The Real Timeline of Dancing Mania from Then to Now

Dancing mania was a peculiar “plague” of sorts, where people felt compelled to endless and energetically dance to no good means or purpose. Here lies an anthology of the dancing mania that occurred most notably in Europe from 7th to 16th centuries. In modern times, when this is classed as “mass psychogenic illness,” we also see some resurgence of the phenomena, possibly. But since we aren’t yet so sure of what caused dancing mania in the first place, the reader must draw their own conclusions in similarities. So here is the timeline of dancing mania, with all recorded occurrences I could find.

If there’s one thing I learned from attempting to make a complete anthology of dance mania, it’s that the history surrounding it is a deep web of MESS. And, we really don’t know much about the causes now than we did then. It’s still a mystery. The top theory now is mass psychogenic illness (MPI), but academics still struggle to define that or determine its mechanism. I had to split what was originally to be one post about dancing mania, into 6 parts, and so the theories and lore will be published separately.

Basically, we can’t say this is an exhaustive list, but the events stated are indeed definitive, being mentioned in multiple old books. Many sources turned around on themselves, and all the older cases are a bit of a “telephone” game. But this is what we “know.” And I hope you find this anthology to be more comprehensible and organized than I found the source material to be.

A Dance by any Other Name is Just as Insane

Throughout the literature, a variety of terms referred to dancing mania. These dancing plagues were sometimes called “choreomania,” “chorea major,” “chorea Sancti Viti,” “St Vitus’ dance,” “St. Guy’s dance,” “la danse de Saint Guy,” “St. John’s dance,” “Johannistanz,” or “tarantism”, among other things. St. Vitus and St. John’s influence on these matters are the topic of Part 3, in which I cover the most famous and well-documented dancing outbreak of 1518.

The term chorea, which you may recognize from the more common word “choreography,” the staged sequencing of steps to a dance, is Greek for “to dance.” Medically, chorea describes abnormal, purposeless, and involuntary movement that appears as dance. Chorea is part of the dyskinsias cluster of neurological maladies.

Timeline of Dancing Mania

I’ve surveyed all the records and would like to begin by taking you through the earliest known documentation of dancing plagues into the most well-known dancing plague of 1518. This gives context that when that dancing plague of 1518 occurred, at least some of the public did already know of the phenomena to some degree. This also provides connections for the dancing plague theories, the main topic of Part 2.

Chart Anthology of Dancing Mania

Christmas Eve, 600s AD	Nyon, Picardy	I’ve placed in Nyon, Picardy, in absence of a precise location, based on St. Eligius’s place of death. Participants in a churchyard cursed to dance for a year.
700s AD	Waxweiler, Germany	An apostle cursed the spontaneous dancers to dance non-stop, for three days, until they were sent to monasteries.
Christmas Eve, 1021	Kölbigk, Germany	Beginning with 18 people, alleged to be possessed with demons, sentenced to dance for a year.
August 1, Late 1100s	Brecon, Wales	After the Saint’s day celebrations, people at St. Almedha’s church began dancing without reason, in distresss.
1237	Erfurt to Arnstadt, Germany	A group of children became infected with the dancing plague. Many related this to the “Pied Piper” tale. Some died, others had permanent tremors.
1247	Erfurt, Germany	Little to no details, but happened.
June 17, 1278	Mosel bridge at Utrecht, Germany	Peasants danced on a bridge until it collapsed and drowned them. Many took this as divine puishment.
1349	Lusitze, present-day Germany	A group of women began maniacally dancing at Virgin Mary statue.
1373-1374	England, Germany, and the Netherlands	These are scattered and sparse reports. See description for complete list of cities, which I did not include on the map below.
July 1374	Auchen, Germany, spreading to Liege & Utrecht	Overflowing of Rhine & Maine river (February), revels of St. John’s feast (June).
1381	Augsburg, Germany	Little is reported, but “The White Book,” attributed to the scholar Sigismund Gossembrot apparently has the details.
1390s-1410	Trier, Germany	Affecting abbots and monasteries, some danced for six months. Sparse yet definite reports.
1418	Strasbourg, France	Cited in Bartholemew’s “Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-Hunting Panics: A Study of Mass” but no additional details
1428	Schaffhausen, Germany, and Zurich, Switzerland	We know that a monk died.
July 1518	Strasbourg, France	Beginning with a single women and involving over 400 by the end. Many died and this caused an uprorar in the area.
Yearly in Spring, 1623	Weissenstein, Switzerland	Women go yearly to relieve themselves at St. Vitus’s altar.

The First Recorded Origins of Dancing Plague

Of tangential relevance is the ecstatic dance cults of the pre-millenial times. These I partially accounted in Revealing the Hidden Ancient History of Ecstatic Dance. The only similarity is that of dance, markedly. The states of dncing mania are diametrically opposed to that of ecstatic dance. In dancing mania, one is not aware of themselves, and is noisily overstimulated. In ecstatic dance states, one is hyperaware or the significance in every moment, feeling calm and peaceful.

Before 1200

7th century Germany:

The dances before 1000 AD are some of the more obscure to located accounts of. Even Hecker had omitted mention in his anthology. In E. Louis Backman’s 1952 book, Religious Dances in the Christian Church and Popular Medicine, the most detailed account was found citing the primary older sources. Sometime in the 600s AD, near to the feast of St. Peter’s day, which is on June 29th, some fifty Germans were found dancing during the vigil.

A bishop called St. Eligius (588-659) commanded they stop, whilst they refused. On the following year’s feast, this event repeated. St. Eligius prayed for their punishment, which was to be compelled to continue their dance for the entire year. After that apparently took place, Eligius “released them from their penance.” This account is from Andoenus of Rouen’s (609-683) biography of St. Eligius. Backman surmises, however, that the “year of dancing” was probably closer to a week.

However with this 7th century account of dancing mania, we substantiate some of the parallels we see throughout subsequent occurrences:

• Beginning in a church or other religious setting
• Long duration of the dance
• Refusal to stop despite disturbing others
• A clergy seeking either healing or punishment

“Beginning of the 8th century”

This account, retold from Backman from a scholar named Krier, details. a Frisian apostle St. Williborod, who found a congregation dancing outside a church while passing through Waxweiler. Since they would not stop upon his request, he angrily commanded them to continue dancing without end. After three days he found them there still, and Williborod “released the sufferers from their bondage by sending them to a monastery at Echternach.”

From this point on, most of the instances in the dancing mania timeline are more well-documented. Backman documents these and Hecker as well as others referenced at the end in my sources.

1021: Kölbigk, Germany

On Christmas Eve, 18 people began the dance outside the church dedicated to St. Magnus the Martyr. A priest tried to give mass, but the noise stopped him. He ordered them to stop, and they formed a “ring dance of sin,” involving claps, leaps, and chants. As a punishment, the priest ordered them to dance for a year. So the dancers did not stop until the following Christmas, allegedly. Some “fell asleep” and never awoke.

Detailed by Hecker, this was near to Bernburg, the tales says that eighteen peasants, began disturbing the service in the churchyard. The priest, according to Hecker named Ruprecht, inflicted the classic year-long dancing curse upon them.

Bovo rode through the dark green forest
With him bore the fair Mersvinden
Why do we stay? Why don’t we follow?

The song sung in 1021 at Kolbigk led by someone named Othbert

The priest asked them to stop thrice. Apparently his sone tried to pull someone’s arm, which came off without any blood. They were condemned to dance the year, and after six months, the story goes, they had tramped their legs into the ground, hip-deep. Having neither eaten nor slept, when the ban was lifted they were brought inside and slept for three days, and not everyone woke up after that. Many of these people may have been sick already with some kind of convulsive disorder, and chose this church to perhaps heal themselves, since St. Magnus is famed for casting out demons. Also, this event basically served as a warning for subsequent dancing manias.

“It is not worth while to separate what may have been true, and what the addition of crafty priests, in this strangely distorted story. It is sufficient that it was believed.”

Hecker, after recounting the 1021 dancing plague.

Late 1100s: Brecknockshire, South Wales

This account is found merely in a journal by Giraldis Cambrenisis and takes place at St. Almedha’s church. August 1st was the celebration of the Saint’s day. Many sick people gathered hoping to be healed.

Men and women could be seen in the churchyard, singing and dancing around. Then they would fall suddenly, motionless at first, as in a state of trance, then, as suddenly leap up again, like lunatics, apparently to perform tasks forbidden on feast days. […] “piping a cobbler, carrying a yoke, drawing a thread and winding it into a skein, imaginary thread … then at last awaken and recover [at the altar]/.

Giraldis, circa 1200

Backman believes this is poisoning and that Giraldis wrongly interprets the participants as imitating craftsmen. He believes the description is that of a textbook dance epidemic, and the only account in the area of Britain.

11th – 14th Century Europe: A Boom of Dancing Plague

1237 Germany

This instance in the timeline of dancing mania involved a group of children, between the towns of Erfurt and Arnstadt, Germany, over the course of 12 miles (20 km) while traveling. While some sources state this group comprised more than a thousand children, others claim a hundred. In any case, it was a large group. Some relate this to the origin of the “Pied Piper of Hamelin” tale. Like the other instances, one child began the obscure movements, and slowly the affliction spread. According to Hecker, some died after being brought home, and others remained afflicted with a tremor the rest of their lives.

1247: Erfurt, Germany. Reported with very few details. Always mentioned before this next bridge incident.

1278, June 17th: River Mosel Bridge at Maastricht

According to this distinct occurrence of dancing mania, two hundred peasants began dancing impiously on the Mosel bridge, eventually causing it to collapse. Hecker states the peasants “would not desist until a priest passed who was carrying the Host (“Body of Christ”) to a person that was sick, upon which, as if in punishment of their crime, the bridge gave way, and they were all drowned.”

1346 – 1353: The Black death – for context of the dancing mania timeline

“The effects of the Black Death had not yet subsided, and the graves of millions of its victims were scarcely closed, when a strange delusion arose in Germany, which took possession of the minds of men, and, in spite of the divinity of our nature, hurried away body and soul into the magic circle of hellish superstition. […] It did not remain confined to particular localities, but was propagated by the sight of the sufferers, like a demoniacal epidemic, over the whole of Germany and the neighbouring countries to the north-west… [Affected individuals] united by common delusion … formed circles hand in hand, appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing,”

-Paracleaus, via Lanska

1349, Lusitze:

Lusitze in 1349 (edge of what became Bohemia), for example, has some limited details of women and girls dancing before a Virgin Mary and claiming it spoke to them. Others slowly joined them, reaching what we can classify as a dancing mania event. Allegedly, nothing good came from this, whatever happened.

1373-1374: Various sources reported dancing plagues in England, Germany, and the Netherlands, including mainly near to the Rhine River. The areas listed with definite accounts, albeit sparse include: Swabia, Hainaut, Flanders, Brabant, Lower Rhine, Cologne, Utrecht, Tongern, Aachen, Franconia, Metz, and Strasbourg.

1374: Aachen, Germany (aka Aix-la-Chapelle)

In this year of the dancing plague, people danced to the point of collapse and the Aachen dancing plague did spread to Italy and Luxembourg, sweeping across Northeastern France as well, allegedly. There was ample information about the 1374 dancing mania, more so than any other up to this point, so hold onto your dancing shoes.

One account comes from a monk witness who lived until 1390. He said that some of these people had been demonically possessed because the priest who had baptized them had “associated with whores,” in Liege. Priests carried out many exorcisms there, which the dancers, who were in agony, gladly submitted to.

There are many more details specifically about the priests and the sequence of events detailed in Backman’s book for the interested reader. These details are not particularly worth discussing in this timeline of dancing mania.

Backman also notes some of the environmental conditions of the area. “The 1374 outbreak maps on to the areas most severely affected, earlier in the same year, by one of the worst floods of the century. Chronicles tell of the waters of the Rhine rising 34 feet, of flood waters pouring over town walls, of homes and market places submerged, and of decomposing horses bobbing along watery streets.”

This detail is of importance in discussing the theories of what caused dancing mania, since sometimes there is a commonality of the rivers overflowing shortly before. Many possible hypotheses from this coming, one of which being that some kind of contaminant had spread this way.

Hecker’s Description at Aachen

“While dancing they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions through the senses, but were haunted by visions, their fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked out [..] Where the disease was completely developed, the attack commenced with epileptic convulsions. Those affected fell to the ground senseless, panting and labouring for breath. They foamed at the mouth, and suddenly springing up began their dance amid strange contortions […]
July, 1374, the epidemic so closely followed the ‘frantic celebration of the festival of St. John’ [Midsummer’s day, July 15th] that the dancers had ‘St. John’s name in their mouths,’ the festival having only served to bring to a crisis a malady which had long been impending among a wretched and oppressed populace. […]
[Those affected], unless prevented by the onlookers, [continued] to dance without intermission, until their very last breath was expended. Their fury and extravagance of demeanor so completely deprived them of their senses that many of them dashed their brains out against the walls and corners of buildings, or rushed headlong into rapid rivers, where they found a watery grave. Roaring and foaming as they were [they danced and leapt until exhausted, when] they fell as if they were lifeless to the ground, and, by very slow degrees, again recovered their strength.
Many of them, even with all this exertion, had not expended the violence of the tempest which raged within them, but awoke with newly revived powers, and again and again mixed with the crowd of dancers, until at length the violent excitement of their disordered nerves was allayed by the great involuntary exertion of their limbs; and the mental disorder was calmed by the extreme exhaustion of the body.

JBC Hecker, The Dancing Mania, an Epidemic of the
Middle Ages: From the Sources by Physicians and Non-Physicians; 1832, Trans. Babington

1381: Augsburg
Several secondary sources mention an outbreak in Augsburg in 1381 but those trails do not lead to a single reliable primary account. [Scullion] claims it is illustrated “The White Book,” attributed to the scholar Sigismund Gossembrot, and this couldn’t be found at all. (Go ahead and try and let me know.)

1390s-1410: Again this is time period where there is no single instance of great detail, but scattered accounts definitely mentioned. Of these we do have some detail during this period of an abbot near the city of Trier, in which hallucinating dancers leapt for allegedly as long as six months. The oft repeated quote regarding this states “some of them dying after breaking ribs or loins.”

1428: Switzerland, Zurich and in the cloister of St. Agnes in Schaffhausen, a monk danced until he died. This is all the details.

1518, Stausbourg

As for the most famous dancing plague, in Strausbourg in 1518, I am reserving those details for its own article. You can easily find surface level details, such as that it at first affected some 400 people, and they were sent to various jurisdictions to be healed. I have found some deeper descriptions that will be compiled separately from this anthology.

Dancing Plague Occurrences After the 16th Century

There was a sudden and considerable drop-off in reports of dancing mania. In our timeline of dancing mania, we see some scattered, unambiguous upcroppings. After a certain points the accounts that are associated take on more of a form of twitching, spasms, laughter and crying, seeming more as a generalized hysteria. So one may surmise that the descriptions of dancing may have been similar to these reports of generalized, spreadable hysteria, but written in a different context. Religious dances also tended to wane in these few hundred years.

“However, some other diseases can produce a wide variety of involuntary movements which the laity may be excused for classifying under the
general tide ‘epilepsy.’ In less scientific days when nothing was known about the pathology of the nervous system people understandably viewed all manner of
involuntary motor activity as attacks of uncontrollable ‘dancing.'”

McAlister

1600s to 1800s Possible Dancing Mania Examples

1623, Ulm territory:
As recollected in both Hecker and Backman, there existed almost a cult-like belief system amongst some groups of mainly women, and coinciding with yearly spring and summer festivals. This centered around 1623, and consisted of a pilgrimige to St. Vitus’s chapel at Drefelhausen, near Weissenstein, in the territory of Ulm. Women would voyage in expectation of the yearly dancing fit, and would stay as long as poosible. This seemed more like an ecstast and less an affliction, which you should know are very different things. The states of ecstatic dance are calm and bliss, not perturbation. But the participants of this quasi-cult would indeed dance until they dropped, and felt relief from some pain in their bodies they had experienced beforehand.

1787, Lancashire:
In a cotton factory, a woman worker pulled a prank by putting a mouse down the shirt of a colleague. The companion had a dreadful fear of mice, and immediately suffered violent convulsions for a day. The next day, three other women had similar fits, and after a few days over twenty people in the factory had fits, including a man who had been trying to restrain the women. This recount comes mainly from Hecker.

1800, Kentucky:
During a religious revival, the congregation became so fearful that they exhibited jerky movements, falling in unconsciousness, and even barking. This spread from person-to-person in the manners described above. [Leighton]

Though not described as dancing, many researchers take these to be a similar phenomena, but divorced of the context of religious dance. Religious dance was a large part of daily and spiritual life, but tended to wane in the period shortly before the initial booms in the dancing mania timeline.

20th & 21st Century Alleged Outbreaks

As early as the 1950s, physicians began to define a condition “mass psychogenic illness.” Many of the accounts of mass psychogenic illness seem to have a great number of similarities with the events in our timeline of dancing mania. Namely,

• Starts with one or a few people and then spreads
• Tends to begin in a restricted community such as boarding schools or factories (compare with nunneries, church congregations)
• No specific pathogen or detectable physical abnormalities
• Characterized by abnormal uncontrollable and purposeless movements
• Some recover spontaneously, some continue to have some tremors permanently, and a fraction die from complications related to the illness

As far as our modern time now, the 1900-current day, there are actually too many individual reports to ever hope to list here, at least in this article. So I have selected three to summarize, as a sampling of what we continue to look at and link potentially to the dancing mania of the past.

Three Modern Examples of Alleged Mass Psychogenic Illness

1962: Kashasha School, Lake Tanganyika, Uganda

Several girls at a mission school suddenly compulsively began to laugh and cry. Even neighboring populations felt this spread. This isn’t the only school in central Africa to experience “mass motor hysteria.” [Rankin] This affected 95 of the 159 pupils. The school had to shut down twice over the course of several months. These attacks had a lack of physical abnormalities, clinically distinguishing them. Of this event the only one noted was “The pupils were frequently more dilated than controls, but always reacted to light.”

“During this time the patient is unable to perform her normal duties and is difficult to control. The majority of those affected have had more than one attack separated by a period of normality [..] teachers state that for several weeks after recovery the girls are unable to attend well to their lessons.”

“About 10 days after Kashasha school was closed for the first time and pupils sent home, the disease broke out at Nshamba village complex, 55 miles west of Bukoba. Several of the sick girls from Kashasha came from this village. During April and May, 217 people out of a total of 10,000 were attacked.” Everyone recovered.

1973, Singapore

Workers in a large television factory in Singapore, 1973, became hysterical, which came on suddenly. They cried, flung themselves, clung, and otherwise were throwing fits. The workers complained of dizziness, numbness, and faintness. They were given valium and other drugs. while this calmed them down, oddly, the hysteria actually spread to other factories in the area. Medical tests could find nothing wrong with the victims. [hatfield]

2016 Havana Cuba

American and Canadian diplomatic personnel began reporting symptoms such as headaches, nausea, dizziness, and unexplained brain and hearing problems. Many other people in the area did not report anything, but people reported up to 40 cases between 2016 and 2018 in Havana embassies.

A number of researchers do think the most likely explanation for the Havana Syndrome is mass psychogenic illness. But, just like every other case of suspected MPI, researcher consider the malady an unsolved mystery. [bartholomew]

We also see in our day, some that take inspiration from the recounting at Strausbourg. A choreographer named Ceren Oran has created a performance art of dancing for long hours in public places, in a remembrance and honor.

Is this a complete Timeline of Dancing Mania and Now What?

So here we have it, folks. What originally started as a simple overview of dance mania, has resulted in this first of many part series on the matter. The topic I hoped to at least partially cover, sufficiently for a casual but interested learned, is the timeline of dancing mania instances, while sparing some details about the most famous Strausberg incident of 1518. And here is how I plan to continue this study, spaced between, of course, the other topics I discuss here at Abnormal Ways.

Subsequent parts of Dancing Mania series

• Dancing mania theories & The lore of St Vitus and St John’s dances
• Tarantella of Italy
• The famous Strausbourg dancing mania of 1518
• Dancing plague as depicted in artwork
• Madness in Nunneries
• Modern Day MPI

In summary,

Accounts of dancing mania begin even as early as the 7th century, not including the intentional ecstatic dances such as those in Bacchic rites. These dances characterize themselves by intentionality, blissful states, and initiation rites. In contrast, dancing mania comes on unexpectedly, and is reported as painful and unwanted. Ecstatic dance I still see as safe and beneficial. No where in this literature search did I actually find any connections between dancing mania and ecstatic dance. I was perhaps expecting to see some ecstatic dance practitioners accidentally overwhelmed with dancing mania. However, to be clear, there is no connection to be found, and many believe its likely that what was described as “dancing” in the past, could have only been interpreted that way due to context, when in fact it may have been more of a Tourette’s or seizure like movements.

Articles Referenced

[lanska] Lanska, D. J. (2017). The Dancing Manias: Psychogenic Illness as a Social Phenomenon. Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience, 132–141. doi:10.1159/000475719 

[ramkin] Rankin, AM* & Philip, P. J. “An epidemic of laughing in the Bukoba district of Tanganyika.” Central African Journal of Medicine 9.5 (1963): 167-170.

[hecker] Hecker, Justus Friedrich Carl. The epidemics of the Middle Ages. G. Woodfall, 1844.

[mcalister] McAlister, Neil Harding. “The dancing pilgrims at Muelebeek.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 32.3 (1977): 315-319.

[schullion] Scullion, Val, and Marion Treby. “Devilish Dynamics: Fairy Tale, Dream, Art, and Dance in ETA Hoffmann’s “New Year’s Eve Adventure”.” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 28.2 (2014): 278-301.

[rankin] Rankin, AM* & Philip, P. J. “An epidemic of laughing in the Bukoba district of Tanganyika.” Central African Journal of Medicine 9.5 (1963): 167-170.

[leighton] LEIGHTON, A. H. & HUGHES, M. H. (1961). The Mill-bank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 39, 446.

[hatfield] Hatfield, Elaine, Megan Carpenter, and Richard L. Rapson. “OUP Copyright.”

[bartholomew] Bartholomew RE, Pérez DFZ. Chasing ghosts in Cuba: Is mass psychogenic illness masquerading as an acoustical attack? International Journal of Social Psychiatry. 2018;64(5):413-416.