In the summer months of 1518 a lone woman
exits her home in Strasbourg, France.
Under the watchful eye of the local
authorities she begins to dance.
Within a few days, she is joined by dozens more.
Dancing, jigging, krumping in the
street, but there’s a problem.
None of them can control it, and
only death itself can stop them.
And after the course of three blazing hot months,
as many as 400 people dropped dead in the street.
But you can’t actually dance until you die...
right?
We know about the events of Strasbourg 1518
from a physician named Paracelsus, who wrote an
account of the events of that fateful summer.
It began with one woman, but quickly
spread to hundreds more around town.
They started dancing, and couldn’t stop.
The leaders of the town were unimpressed with this display.
In fact, one of the more prominent members of this class,
Sebastian Brant, warned the pious citizenry in his book
“Ship of Fools” of the dangers and moral follies of dance.
Consider that this is a time in which religion,
more specifically a soon to be reformed Catholicism,
was at the forefront of everyone’s minds.
Morality wasn’t something that
was separate from religious zeal.
He was a killjoy, but he was just
saying what everyone else was thinking.
The leaders went to local doctors asking them to diagnose
the dancers, and they, according to the finest medical
diagnostic techniques, determined that the dancers
were suffering from “overheated blood” in the brain.
So the town leaders decided that the best
possible way to fix this issue of… hot blood,
was to prescribe, wait for it, more dancing?
Wait, seriously?
Brew, that doesn’t make sense.
Well, we can’t hold people in the
past to the standards we have today.
The authorities cleared out the center of town
for the prescribed dance battle, and shuffled
everyone there so that they could… Shake it off…
Throw me a bone guys.
In the end, local authorities decided that doctors
are hacks, and obviously these people were suffering
from a little too much Devil Worship in their diets.
Which they treated by forced prayer, and in an amazing
180 degree switcheroo, banned absolutely all dancing.
They also banned music in the city, and
carted the sufferers to a shrine for St.
Vitus in a musty grotto nearby, stuffed their bloodied
feet in bright red shoes—perhaps to make sure no
one could see their gross bloody feet—and were
made to march around a wooden statue of the saint.
After a few weeks of constant marching and prayer,
the Dancing Plague of Strasbourg came to an end,
and those who suffered returned to their homes.
Presumably to sit down and not dance.
John Waller, a journalist for the Guardian, writes
that there were two main explanations for this
phenomenon with varying degrees of credibility.
Claviceps purpurea, or Ergot, was the first
theory, but how could a fungus force people
to dance in the street until they die?
Well, as it turns out, ergot is not only poisonous, but
its consumption produces a distinct hallucinogenic effect.
In fact, the drug lysergic acid diethylamide,
otherwise dubbed by the Beatles as Lucy in the Sky
with Diamonds, is a semi-synthetic form of ergot!
There are two main forms of ergotism.
Type one, gangrenous, is marked by a buildup of
fluids in the limbs, loss of sensation, and if
left untreated, loss of the affected tissues.
Type two, convulsive, is characterized by
paranoia, hallucinations, and muscle spasms.
Ergot commonly grows on rye, and the claim is that
Strasbourg’s grain supply had likely been contaminated with
this hallucinogenic fungus, thereby producing the curious
side effect of a sick medieval dance battle to the death.
How could eating a little bit of funny fungus
make people think you were worshipping the devil?
Well, to give one example, many point to ergot as
a way to explain the witch hunts in New England.
In her paper Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem, Linnda
Caporael PhD argues that the growing conditions for rye
along the Atlantic were perfect, and it was likely that
rich landowner Thomas Putnam’s grain stores had been
contaminated, therefore inadvertently infecting the
entire town since taxation was paid in provisions, and his
contaminated grain was given to the community stockpile.
Caporael brings up Mary Sibley, one of the victims
in Salem, who, in order to prove that she had been
bewitched by a “witch cake”, fed said cake—which
was made primarily from rye from the local grain
stores—to a dog, which subsequently began convulsing.
The point is that ergot hallucinations could
result in a diagnosis of “Devil Worship” to be
treated by 200 mgs of “some really good prayer”.
This could explain the case of the Dancing Plague, however
it’s very unlikely that ergot infected individuals would have
danced for days on end, let alone until they dropped dead.
If you’ve ever seen someone have a motor seizure, you’ll
know that it doesn’t look all that much like dancing.
“Mass Psychogenic Illness” or MPI,
formerly referred to as “Mass Hysteria”.
The latter term has generally been phased out
of our vernacular because, well, it’s sexist.
It comes from the Greek word “Husterikos”, meaning “of
the womb”, so from its origin, hysteria was a mental
illness that was exclusively diagnosed in women.
There are two different kinds of MPI: Anxiety MPI
can be identified by “dizziness, headache, fainting
and over-breathing”, and is often triggered by odors
or other phenomena that can be seen as harmful.
Motor MPI is identified by “twitching, shaking, trouble
walking, uncontrollable laughing and weeping, communication
difficulties and trance states” and is often triggered by
long term stress and will fade when the stress has subsided.
The theory is that the Dancing Plague of Strasbourg was
an incident of Mass Psychogenic Illness triggered by the
long term stress of rigid and strict religious orders.
People were constantly worried about whether or
not something they were doing was sinful, and
questioning if it would bring down God’s holy wrath.
So when a young woman began uncontrollably
dancing in the street, her neighbors, who were
already keenly aware of the political and moral
undertones of dancing, would ascribe sin to it.
Then they’d go home reflecting on all the
bad things they had done, and worry night
and day if the same fate would befall them.
Eventually, at the intersection of their own
perceived failings, and the punishment they thought
they deserved, their legs would begin to jive.
God was making them dance just like
that other girl, and that was a fact.
What, Brew that doesn’t make sense.
How could stress make someone dance until they die?
Stress expresses itself in different ways.
Sometimes it’s in obvious, clear cut ways, like sweating
or muscle tension, and sometimes you get an entire
convent of nuns climbing trees and meowing like cats.
What.
Sorry, let me reiterate.
Stress physically manifests through-
BREW, OBVIOUSLY WE WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE MEOWING NUNS.
Convents prior to the 17th century saw multiple incidents
where the nuns living onsite would “writhe, convulse,
foam at the mouth, make obscene gestures and propositions,
climb trees”, and most importantly, meow like cats.
Many of the symptoms were consistent with
what theologians and exorcists of the time
believed were signs of demonic possession.
In fact Dr.
Robert Bartholomew, in his paper Protean nature of
mass sociogenic illness, argues that many of these
convents housed young women who were typically
coerced by their elders into joining, and much
of the rigid discipline included disproportionate
punishment including flogging and solitary confinement.
Bartholomew claims that these are the
perfect conditions for incidents of MPI.
Humans are social animals after all.
Sometimes this works against us, as we see with
the Dancing Plague and the meowing nuns, but by
and large, these social imperatives ingrained in
us help us navigate a dangerous and complex world.
Just like how krumping is a dangerous and complex dance.
Now that we’re done filming, do we want to
think about what we want to do for dinner?
How about some EnCHILLadas!
Hah!
Nice.
Or Char-GRILLed chicken?
Or maybe a BREWed coffee?
Boo.
You stink.
Okay well, since apparently you two are the
punlords now, you can make dinner for yourselves.
Hold up—are you letting us use the kitchen again?
I mean, you’ve been good about not
setting things on fire lately...
Ohmygod.
I can’t WAIT to dust off my Gordon Ramsey cookbooks!
Or maybe something hot and Fieri…
Hmm.
I think I’ll come to regret this.
Hey, cooking’s just controlled burning and me?
I’m the master of roasts.
See my next masterpiece On the Hill!
