Hundreds to thousands of people would spontaneously dance themselves to death. Find out why in this video. This is the dancing plague. A phenomenon that persisted in Europe for several centuries.
The Europeans back then were clearly clueless as to what was causing this phenomenon. Guesses ranged from witchcraft to demonic possession to astrological positions of the stars and moon.
Because they didn’t know what was causing these spontaneous dances, they also didn’t know to treat for it. One of the popular treatment methods was to pay musicians to play at these dances. The thought behind this “cure” was that the dancers were “dancing out the disease”. Dancing was the affliction and the cure was even more dancing.
This obviously didn’t work. The music would just encourage more dancers, and more and more people subsequently died from physical exhaustion.
A particularly infamous mass dancing occurred in July of 1518 in the Holy Roman Empire. Today, the city is known as Strasbourg (Stras-Boo), France. A lone woman started dancing in the middle of the street and within a month, 400 people had joined. Musicians were hired, pavilions were built, and people danced their merry way to death. It’s estimated that around 15 people died everyday from dancing, though it’s hard to know for certain since the city wasn’t keeping accurate records.
It’s like a molly-fueled rave that doesn’t end until you die.
Even today, historians are unsure what was causing this. A common theory is that they were caused by a toxic fungi. Ergotamine is the main psychoactive product in these fungi, and it’s structurally similar to lysergic acid diethylamide. Or LSD-25. It’s the same fungus that is guessed to have caused similar hysterias, including the Salem witch trials in the late 17th century. This theory is further supported by the fact that almost all the impacted regions occurred between the Rhine and Moselle Rivers. Meaning most of the areas affected by this dancing mania shared the same source of water.
We know that the dancers were experiencing some form of altered state of consciousness because the amount of dancing they were doing required more endurance than what present day marathon runners possess. And it’s highly unlikely that a famine ridden area would be the home to elite athletes.
Dance mania vanished around the mid-17th century, which is the same time Europe left its obsession with the supernatural stage. This timing suggests that the dancers weren’t, for lack of a better way to put it, “tripping their balls off”. Part of the fevered dancing was a deliberate effort to rid the body of the supernatural possession I mentioned earlier. And when the fear of the supernatural went away, so did the compulsion to “dance the demons away”.
0 Comments