Strange History
That Time in 1518 When the People of Strasbourg Couldn’t Stop Dancing
The dancing plague involving up to 400 people that lasted for three months
What happened?
In July 1518 in Strasbourg, a woman started dancing intensely in the street. Other people then joined in, mostly young men to begin with. Between July and September between 50 and 400 people danced for days at a time. Eventually, doctors intervened and took some of them to the hospital.
Why did it happen?
One modern theory is food poisoning. Fungi which grow on grains like rye can have psychoactive properties. The main psychoactive component of the fungi, ergotamine, is like LSD. In fact, it is the substance that LSD was originally synthesized from.
But John Waller in The Lancet considers this unlikely:
“This theory does not seem tenable, since it is unlikely that those poisoned by ergot could have danced for days at a time. Nor would so many people have reacted to its psychotropic chemicals in the same way. The ergotism theory also fails to explain why virtually every outbreak occurred somewhere along the Rhine and Moselle rivers, areas linked by water but with quite different climates and crops”
Rather, the dancing could have been a form of mass psychogenic illness that spread rapidly. The area was riddled with disease and starvation, and people there tended to be superstitious. This could have brought about a form of mass “stress-induced psychosis”. During the medieval era, there were as many as seven other reported cases of dancing plague in the same region.
Did people die?
There is some controversy about this. Some say that as many as fifteen people per day were dying during the height of it. But the city of Strasbourg’s record of the events at the time doesn’t mention deaths at all.
Other outbreaks of dancing mania
Throughout history, there have been other instances of dancing mania. For example:
In the 1020s, 18 peasants disturbed a Christmas Even service in Bernburg when they began singing and dancing around a church.
In 1237, a large group of children danced the 12 miles (20 kilometres) all the way from Erfurt to Arnstadt.
In 1278, about 200 people danced on a bridge over the River Meuse until it collapsed.
One of the biggest outbreaks started in Aachen 1374 and then spread to other parts of Europe. There were more episodes of this in 1375 and 1376 in Germany, France and the Netherlands. There were other cases in 1381 and 1418, and in 1428 a monk danced himself to death in Switzerland.
Some strange kind of euphoria
All this talk of people becoming manic and dancing about reminds me of this song by Killing Joke. You’ll understand why when you see the footage of people dancing about in a frenzied manner in what appears to be a religious gathering.
