Dancing Plague of 1518

[ivanb]

There may have been several factors that coincided into a perfect storm including mass hysteria induced by a psychosomatic disposition, instigated by emotional suppression, complicated by malnutrition and disease, not excluding possession by ancestral spirits...

But I'm just thinking out loud.

Certainly would be fastenating to research this topic to help with rediscovering our human nature...

 

[nature]

I read some years ago in a medical newspaper, about a similar event in a village located in South France, named Pont-Saint-Esprit. I still remember because I found it ironic the name Pont-Saint-Esprit and the cause. Then, it's been easy to find a similar article on internet:
The name:
Pont= Bridge
Esprit= Spirit
The cause reported in this newspaper was an experiment with the drug LSD, in the 50's, by american secret services. One wonders why they choose that little village. An ironic sense of irony, i.e do the experimenters have fun? this drug targets brain/spirit and maybe enhances a bridge with other dimensions (cf recreational or shamanic purposes)
Let's continue with recreational remarks: There's the Rhône river crossing that village and streaming under a bridge in a city 50 km away, called Avignon. There's a popular song in France, for kids: Sur le pont d'Avignon on y danse, on y danse - Sur le pont d'Avignon on y danse tout en rond.
Translation: "On the bridge of Avignon we dance there, we dance there - On the bridge of Avignon we dance in round." There's only these 2 sentences all along the song: it's circular, repetitive. Like the repetitive abnormal movements in intoxicated people?

Here is the link in french and the Yandex automatic translation. (I boldered some words)

-https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/une-histoire-particuliere-un-recit-documentaire-en-deux-parties/pont-sous-lsd-5774240

When CIA experimented on guinea-pigs

In August 1951, the inhabitants of the village of Pont Saint-Esprit (Gard, France) will fall prey to a strange evil: the cursed bread. In question? The bread of the baker Roch-Briand, gangrenated by a fungus: ergot of rye. Locals wander around overnight, one throws himself into the Rhone, the other thinks he's a jet plane...
Death toll: 5 dead and hundreds of victims of hallucinations. And then we remember that LSD is a derivative of ergot compounds...

A White House document alluded to the Holy Spirit. (...) a specific document on the experiments carried out with LSD and other products for that matter, at other specific locations. It's still quite strange that a power such as the United States is interested in a very small village where these collective hallucinations happened. (...) We can enter into a very important suspicion about the fact that this is a possibly criminal act.

Bridge on LSD? "While emptying my grandfather's house in Pont Saint-Esprit in 2016, I discovered his post-war diary. In it, he tells about his son's strange illness and the rumors that run through the village the day after the poisoning." Rumors that, sixty years after the facts, are revived by an American journalist, Hank Albarelli, having worked on the CIA archives: the Americans would have doused the Spriritualists [inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit] with LSD... No more and no less.
A documentary by Stéphane Bonnefoi

• Francis Zamponi, journalist and writer, author of de "Le mal des ardents", Ed : Adam Biro, 2010
• Steven Kaplan, historian, professor at Cornell University (New-York), author of "Le pain maudit : retour sur la France des années oubliées, 1945-1958", Ed : Fayard, 2008 and of "Raisonner sur les blés", Ed : Fayard, 2017
• Yvonnick Denoël, historian and éditor, author of "Le livre noir de la CIA", Ed : J’ai lu
• Olivier Pighetti, filmmaker "Le pain maudit" and "Les cobayes de la CIA"

 

[Gallo]

I heard about this story a few months ago. It seems to me that the authorities at the time had forbidden this practice.
I immediately thought it would be a good way of protesting. Imagine, in the street, groups of people just dancing, without music, without speaking, with a message: enough is enough...

 

[palestine]

I have been doing a quick search about the topic and come up with two hints; the first is rye ergot and the second provides mistletoe. I find the cosmic angle interesting (@Ryan ).

This one is the rye ergot one - interest is an even earlier date for this "dance mania" (1278):

(2023) - Jean VITAUX - "A History of Rye Ergot. From Burning Sickness to LSD" ("Une histoire de l’ergot de seigle. Du mal des ardents au LSD")

Epidemics of dancing madness struck the Rhine region and the Low Countries during the Middle Ages. The first epidemic of choremania affected the city of Maastricht in 1278, and similar phenomena occurred a century later in Aachen, Utrecht, Bruges, Cologne, Metz, and Obernai (in 1463). Sufferers suffered from hallucinations and convulsive movements. In Utrecht in 1278, dancers, seized by frenzied movements, sang, screamed, had visions, invoked both the devil and demons, and finally collapsed from exhaustion. In 1418 and 1458, after harsh winters, other epidemics of dancing madness occurred in the Rhine basin: several hundred children from Swabia and Holland set out on pilgrimage to Mont-Saint-Michel, and many died on the way. The most famous of the dancing madnesses took place in Strasbourg in 1518. The affair began on July 15, when a woman, Frau Troffea (an identity later invented by the physician Paracelsus, troffea meaning spinning top in Greek), began to dance frenetically day and night.

…

We don't know much more about the Strasbourg dancing madness: the only sources that have come down to us on this subject are the Annals of Sébastien Brant (author of La Nef des fous), the Chronicle of Hieronymus Gebwiller and the archives of the city of Strasbourg, including the invoices for the pilgrimage. These documents are often quite laconic.

…

It is difficult to know whether dancing madness can be linked to the spasmodic contractions of the limbs caused by ergotism. However, it is likely that ergot acted in association with other phenomena: bread of misery containing cockle and tares with known hallucinogenic effects; collective hysteria linked to famines, food shortages and other misfortunes of the time; political and moral crisis leading to a loss of confidence in the clergy, often sinful and corrupt, and in speculative merchants in these times just before the Reformation. The name Saint Vitus's dance was later given to Sydenham's chorea, a bacterial disease that has no connection with dance mania, and more recently to Huntington's chorea, a rare genetic disease. These dancing follies can be compared to the procession of Echternach, in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which dates from the 11th century, contemporary with the great epidemics of ergotism.

Second mentions mistletoe in a translation of Paracelse (chapter "Of the disease called St. Vitus' Dance?"), because this dance has been called "Danse de Saint-Guy" and the author expresses an interest about "gui" - mistletoe in French:

(1913) - Grillot DE GIVRY - "Complete works of Philip Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim known as Paracelsus"

(1) The Veitz Tantz. Palthenius translates: chorea lasciva, sive chorea viti, sive mentaphora. The true dance of Saint Vitus, which has been confused in modern times with chorea, must, it seems, be separated from it. The dance of Saint Vitus made its first appearance in July 1374, in some towns of the Meuse and the Rhine, where a certain number of individuals began to move and dance in a manner that bordered on both possession and neurosis. Perhaps the dancing pilgrimage of Saint Willibrod of Echternach must be linked to this origin. This pathological dance took, for some reason, the name of Saint Vitus. The Bollandists count six or seven saints of this name; but it was probably the one who was one of the martyrs of the persecution of Diocletian, and who had chapels at Drefelhausen, near Ulm, in Swabia, as well as at Zabern and Rottestem. He was called Guy, in France, Veit or Wit, in Germany. It is necessary to note the similarity of this name with the term gui, which signified the sacred parasite of the oak, and at the same time wy, union and fertilization. If we believe Vanini, (De admirandis nature arcanis, Dial. sup), Saint Vitus was also invoked at Bari, in Apulia, no longer for epilepsy, but for the bite of rabid dogs. It was enough to enter his sanctuary to be immediately cured. As for the story of Troffea, we have found no trace of it elsewhere than in Paracelsus.

(The above is a note by the author, "Givry", who translated the German edition - and it seems that he has been referring to the Latin edition as well (crossing/double-checking). Those German & Latin editions are "collections of Paracelse's work", dating ~1600)

And so, "parasites", "mistletoe", "rye ergot". Joe has been mentionning "possession" but I couldn't find anything about this yet. Still, web archive provides 300 results for "Frau Troffea" so there may be one book wich explores this specific angle.

 

[palestine]

Here is a last quote from another author listing earliest "dance mania" episodes:

(1952) - Louis Eugène BACKMAN - "Religious dances : in the Christian church and in popular medicine"

I propose to treat the following instances of the earliest dance epidemics: those which took place in the seventh century and at the beginning of the eighth century, and that of the year 1021, the latter being known as 'the banned dance of Kolbigk'; then the Welsh epidemic of about the year 1200, the Children's Dance from Erfurt to Arnstadt in 1237, and finally the dance on the bridge at Maastricht in 1278.

i. The Dance Epidemics of the Seventh and Eighth Centuries

Andoenus of Rouen (609-683) has left us an account of the life of St Eligius (588-659). Bishop Eligius was mentioned before when he commanded some fifty Germans to cease their practice of dancing during the vigil before St Peter's Day. They refused to do so but the story does not end there. On the next occasion, the following June 29th, he once more denounced these church dances; once again he was disregarded and the dances were held with even more enthusiasm. Then St Eligius prayed God to punish these obstinate sinners, and God did punish them, in that they were compelled to continue their frenzied dance for a whole year. Then at last St Eligius released them from their penance [Stieren]. There is one item in this story which is obviously pure legend: the continuance of the dance for a whole year. Clearly, the period must have been very much shorter, probably a week at the most. But the interesting points of the story are the long duration of the dance, And the unwillingness (or perhaps the inability) of the dancers to stop, coupled with the fact that it clearly took place in the churchyard, or perhaps even in the porch of the church. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose an element of truth in the legend, namely that certain persons, smitten with the 'dancing fever', sought healing from the church and its rites by dancing in the churchyard or in the porch of the church; and that they either could not, or would not, cease dancing. If my supposition is justified, then this is the earliest instance of a dance epidemic that I have been able to find.

The above suggests a "mythical" angle.

 

[palestine]

Details about this old episode mentionned in my last post, with a hint about "demonic possession":

(2019) - Lindsey DRURY - "Three Imagined Dances: the somatics of early modern textual mediation"

Through the commonality of ceaseless ritual dancing, Paracelsus’s texts on the invisible diseases can be connected to early medieval treatises on the conversion of pagans. Because of this fact, Paracelsus’s writing on the St Vitus dance operatively adheres to Erasmus’s critique of saintly intercession as a transformation of the saints into “successors of the pagan gods.”*

Paracelsus makes the connection between narratives of pagan ritualistic ‘raving’ and his critique of saintly intercession by miring his analysis of the St Vitus dancing illness in De Causis Morborum Invisibilium in medieval language used to admonish pagan practice. Such language is exemplified in one of the oldest accounts of ceaseless dancing in the medieval period – that of Audoin of Rouen in his Vita Eligii, originally written in the 7th century.

In the account, the prayer of Eligius, who was later canonized as a saint, fated a group of around 50 people to ceaselessly ‘rave’ for a year (in the style of their pagan rituals of games, leaping, and dancing). In the story presented by Audoin, Eligius preached to the diocese of the town of Noyon for the celebration of the birth of Peter the Apostle. Audoin notes that, as was usual for Eligius, the speech focused on “denouncing all demonic games and wicked leapings and all remnants of inane superstitions as things to be thoroughly abominated.”* The people cried out in anger, threatening to kill Eligius, as “nor can any man forbid us our ancient and gratifying games.”* Eligius prayed that the people “be given an example of such ferocity and terror that they shall know whose work they are,” and suddenly the people were possessed by demonic spirits, and with this “they began to rave.”* The Latin term used in the 8th century manuscript is ‘debacchari,’ raving, from ‘debacchor’, meaning to rave, rage without control, or revel wildly.* Notably, the word alludes to Bacchantes (followers of Bacchus).* A year passed before Eligius called those sentenced to rave back to himself in order to exorcise them.

 

[palestine]

And so, those two guys, Eligius and Andoenus, were allegedly around in Europe in 650-700 AD. From what I recall, isn't this when Europe was supposed to be in some dark age?

The above account of dance mania features "troubled people", "a priest" and some "religious spell" / spiritual activity. We could imagine Paul healing a flock. The above would be part of some recuperation of Paul, during the building of Christianity 2.0.

Is "Frau Troffea" a similar process? The recuperation of the recuperation?

This is funny. It would mean that each occurence of "people" somehow "facing" "a priest" would refer to something else. They would have been endlessly expanding from some basic scenario.

*

The angry priest doubling down on the people's hysteria is not credible:

... he once more denounced these church dances; once again he was disregarded and the dances were held with even more enthusiasm. Then St Eligius prayed God to punish these obstinate sinners, and God did punish them, in that they were compelled to continue their frenzied dance for a whole year.

 

[palestine]

I found an interesting quote that may relate:

Laura KNIGHT-JADCZYK - "The Secret History of the World"

What is important, however, is that the myths are only a much later formulation
of an archaic content that postulates an absolute reality, or levels of reality, which
are extra-human or hyperdimensional.

There is another interesting key to the ancient myths and rituals: in nearly every
case, there is a conception of the end and the beginning of a Cyclical Temporal
Period; and, coincidental to this idea, is an expulsion of demons, diseases and sins.

It's like three levels; we would be tempted to stop at the myth, if we manage to get there, but there seems to exist something above.

plain history >> mythical formulation >> archaïc reality

Could be that the legendary interpretation of the event is a step, but not sufficient. The author analyzing the episode of dancing mania would be kind of right, but there exists an additional level for interpretation. I have been barely making it myself towards understanding a bit of "the myth" framework, so I am in the dark as to how to walk from there, towards a higher perspective!