Happy Johannestanz day

June 24, 1374, Aachen: An outbreak of dancing mania grips the town.
The citizens hallucinate and experience convulsions until dropping from exhaustion.
The phenomenon was widespread in Medieval Europe and known before the twentieth century as "St. John's Dance."
(Aside: "St. Vitus's dance" is a neurological disorder related to Huntington's Disease and unrelated to manic dancing.)
(Further aside: The pic is a lithograph of the Danse Macabre, also totally unrelated; it's just that I'm listening to The Faint.)
The Skeptical Inquirer has a good breakdown on dancing mania here. (Three fallacies.)

I Disappear
I disappear / I lost control / My body's moving / All on its own / I watch myself / Walk away / A foreign spirit / Took my place....
--The Faint, Wet From Birth, 2004

(Housekeeping: Starry D. & Severn don't blog here anymore. T.P.S.M. is a one-man show.)

Tags: St. John's Dance, dancing mania, Danse Macabre, Skeptical Inquirer, Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, skepticism, The Faint, Zombies.

Comments

[eric]

I recall reading, many years ago, a theory that some outbreaks of dance mania were the result of ergotism, a disease caused by eating fungus-infected grains. It was from ergot that Dr. Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD.

[Stein]

You're right, Eric, that's the most common "scientific" explanation offered. The Skeptical Inquirer piece does a pretty persuasive job of debunking everything and advancing a different explanation, based on close reading of contemporary sources. The dancers were, in fact, enacting elaborate religious / cultural rituals: They were pilgrims walking within or across Europe's states, performing ecstatic rites; the pilgrimages were typically to the shrines of specific saints, usually St. John, but also sometimes St. Vitus.
The skeptics are thumbs down on the LSD hypothesis, too.

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