submerging them in barrels of water, or forcing their fingers down their throats in order to purge whatever demons had occupied their bodies.

A few months after it erupted, the dancing epidemic of 1374 blew itself out – not to reappear on a mass scale for more than a century. The church concluded that its brutal campaign of ‘healing’ had worked, and solemnly declared that the many dancers who had succumbed to exhaustion or malnutrition (literally dancing themselves to death) had fallen victim to demonic forces. But was this diagnosis correct? Were the dance epidemics of the Middle Ages truly the work of the devil?

Over the past five centuries, numerous explanations have been put forward to explain why hundreds of people chose to dance themselves into a frenzy. Some have claimed that they were members of a hysterical dancing cult; others that they were suffering from Sydenham’s Chorea or Chorea Minor (also known as St Vitus’s Dance), a disorder characterised by rapid, uncoordinated jerking movements primarily affecting the face, hands and feet.

In recent years, scientists have increasingly sought to find an answer in environmental influences. They have suggested that the sufferers may have ingested ergot, a type of mould containing psychotropic properties. (Ergot has long been in the frame for causing the psychosis that gripped the American town of Salem in 1692, leading to the infamous witch trials.)

But there’s a problem with this theory – and that’s the nature of the dance itself. The fact that the dancers appeared to be completely disassociated with their bodies – that they jumped and lurched as if in a dissociative trance, and put themselves through rigours that not even marathon runners could endure – suggests that the source of their affliction was more likely to be psychological than something that they’d ingested.

The river Rhine is vulnerable to extreme floods, and in the 14th century, water rose to 34 feet, submerging the surrounding communities and leaving disease and famine in its wake. In the decade prior to the outbreak of choreomania in 1518, Strasbourg experienced plague, famine and a severe outbreak of syphilis. In both cases, the people were in despair – as they were when the Black Death ravaged the continent in the 1340s. The question is, did that despair lead to mass outbreaks of hysterical dancing?

At a time of lethal plague, terrible wars, environmental disasters and low life expectancy, we certainly can’t discount the link between extreme stress and Saint John’s Dance. But, for now, the true reason for the gathering of the choreomaniacs, who danced in mad ecstasy at the banks of the Rhine, remains a mystery.

The medieval dance of death. By Helen Carr. History Extra,  March 25, 2020.

                                                                  Paracelsus

Five centuries ago, the world’s longest rave took place in Strasbourg – a ‘plague’ of dancing that was fatal for some. What caused it? Art, poetry and music of the time can provide some clues

It started with just a few people dancing outdoors in the summer heat. Arms flailing, bodies swaying and clothes soaked with sweat, they danced through the night and into the next day. Seldom stopping to eat or drink, and seemingly oblivious to mounting fatigue and the pain of bruised feet, they were still going days later. By the time the authorities intervened, hundreds more were dancing in the same frenetic fashion.

But this was not one of those 80s raves that began in a remote layby and ended in a muddy field. Rather, it’s one of the oddest epidemics to be recorded in world history. And it happened 500 years ago this summer in the French city of Strasbourg. It was there, over the course of three roasting-hot months in 1518, that several hundred people developed a compulsion to dance. The dancing went on and on until – to the horror of the crowds who gathered to watch – some of them collapsed and perished on the spot. Just what was happening?

According to an account written in the 1530s by the irascible but brilliant physician Paracelsus, the “dancing plague of Strasbourg” began in mid-July 1518, when a lone woman stepped outside her house and jigged for several days on end. Within a week, dozens more had been seized by the same irresistible urge.

The rich burghers who ran the city were not amused. One of them, writer Sebastian Brant, had devoted a chapter of his moralising bestseller, Ship of Fools, to the folly of dance. Mystified by the chaos in the streets, he and his fellow city councillors consulted local doctors who, in keeping with standard medical wisdom, declared the dancing to be the result of “overheated blood” on the brain.

The councillors implemented what they felt was the appropriate treatment – more dancing! They ordered the clearing of an open-air grain market, commandeered guild halls, and erected a stage next to the horse fair. To these locations they escorted the crazed dancers in the belief that by maintaining frantic motion they would shake off the sickness. The burghers even hired pipers and drummers and paid “strong men” to keep the afflicted upright by clutching their bodies as they whirled and swayed. Those in the grain market and horse fair kept dancing under the full glare of the summer sun in a scene as demonically outlandish as anything imagined by Hieronymus Bosch.

A poem in the city archives explains what happened next: “In their madness people kept up their dancing until they fell unconscious and many died.” The council sensed it had made a mistake. Deciding the dancers were suffering from holy wrath rather than sizzling brains, they opted for a period of enforced penance and banned music and dancing in public. Finally, the dancers were taken to a shrine dedicated to St Vitus, located in a musty grotto in the hills above the nearby town of Saverne, where their bloodied feet were placed into red shoes and they were led around a wooden figurine of the saint. In the following weeks, say the chronicles, most ceased their wild movements. The epidemic had come to an end.

This weird chapter of human history raises plenty of hard-to-answer questions. Why did the burghers prescribe more dancing as a treatment for cooked brains? Why were the dancers made to wear red shoes? And how many people died? (A writer living close to the city reckoned 15 a day, at least for a while, but this has not been corroborated.)

We can be more confident, I think, in saying what did and did not cause this strange phenomenon. For some time, ergotism looked like a good contender. This results from consuming food contaminated with a species of mould that grows on damp rye and produces a chemical related to LSD. It can induce terrifying hallucinations and violent twitching. But it is very unlikely that sufferers could have danced for days. Just as improbable is the claim that the dancers were religious subversives. It was clear to observers that they did not want to be dancing. The most credible explanation, in my view, is that the people of Strasbourg were the victims of mass psychogenic illness, what used to be called “mass hysteria”.

There had been several other outbreaks of dancing in the preceding centuries, involving hundreds or just a few people, nearly all in towns and cities close to the River Rhine. Along with the merchants, pilgrims and soldiers who plied these waters, news and beliefs travelled, too. One particular idea appears to have lodged in the cultural consciousness of the region: that St Vitus could punish sinners by making them dance. A painting in Cologne Cathedral, more than 200 miles downstream from Strasbourg, dramatises the curse: under an image of St Vitus, three men joylessly dance, their faces wearing the divorced-from-reality expressions of the delirious.

                             

                            German engraving of hysterical dancing in a churchyard during the late middle ages.

                          

Such beliefs in supernatural agency can have dramatic effects on our behaviour. A classic case is “spirit possession”, in which people act as if their souls have been taken over by a spirit or deity. The US anthropologist Erika Bourguignon has written about how being raised in an “environment of belief”, in which spirit possession is taken seriously, primes people to enter a dissociative mental state, where normal consciousness is disabled. People then act according to culturally prescribed ideas of how the possessed should behave. This is what happened in European convents before the early 1700s, when nuns would writhe, convulse, foam at the mouth, make obscene gestures and propositions, climb trees and miaow like cats. Their behaviour seemed strange, but the nuns lived in communities that encouraged them to obsess about sin and were steeped in a mystical supernaturalism. Those who became convinced that demons had entered their souls were prone to fall into dissociative states in which they did exactly what theologians and exorcists said the diabolically possessed do. In such cases, the possession trance also spread to witnesses who shared the same theological fears.

These observations could certainly apply to what happened in Strasbourg in 1518. The curse of St Vitus is just the kind of supernaturalist belief that can drive the suggestible into dissociative states. The chronicles agree that most people were quick to assume that an enraged St Vitus had caused the affliction. So all it took was for a few of the devout and emotionally frail to believe St Vitus had them in his sights for them to enter a trance state in which they felt impelled to dance for days. If the dancing mania really was a case of mass psychogenic illness, we can also see why it engulfed so many people: few acts could have been more conducive to triggering an all-out psychic epidemic than the councillor’s decision to corral the dancers into the most public parts of the city. Their visibility ensured that other cityfolk were rendered susceptible as their minds dwelt on their own sins and the possibility that they might be next.

Life in Strasbourg in the early 1500s satisfied another basic condition for the outbreak of psychogenic illness: the chronicles record plenty of the distress that brings about a heightened level of suggestibility. Social and religious conflicts, terrifying new diseases, harvest failures and spiking wheat prices caused widespread misery. A chronicler described 1517 with poignant brevity as a “bad year”. The following summer, orphanages, hospitals and shelters were overflowing with the desperate. These were ideal conditions for some of the city’s needy to imagine that God was angry with them and that St Vitus stalked their streets.

Fortunately, the 1518 dance epidemic was the last of its kind in Europe. In all likelihood, the possibility of further outbreaks declined along with the belief systems that had sustained them. In this way, the dancing mania underscores the power of cultural context to shape the way in which psychological suffering is expressed.

The fifth centenary of the dancing epidemic is being remembered this year with an exhibition at Strasbourg’s Musée de l’Oeuvre Notre-Dame, a TV documentary in production, the publication of a novel by French author Jean Teulé, even a techno party organised by a group of DJs who have adopted the name “1518”. And why not? Few events more vividly reveal the bizarre extremes to which our brains can take us when in the grip of collective fear.

Keep on moving: the bizarre dance epidemic of summer 1518. By John Waller , The Guardian, July 5, 2018.

                                             Pieter Brueghel the Younger

On Christmas Eve in 1021, 18 people gathered outside a church in the German town of Kölbigk and danced with wild abandon. The priest, unable to perform Mass because of the irreverent din from outside, ordered them to stop. Ignoring him, they held hands and danced a “ring dance of sin”, clapping, leaping, and chanting in unison. The enraged priest, recorded a local chronicler, cursed them to dance for an entire year as a punishment for their outrageous levity. It worked. Not until the following Christmas did the dancers regain control of their limbs. Exhausted and repentant, they fell into a deep sleep. Some of them never awoke.

It might seem improbable to us, but there was nothing in this story that mediaeval people found hard to believe. Compulsive dancing joined that litany of natural and human disasters to be explained in terms of celestial or supernatural forces. But even if much of the chronicler's account is clearly the stuff of legend, we should not dismiss it as purely invention. Plenty of sources indicate that this obscure chronicler may have embellished a real event. The Kölbigk incident is a contender for the first of the dancing plagues.

Later chronicles speak of a bout of unstoppable, and sometimes fatal, dancing in the German town of Erfurt in 1247. Shortly after, 200 people are said to have danced impiously on a bridge over the Moselle River in Maastricht until it collapsed, drowning them all. Likewise, dozens of mediaeval authors recount the terrible compulsion to dance that, in 1374, swept across western Germany, the Low Countries, and northeastern France. Chronicles agree that thousands of people danced in agony for days or weeks, screaming of terrible visions and imploring priests and monks to save their souls. A few decades later, the abbot of a monastery near the city of Trier recalled “an amazing epidemic” in which a collection of hallucinating dancers hopped and leapt for as long as 6 months, some of them dying after breaking “ribs or loins”. On a far larger scale was the outbreak that struck the city of Strasbourg in 1518, consuming as many as 400 people. One chronicle states that it claimed, for a brief period at least, about 15 lives a day as men, women, and children danced in the punishing summer heat. There were also several isolated cases during the 1500s and 1600s, from Switzerland and the Holy Roman Empire, of the mania gripping an individual or entire family.

The dancing plagues are little remembered today, in part because they seem so unbelievable. But while the incidents at Kölbigk, Erfurt, and Maastricht might be apocryphal, there is no question that the 1374 and 1518 epidemics occurred. Dozens of reliable chronicles from several towns and cities describe the events of 1374. And the course of the 1518 epidemic can be minutely detailed with the help of municipal orders, sermons, and vivid descriptions left behind by the brilliant Renaissance physician, Paracelsus. These outbreaks represent a real and fascinating enigma.

On one thing contemporary and modern writers have agreed: those who danced did so involuntarily. They writhed in pain, screamed for help, and begged for mercy. So what could have impelled them to dance against their will? One theory is that they had ingested ergot, a mould that grew on stalks of ripening rye and can cause hallucinations, spasms, and tremors. Epidemics of ergotism certainly occurred in mediaeval Europe when people ate contaminated flour. But this theory does not seem tenable, since it is unlikely that those poisoned by ergot could have danced for days at a time. Nor would so many people have reacted to its psychotropic chemicals in the same way. The ergotism theory also fails to explain why virtually every outbreak occurred somewhere along the Rhine and Moselle Rivers, areas linked by water but with quite different climates and crops.

We do know, however, that the victims of dancing epidemics were experiencing altered states of consciousness. This is indicated by their extraordinary levels of endurance. In a trance state, they would have been far less conscious of their physical exhaustion and the pain of sore, swollen, and lacerated feet. Onlookers in 1374 also spoke of the afflicted as wild, frenzied, and seeing visions; the dancers yelled out the names of devils, had strange aversions to pointed shoes and the colour red, and said they were drowning in “a red sea of blood”. There is even a drawing of 1564 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder showing a group of women dancing uncontrollably, all of them wearing the distant, distracted, and divorced-from-reality expressions of the deeply entranced.

High levels of psychological distress significantly increase the likelihood of an individual succumbing to an involuntary trance state. It is unlikely to be a coincidence, therefore, that the 1374 dancing plague spread in the areas most savagely hit earlier in the year by the most devastating deluge of the 14th century. The people of Strasbourg and its environs were similarly experiencing acute distress in 1518, after a succession of appalling harvests, the highest grain prices for over a generation, the advent of syphilis, and the recurrence of such old killers as leprosy and the plague. Even by the gruelling standards of the Middle Ages, these were bitterly harsh years for the people of Alsace.

But if despair created the right conditions for an extreme psychological reaction, this does not explain why so many danced in their misery. Why did they not sob, scream, riot, fight, or fall into a sullen silence? This is where anthropological field studies prove to be invaluable. Accounts of “possession rituals” from the Arctic and Andes to the Kalahari and Caribbean show that people are more likely to enter the trance state if they expect it to happen and that entranced participants behave in a ritualistic manner, their thoughts and motions shaped by the spiritual beliefs of their cultures. Female mediums in Madagascar, for instance, take on the distinct personas of the spirits believed to inhabit them. Similarly, the participants in Vodou rituals adopt the roles of specific deities drawn from a pantheon of gods with varying personalities. Were there, then, belief systems in the regions affected by the dancing plague that could have channelled widespread despair into an irresistible urge to dance?

A variety of sources, from altar paintings to chronicles and law books, show that a dread of this punitive affliction formed part of the collective consciousness of the people of the Rhine and Moselle valleys. Those living near these mighty commercial waterways shared a profound fear of wrathful spirits able to inflict a dancing curse. And it is in this region alone, close to the western fringe of the Holy Roman Empire, that confirmed epidemics of dancing occurred. Moreover, these outbreaks nearly always struck in or close to cities affected by earlier dancing epidemics. In short, the epidemiological picture is strikingly consistent with a form of cultural contagion. Only where there was a pre-existing belief in a dancing curse could psychological distress be converted into the form of a frantic dance. Every so often, when physical and mental distress rendered people more than usually suggestible, the spectre of the dancing plague could quickly return. All it then took was for one or a few poor souls, believing themselves to have been subject to the curse, to slip into a spontaneous trance. Then they would unconsciously act out the part of the accursed: dancing, leaping, and hopping for days on end.

The course of the epidemics also suggests that they were driven by pious fear. From the outbreaks of 1374, 1463, and 1518 we know that dancing was thought to be both the affliction and its cure. There are accounts of people who had temporarily recovered their wits, deliberately dancing themselves back into oblivion in the expectation that only in this way would the curse be lifted. For the same reason, in Strasbourg in 1518 the authorities mandated that the dancers go on dancing day and night, to which end they constructed a special stage in the heart of the city where they could move freely. They even hired professional dancers and musicians to keep them in constant motion. The policy was a disaster. From the dramatic escalation in the epidemic it seems that the strategy helped spread a psychic contagion. In fact, nothing could have been better calculated to turn the dance into a full-scale epidemic than making its victims perform their dances in the most public of spaces. The authorities turned a crisis into a nightmare scenario worthy of a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch.

  

                                       The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1500s, by Hieronymous Bosch

The central role of belief is also apparent in the speed with which epidemics abated once victims had prayed at appropriate shrines or undergone elaborate exorcism rituals. Perhaps more significantly, we have several accounts from the mid to late 1500s of cults of entranced dancing in towns close to the Black Forest and where the Rhine enters the North Sea. Groups of distressed men and women deliberately entered a trance and then danced, accompanied by musicians, towards shrines dedicated to the saints most widely associated with the dancing curse: St Vitus and St John. It seems that a dread of the dancing curse had been harnessed and controlled. A psychic epidemic had been turned into an ecstatic religious ritual.

By the mid-1600s, if not before, outbreaks of compulsive dancing had ceased to torment the people of Europe. Their disappearance coincided with the demise of the fervent supernaturalism that had sustained them; in the late 17th century the term “St Vitus' Dance” was appropriated to describe a quite different medical condition. But these bizarre events are well worth remembering. For they provide an object lesson in the power of our beliefs and expectations to shape the expression of psychological distress. In an age dominated by genetic explanations, the dancing plagues remind us that the symptoms of mental illnesses are not fixed and unchanging, but can be modified by changing cultural milieus. At the same time, the phenomenon of the dancing mania, in all its rich perversity, reveals the extremes to which fear and supernaturalism can lead us.

 A forgotten plague: making sense of dancing mania. By John Waller. The Lancet, February 21, 2009