Dance to death: the mystery behind Dancing Manias
In 1518, several individuals began to dance in the streets of the city of Strasbourg (which is now located in France). It was not a parade: they contracted a strange and seemingly contagious compulsion to do so, and within weeks, swarms of residents were swirling through the city. The dance dragged on, and soon the dancers began to drop dead. According to an article published in The Lancet.
Although this story seems absurd today, witnesses to these events were already familiar with this dangerous dance. Indeed, several similar “dancing fads” and “dancing plagues” occurred in continental Europe throughout the medieval period, ensuring that these events were well within the realm of possibilities of the time.
So why have so many people tripped and wobbled without being able to stop?
The deadly dance
The unrest in Strasbourg is said to have started in July 1518, when a woman rushed through the streets for several days in the sweltering summer temperatures. She danced and danced nonstop, says Anderson University historian Lynneth Miller Renberg. As the woman writhed, the compulsion began to spread. In one week, 20 to 30 individuals waltzed wildly through the city, and in about a month, around 400 were caught in a continuous and uncontrollable dance.
“They are quite spectacular,” says Renberg, who has analyzed these strange circumstances and their cultural background in a Dance research item published in 2017. The chaos in the streets immediately prompted public officials to consult doctors to find out the causes and treatments of the contagion.
According to the then popular humorous theory, they determined that the dancers had “hot blood” trapped in their bodies, which forced them to move involuntarily. To remedy the problem, Renberg says, medics advised the dancers to keep twisting and turning, all in an effort to burn the bad blood.
“Medical theory no longer makes sense today, but it incorporated cutting-edge theories about the body,” Renberg says. “It was an interesting moment in which we see several medical theories converge in an attempt to explain something that they feel, even to them, inexplicable.”
To maintain their steady movement, the authorities moved the victims to the city’s most spacious public places, including the guilds and the grain market, and sent musicians, minstrels and other dancers to accompany them. “They thought it would help burn the bad blood,” Renberg says. But the compulsion continued to spread, claiming more and more victims, many of whom were stranded by swaying until they eventually collapsed from fatigue or died.
City officials then determined that only direct divine intervention could bring about such a dire situation. They believed that St. Vitus, a Christian saint associated with the dancing curses, was the source of this disturbance. In the end, they banned all public dancing, rounded up the victims, and transported them to the nearest shrine to St. Vitus. There they prayed and performed several rituals shrouded in mystery, and finally, the deadly dance died down in September.
Those who witnessed the event widely admitted that supernatural agents, such as saints, angels, and demons, could cause dancing curses. “The people who lived at the time had absolutely no doubt in their minds that God and Satan were active in their daily lives,” says medical historian John Waller, author of A time to dance, a time to die: the extraordinary story of the dancing plague of 1518. “The people of this region absolutely believed in the ability of St. Vitus to issue this kind of curse.”
The dance continues
Although countless people believe in similar spirits and curses today, some researchers are not satisfied with this reasoning and find it difficult to explain the event.
Several distinct theories swirl around the disaster. For example, some scholars suggest that residents of Strasbourg contracted ergotism – a condition that can cause hallucinations, contractions, tremors, convulsions and incredible pain – from a fungus in their food. It is possible that the fungus that causes ergotism is involved in several other historical hysteria, including Salem Witch Trial, although this Strasbourg theory has lost much of its credibility.
“This theory is one of the few that is absolutely untenable,” Waller says. “You just can’t dance if you have ergotism.” This hypothesis also struggles to explain, according to Waller, why every dancer developed the same symptoms.
Today, a much more prevalent premise is that the people of Strasbourg suffered from mass psychogenic illness, a condition involving strange behavior that spreads among a given population in response to stress. “When you have the right beliefs and high levels of hopelessness and fear, then the dancing plague becomes possible,” says Waller, whose work To popularized this theory.
In 1518, the people of Strasbourg experienced significant stress. Consecutive poor harvests, famines, floods and bubonic plague outbreaks and syphilis caused disease and famine, according to Renberg and Waller. Next to a strange astronomical activity, these misfortunes seemed to indicate an imminent apocalypse. To make matters worse, peasant rebellions have ravaged the region, and rumbles of religious reform to come. promoted pervasive anxiety and worry.
“Things are getting out of hand,” Waller says. “All of these factors, but in particular the poor harvests, converge to mean that these people living in the Strasbourg region are under unimaginable psychological pressure in 1518.”
Yet, according to the theory of mass psychogenic illness, the trauma alone did not force Strasbourg residents to bustle across the city. In fact, this theory pose that the stress of the townspeople and their palpable fear of curses combined to convince many individuals that they were facing the contagion of St. Vitus. They began to compulsively dance, Waller says, and soon spectators began to sway as well. “If there is a preexisting belief in the possibility of possession and curse,” he says, “then you are much more likely to slip into a trance state.”
This theory places particular emphasis on the common symptoms of dancers and explains why the mania has spread so deeply in Strasbourg. According to Waller, the initial responses from officials only intensified the mass psychogenic illness. “The fact that the city authorities made people dance in the most public places in the city was an absolute disaster,” Waller said. “This ensured that anyone walking past who felt overwhelmed by sin was far more likely to succumb to the dance.”
Although the context and cause of these dance crises continue to mystify modern researchers, the history of Strasbourg remains relevant, especially as poor harvests, floods and pandemics continue to challenge us. “It was the most extreme expression of how humans behave in extreme distress,” Waller explains. “I think it’s a really good reminder that… the way you fall apart is, on a deep level, a reflection of your particular cultural environment.”