On the Dancing Plague, starting a blog and the true meaning of flash-mobs
How do you even find something to write about for your very first blog article ?
I tend to overthink things a bit… I know it, yet I can’t help it. Even as I am writing those lines, my brain is stuck in what is called Analysis Paralysis. On the one hand, I want this first article to be special, to be about something I truly care, and at the same time, I know too well that it will take me a few tries to figure out the writing style. I don’t want to “waste” a topic that is dear to me on that. So I have to make a choice, and that’s the gist of the problem, and the reason why I feel stuck right now.
When I approached one of my co-editor with this, her answer was something along the lines of: “Get started no matter what, even if you have to write about your Saturday”. I shall just do that. I shall tell you about my Saturday. Or rather, about what I learned this Saturday, because it is pretty weird.
When we decided to start this blog a few weeks ago, we gathered together (all three of us !) and tried to lay down some rough guidelines about what it would be about. We originally thought that discussing weird video games was a good idea. Then we quickly expanded our scope to other kinds of weirdness. Movie weirdness, book weirdness, technological weirdness, all kind of weirdness really as long as we were willing to share it with each other.
One thing we never discussed, but I think it has its place here, is History. I am not a big history fan, but I do enjoy the occasional trivia, especially the ones that leave you scratching your head in bewilderment. More importantly, because of their very nature, past events are not at risk of sounding implausible. More often than not, the reality of what happened would be called out as far fetched or unbelievable if it appeared in any fiction.
But enough with the introduction, and without further ado, let me tell you about “The Dancing Plague epidemic of the Middle Age”.
The most famous occurrence of this phenomenon occurred in Strasbourg, France in 1518. Five hundreds years ago is not that far away from us, and we have good reasons to trust the records we have of this event.
Concretely, the Strasbourg episode started when a woman, (Mrs Troffea) started to dance, for six days and nights before collapsing of exhaustion. By the end of that first week though, there were now 36 other dancers that had joined her. By the end of the months, they were 400.
Now, obviously the human body is not made for endless dancing, at the expense of any basic need it may have, and people thus started to die from exhaustion, heart attacks and whatnot. Reports estimate that at the peak of the epidemic, up to 15 people were dying per day in Strasbourg.
A quick lookup on google will tell you that Strasbourg’s population in 1793 was around 47,000. Even with that number, which is probably far off, 15 person a days is a lot. Scale that to modern day Strasbourg and you have around 100 deaths a day, for months. That makes you happy we got a lot better at containing and preventing mass epidemics.
Though the weirdest part in my opinion is yet to come. Middle age being Middle age, the physicians of the time came with no better explanation than a “natural disease” as the cause of the epidemic. They blamed it on “hot blood”. This is already odd in itself since even today some people would invoke sorcery and possession as a possible explanation. Even more baffling, is the solution they proposed. The cure for “hot-blood” was not bleeding but… more dancing…
Yeah, you read that right. Strasbourg must have had some very progressive physicians at that time, albeit a bit misguided.
The city thus opened two guildhalls, a market and a stage then hired musician to keep the ills dancing as much as possible. That was a disaster and the illness only grows stronger and affected more people. Only to stop on its own, for no apparent reason after a while. Same as the other reported cases across Europe.
And there you have it ! The story (loosely recounted) of the dancing plague of 1518. This entire story makes no sense to me honestly. From the illness in itself to the possible cure that was advanced by the specialists at the time. Even by 16th century standard (at least, from how I picture the 16th century standards) I don’t understand how anyone would come up with “more dancing” as a solution to a dance epidemic that was already exhausting people to death.
As for a tentative explanation, even today, scholars fail to come up with something credible for what caused the illness. The generally accepted theory is that is was mass hysteria, caused by the terrible living condition at that time. Famine on top of other illnesses and strong superstitious beliefs. Another, controversial theory is that the illness was the result of food poisoning caused by the hallucinogenic byproducts of “Ergo Fungi”; which can be found in wheat grains. It should be noted that the main psychoactive product of Ergo Fungi is loosely related to LSD. Although this theory has been criticized as it fails to explain why so many people reacted in the exact same way, and why the illness propagated along the Rhine valley through regions with different climate and cultivated crops. Notwithstanding, when our two best theories to explain something is either mass hysteria or the middle-age version of LSD, it is generally a sign that, overall, we are mostly clueless of the whys and hows.
From what I could understand this particular episode is not an isolated event and multiple reports of “Dance Mania” exist in Europe between the 7th as 17th centuries. Which means, for a thousand years, there were random occurrences of people dancing to death for no apparent reasons, before it all stopped 400 years ago to never happen again.
Nowadays, we have flash-mobs, and if I have a choice in this, I prefer to believe that they are a way of our subconscious to keep the disease at bay by dancing preemptively. Think of it as a dancing vaccine or something. You may argue that it make no sense, but I would point out that 500 years ago, people started to dance for no reason to the point they would die, and the solution adopted collectively by the authorities to this problem was to hire musicians and build a dancing stage. If that can happen, I’d say my explanation for flash-mobs is as good as any.
More importantly it make the world a more goofy place. In a world that can be so dreadful as to turn people insane, to the point they would literally dance to death. In a world where history as proven times and times again that we, as a society, are terrible at dealing with the unexpected. In a world where, despite our best attempt to pretend otherwise, not a lot of things fall to the “things we expect to happen” category. I would argue that goofiness might be our best hope if we plan to endure.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/jul/05/bizarre-dance-epidemic-of-summer-1518-strasbourg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Strasbourg
