What Caused Dancing Mania? Theories and a Forgotten Saint

Dancing mania theories attempt to explain the mysteries of why, for about 1000 years in Europe, there were intermittent dancing plagues that often had casualties. Could it be the power of suggestion or toxic indigestion? We’ll explore dancing mania theories both old and new as I attempt to compile all the hypotheses in one place.

“There’s been a strange epidemic lately
Going amongst the folk,
So that many in their madness
Began dancing.
Which they kept up day and night,
Without interruption,
Until they fell unconscious.
Many have died of it.”

Medieval physician Paracelsus, Opus Paramirum

“Superstition, in her ancient form,
never again appeared,
and the belief in the dominion of spirits,
which prevailed in the middle ages,
lost for ever its once formidable power.”

Epidemics of the Middle Ages, J.B.C. Hecker

Hot Background & Themes in Dancing Plague Narratives

A chronicle composed by an architect name Daniel Specklin remains in the city archives. The city officials concluded that the dancing resulted from “overheated blood” in the brain. We’ll see this referenced a few times, though it’s not entirely clear what was meant by this.

“In their madness people kept up their dancing until they fell unconscious and many died.”

From Daniel Specklin’s account of the 1518 Dancing Plague [Backman]

The modern descriptions of diseases propped up to be possibly the same mechanism are tied to rheumatic fever. Rheumatic fever is tied with having strep throat in the lack of antibiotics trigger an autoimmune response. Still, many people die of it each year, and its cluster of symptoms only has a sliver of a subset associated with the dancing mania descriptions. At any rate, it seems people used to believe there was something about heat needing to be expelled that drove people into dancing mania.

Jean Bodin, 16th century French jurist, started mixing the medical theories with climate and geography. He said Mediterranean people go madder than northerners, explaining why Granada in Spain had many asylums. Northerly climes he proposed giving sluggish (less leanish and ghostly) physiques, and diminished libido. (Particular example given was that Africans and Persians took many wives, but Caesar reported in England that 10 men can share one wife….) He believed Northerners were naturally conditioned to be chaste, “corpulent and sanuine” spirits “expelled with this divine harmony, delighting in nothing but discords.” This discourse seemed to have spawned from the “something about the heat” beliefs contributing to dancing mania incidents.

the ones at the time who did see it as a natural disorder often referenced “hot blood”. Is blood not of the spirit? Anyway..

Specklin noted: “Dancing was not a cure; it was the disease itself.” Thnk of how emotion is expressed so urely in movement. To see such physical pain and ailing outright..

An Illness Strongest at Late Springtime

Schenck von Grafenberg, simply a man with a diary that [Bart] quotes, states the the illness came annually in June.

Tubinen, another man in a 1610 diary recounts groups going to take sacrifices to Saint Vitus, and actually got well with his help.

A third diary, by Gregor Hurst in 1625 speaks that a lady “has suffered for some years now every spring from a minor mental disorder and similar agitation in which she is forced restlessly to move this or that limb [.. and it] lasts for several weeks.” He goes on, of her group, that “they maintain that for several weeks before they came to the chapel of St. Vitus, they suffered from tense pains in all their limbs together with growing fatigue and heavy-headedness, a condition that continued until they came to the customary dancing place.”

As we will see, the Saint’s days coinciding with the dancing mania outbreaks are in late June and July. Of course, in my dancing plague anthology we saw some, especially very early in the history, cases on Christmas Eve too.

The Theme of Seeing Red, for better or Worse

Themes also include seeing red. In one account, the dancers could not see red, and they did claim to see the head of St. John covered in blood. Pulverized coral, which mixed with water made a blood-red drink, was given in attempt to alieve them. [Hoffman]

In the 1540s Felix Platter accounts of “A woman who would only dance with the guards wearing red .. “. Others would cry at the sight of it. In my article about color perception across cultures, we learn the red is the first color to be named after black and white. Also in my article about photoreceptors in the eye, we learn that there are more red cones than any other color. Red is a very stand-out color, perhaps it was overstimulating, which could be good or bad.

Dancing Mania Theories – A Comprehensive List

I did a pretty broad search to find all the various dancing mania theories that researchers really have reason to believe. The dancing mania theories fall mainly into religious or physical explanations. Of course, the religious reasons aren’t well-explained by science, but have a lot of lore that indeed makes them more believable anyway somehow. Here are the main categories of dancing mania theories:

• Demonic possession
• Punishment or warning from God
• Trials sent from dead Saints
• Toxic ergot poisoning from contminated bread
• Epilepsy/tremors and related motor illnesses
• Mass psychogenic Illness
• Environment mediated genetic expressions from prions (my personal contribution)

I have my own substantiated personal hunch to add at the end, which regards the possibility of prions playing a physical role. Prions are a type of virus that stays in brain tissue. Stay tuned to the end for that. But here are all the commonly discussed dancing mania theories.

So some of these well documented hypotheses pose dancing mania as mass hysteria or a psychological disorder. The disorders could be triggered by hard times and stress, such as famine and social unrest. On the other side of a fine line in the field of psychiatry is psychogenic illness, which can similarly be induced under certain latent conditions by anxiety or religious fervor.

Religious & Transcendental Experiences: The Metaphysical Proposals for Dance Mania Theories

Strasbourg, place of the largest and most well known dancing plague outbreak in 1518, had a mixture of religious, with Catholics and Protestants, and possibly high tensions between them.

Dancing mania was, of course, viewed as something negative, and spontaneous, drawing a clear line between the plagues of dancing and the intentionally entered ecstatic dance states. Like many unexplainable phenomena in the pre-scientific revolution times, observers were inclined to ascribe the mystical element to something religious. For the case of dancing mania, theories included demonic possession and curses from God or particular Saints.

In 1980 Gilbert Rouget defined a “possession cult.” In this, participants enter a trance induced by music and also terminated by music. Rouget states, in the words of Bartholemew, “such a trance is diametrically opposed to ecstasy in that it is noisy, motoric, social, overstimulated, and lacking in hallucinations.” Ecstatic dances have hyper-awareness, these manic dances involve losing one’s self and memory. [bart] Among the religious and cult theories, some propose that the people who would start the dancing, which then spread, were members of some secret cult. This secret cult could have been a continuation of some of the rites I describe in my History of Ecstatic Dance article, but in a bastardized way divorced from the purer intentions.

There is little actual evidence or support that the inciters of the dances belonged to any such rite. There is a lot more support for the idea that they were influenced by the known lore of St. Vitus and St. John.

St. Vitus Inflicted (and cured) Dancing Plague

St. Vitus, also known as St. Guy, is intimately connected with the folklore of the dancing plague. His story goes that as a boy, the son of a senator, with strong faith, he resisted his father’s attempts to turn him away from his beliefs. Fleeing with his tutor and nanny, he performed an exorcism in Rome. All three of them were tortured to death for their faith, hence the martyrdom assignment. The legend includes that his torturers threw him into a cauldron of tar and lead, yet he survived and escaped that. The aspects of life this Saint watches over include lightning strikes, animal attacks, oversleeping, dancing, and performers. His feast day is on the 28th of June in our calendars. He was martyred in 303 AD.

It remains unclear exactly why he rules over dance. His statue was celebrated with dancing around it on his feast day. Perhaps, the time of the feast coinciding with the natural season of dancing mania made this pairing emerge over time.

During that 1518 plague, many were taken to St. Vitus’ chapels, strapped to wagons. They were given a blessed cross and red shoes and danced before his image. Reports came back that those who went on the pilgrimage to St. Vitus’ shrine did recover. So it seems to have worked.

The particular Vitus shrine historically discussed was in a cave in a Vosges promontory named Vixberg, on Vitus’ mountain, west of Saverne. Notably, “There, the dancers’ bloodied feet were placed into red shoes before they were led around with a wooden figurine of the saint.” [Bart]

They had to go up a narrow path to the grotto, usually travelled on Easter and Vitus day June 15th. Others who would go included epileptics, hysterical and infertile women, and farmers with sick cattle. It is difficult to find information on what this mountain is called now. But here’s a photo of the St. Vitus cathedral in Prague.

“May St. Vitus attack you” was a common anathema among Alsatian authors of 15th & 16th centuries (early Northwest France). So in the known lore, Saint Vitus could be both the cause and cure. For example, if not not adequately venerated, he would inflict the dancing punishment, people thought. Music also, the cause and the cure..

Hecker notes that many accounts emphasize the role of music itself in St. Vitus’s dance. Oddly, the music could originate the disease, continue it, worsen it, or resolve it. The dancers at the festivals of St. Johns tended to be accompanied by noisy instruments “who roused their morbid feelings.” It was though that the shrill tones themselves had stimulating effects. In using music for the resolve of dancing mania, the idea held that it would force exhaustion of the vibes by using them all up. Hecker believes that a more intoxicating music could cause the malady to spread, while softer harmonies served to calm the excitement. Here is an exemplary note of a specific quality:

“It is mentioned as a character of the tunes played with this view to the St. Vitus’s dancers, that they contained transitions from a quick to 107a slow measure, and passed gradually from a high to a low key”

J.B.C. Hecker, Epidemics of the Middle Ages

St. John’s Feast Caused and Cured Dance Mania

St. John’s disease was considered the “Rhenish” version of St. Vitus’ dance.
The years 1373-74 saw eruption all across what is now the Western edge of Germany.

Wilhelm von Bernkastel recounted an occurrence of 1463: “hopping dancers from many lands came [to the pilgrimage shrine of Eberhardsklausen] to be healed [..] thinking that they could by exertion and body movement drive out the pains they felt in their heart and viscera [..] they called upon St. John the Baptist, whose disease they said this was.”

I could not find an exact connection to St. John and the practice of dances. It was well-known though, that the revels of St. John’s day could leave people with lingering effects. It could very well be that connection with the time of year again, in late spring, and be more related to the cyclic change of climate during that time of year, to those susceptible.

Whatever it was, God didn’t like it..

Alsatian humanist Hieronymous Gebwiler said this dance was God’s way of forcing modesty and moderation, a sort of crucifixion of their bodies, so that “Christ’s suffering should not be lost upon us.” He also said the dance was a “warning from God that this disease attacked so many just from looking on so much.” Guards came in to try to maintain the spread from people simply watching. The guards actually danced with them, but by the night “tied them all to wagons and took them to St. Vitus of Hohlenstein. And after their pilgrimage and they were all danced out, they took them home again.”

The lesson to him was obvious that people should not practice “shameful and blasphemous dances; they must never dance in the wrong places or with inappropriate persons, as when they dance in cloisters and nunneries with monks and nuns.” There was a time before the middle ages where dance was a very important and sacred part of Christian worship. This is documented to the best of a historian’s ability in Bartholemew’s book nearly Christian dance [Bart]. But the information is sparser than an interested researcher would like. People had already lost religious and Christian dances at this time of the middle ages. So this chronicler Gebwiler saw it as a clear moral message, a curse, from God with no physical and natural causes.

The treatment of dancing mania throughout the fifteenth century was never considered by physicians. It was exclusively a church problem. Some proposed the “hot temperament” idea, connecting more with a physical basis. [Bog] Paracelsus was the first to try to treat dancing mania while ignoring the demonology side of it. In his “On diseases which produce insanity,” he classed choreomania to be a psychiatric derangement, for the first time suggesting it by treated with medicine.

Physical Dance Mania Theories: Bodily & Mental Illnesses

Paracelsus divides the St. Vitus’s dance into three kinds: chorea imaginativa (arising from the imagination), chorea lasciva (arising from offensive sexual desires), and chorea naturalis or chorea coeca (organic chorea). He explained the latter by maintaining, “that in certain vessels which are susceptible of an internal pruriency, and thence produce laughter, the blood is set in commotion, in consequence of an alteration in the vital spirits, whereby involuntary fits of intoxicating joy, and a propensity to dance, are occasioned” [Paraclesus via Hecker]

For chorea imaginativa, Paracelsus proposed something similar to witch antidotes in the middle ages:

“the afflicted person was to make a likeness of himself in wax or resin, concentrate his mind and memory of his misdeeds on that likeness, and then cast it into the fire, so that the thoughts pour so strongly and powerfully from him into the likeness that they cannot be directed against him, as if the image were alive. … There is no resistance in this image, but it is physically destroyed and the thoughts are destroyed with it…”

Paracelsus via Hecker, Epidemics of the Middle Ages

If the type of chorea was instead “careless spirits and impaired willpower” (chorea lasciva), Paracelsus advocated a period of enforced rest, isolation, and deprivation. It was the chorea naturalis, or organic chorea, Paracelsus advocated internal and external medicines, including aurum potibile (the drinkable gold of the alchemists), aqua vitae (“water of life,” an archaic name for a concentrated aqueous solution of ethanol), and essentia opii (tincture of opium).

Paracelsus also mentioned for forced natural dancing certain arteries could be tickled prompting involuntary laughter, the advantage to all his classifications was parsing out the moral religious emotional and physical causes.

Paracelsus discounted the idea that the saints caused or interceded in the cure of the dancing mania, and was perhaps the first to formally suggest a psychogenic basis for the outbreaks: “The common people consider this a plague, sent by the Saint, but it really is nothing but an imaginative sickness….” [sigertst]

If we take a journey outside the narrow context of Europe, we find accounts of “possession rituals” everywhere from the Arctic to the Caribbean to the Andes. The body of work on these rites show that people enter a trance state. And especially if they are conditioned and expectant of it. The spiritual beliefs of the cultures indeed shape the propensity, and there are similarities between every zone of inhabitance. When this is done purposefully, it confers blessings and insight. For example, in Vodou rituals the practitioner draws from the roles of specific deities in inhabit them. In Madagascar and some Native American practices, the characteristics of certain “spirit animals” and brought on to embody as well.

When we take into account how the cultural beliefs shape the “divine”, “paranormal” or otherwise unexplainable states, we may get closer to understanding what channeled the irresistible urge to dance that afflicted the medieval Europeans.

The Hazy Evidence for the Case of Moldy Bread (Ergot poisoning)

Could dancing mania have been exacerbated from the willful possession from bread spirits? The impression of possession connects easily to the practical idea of food poisoning. There is a reason alcohol is called spirits. Fermented foods like bread and wine were considered as harboring entities as well. So our next dancing mania theory theory suggests that the dancing plague was caused by a toxic or hallucinogenic substance, such as ergot fungus.

Ergot is a mold growing on grains like rye, producing compounds that cause delirium, convulsions, and hallucinations. These compounds are similar in structure to LSD. The fungus did cause outbreaks of ergotism, “St. Anthony’s fire”, in medieval Europe, manifesting in. avariety of symptoms, including fever, seizures, and hallucinations.

Some researchers, grasping at straws for a concrete physical explanation, have suggested the dancers consumed bread or food contaminated with ergot, triggering the compulsion to dance. But, as these theories have gone on to be scrutinized,

it actually doesn’t seem very likely..

Ergot poisoning is characterized by convulsions, but also by nausea and diarrhea. So it is somewhat improbable sufferers could have danced for days without cease. Ergot poisoning alsoinvolves the appearance of gangrene (tissue dying from lack of bloodflow, leaving blackened skin). Dancing mania reports never contained this symptom even once. Outbreaks of dancing mania also sometimes occurred in regions where rye wasn’t a common crop. A 1931 researcher already went to lengths to discount these claims shortly after they began, but many held onto them because of the similarities with the ecstatic dance rites, such as those of the Eleusinian mysteries, who purposefully consumed ergot in controlled manners to specific ends.

“[I]t is highly unlikely that ergotism would cause remorseless bouts of dancing. Nor is there any evidence that what the victims of mass possession ate or drank made any difference”

Berger, 1931 [Berg]

People may connect ergot with dancing since it was used in initiatory rites in Dionysus cults like Eleusinian mysteries. Somewhere in the game of telephone, scholars never mention this. But I again have to state the difference between ecstatic and manic dance. Ecstatic dance is intentional, blissful, and calm. Could it be like someone accidentally getting dosed versus preparing for a glowing trip experience? As any psychonaut knows, set, setting, and preparation, determine the vibes.

Out of the Fluids and Into the Mind

Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689) proposed a purely neurobiological interpretation (as opposed to humoral, relating to the fluids and antibodies in the body). But, his proposed illness also doesn’t perfectly match descriptions of old dancing mania. His syndrome, known as Sydenham chorea, more closely resembles epilepsy, which general dancing mania remained distinct from. Notably, Sydenham’s chorea was though to be spawned from a kind of rheumatic fever as well.

Mass Psychogenic Illness as the Bests’ Best Guess

So, in the 16th century, Paracelsus was the first to suggest a psychogenic etiology, or origin of the onset of dancing mania. When he reformulated the illness this way, physicians paid more attention. A modern researcher John Waller, laid out several papers for supported that dancing mania fit best into the contemporary description of mass psychogenic disorder. The characteristics include:

• circumstances of stress and local fears
• uncontrolled movements
• spread from one to another, often simply by sight
• onset and resolves in an unpredictable way

To support the “stress and local fears” facet, Waller found that there was a series of famines affecting the people of Strasbourg. The unrelated diseases caused fatalities, like smallpox and syphilis, . There was also the locally held belief that failing to venerate St. Vitus properly would cause curses such as being forced to dance.

All of these examples of dancing mania took root in towns near the River Rhine where the legend of St. Vitus was strongest. Waller cited the theory of “environment of belief” proposed by U.S. anthropologist Erika Bourguignon. This argues that “spirit possessions” occur primarily when people take supernatural ideas seriously.

The fakers

Alfred Martin, another chronicler, believes the afflicted were already mentally ill. 1518 started like this, and then attracted interested imitators. Some may have seen pretending to have the illness as an escape from mundane life, and may. ormay not have actually wound up with the “real” this. Martin notes: “The sick who made pilgrimage to the chapels of St. Vitus and St. John the Baptist on their days were only the smallest portion of the true St. Vitus dancers, for they went to the shrines if they were sick not waiting for the saints days.” [Bart]

Is the truth anywhere in these Dancing Mania theories?

Regarding the reports of people cured from the shrines, my modern mind and inclinations say this might involve the environment. Maybe on Vitus mountain there is some special water, for example, that flushed or starved out some latent gut. This would connect the lore to the science, if the waters could help clean the body of the prions, a class of pathogen we still don’t know much about. Prions are misfolded proteins that, once integrated, cause endogenous proteins of similar kind misfolding as well. It was also mentioned that they would take sick cattle there, could there be a connection with mad cow disease?

I think there is truth in all, that’s why I presented them all. Only taken together can we pave the way for a more succinct understanding of dancing mania theories, if ever possible.

Other Dancing mania articles:

• Timeline of all Dancing Mania Events
• Tarantella of Italy
• The famous Strausbourg dancing mania of 1518
• Dancing plague as depicted in artwork
• Madness in Nunneries
• Modern Day MPI

Sources

[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 

[Bart] Bartholomew, Robert E. Little green men, meowing nuns and head-hunting panics: A study of mass psychogenic illness and social delusion. McFarland, 2001.

[Berg] Berger, G. (1931). Ergot and ergotism. London: Gurney and Jackson.

[Bog] Bogousslavsky J (ed): Neurologic-Psychiatric Syndromes in Focus. Part II – From Psychiatry to Neurology. Front Neurol Neurosci. Basel, Karger, 2018, vol 42, pp 132–141 ( DOI: 10.1159/000475719 )

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

[Spigert] Sigerist HE (ed): Four Treatises of Theophrastus von Hohenheim Called Paracelsus. Translated from the Original German, with Introductory Essays. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1941.

[Paul Hoffman & Peter Dohms. Die Mirakelbucher de Klosters Eberhardsklausen, Publikationen der Gesellschaft fur rheinische Geschite, vol 64, no 179 (Dusseldorf, 1988, pp. 110-11)