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Saturday Night Fever had nothing on medieval dancing mania. Those crazy fuckers would dance by the thousands until they were barely Staying Alive. It was a Tragedy.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: June 24, 1374--
Dancing mania, as it was known, also took on the moniker St. John’s Dance because some considered it a curse sent by St. John the Baptist. I guess one of Jesus’s main prophets was pissed at people so he said I curse you to dance yourself to death.
And some did die. The first tales of dancing mania are believed to date to the seventh century, with the first major outbreak being in the German city of Aachen, starting on June 24, 1374. It spread to other cities across Western Europe.
What the fuck?
Yeah, it spread. People would start just fucking dancing in the streets and others would join them and soon there would be hundreds or even thousands and they’d dance and dance and fucking dance and collapse and those with weak hearts would sometimes die. It could go on for days, weeks, even months. What. The fucking. Fuck.
The stories proclaim the dancers were mesmerized, like in a state of unconsciousness where they couldn’t control themselves. They hallucinated. Some got naked. Some started fucking in the streets. There was often shouting, crying, and singing. Observers who didn’t join in were sometimes beaten. Because how dare you not get down with this sick beat in my head?
As for the answer to what the fuck, there isn’t one. There is no consensus, only some hypotheses that don’t explain the phenomenon that well. Was it stress induced? Life back then sucked, and the 1374 outbreak was not long after the Black Death. Was it some kind of mass hysteria social phenomenon or even a cult? Some say floods caused the fungal disease ergot to poison the rye, which might explain hallucinations and convulsions, but it only scratches the surface of the whatthefuckery.
On the “stress-related” front, it’s possible it began innocently enough as a way to dance away one’s psychological trauma caused by all the famine and disease prevalent at the time, and then they’d keep going in a quest to see visions and get some kind of fucked up dancer’s high, entering a trance state. And since everyone else is doing it . . .
By the middle of the 17th century such dancing mania phenomenon ceased, largely because the superstitious beliefs that permeated earlier society—beliefs that fed the mania and perpetuated it—began to shift toward more Protestant ideals that didn’t focus on supernaturalism or the revering of saints who allegedly sent the dancing plague in the first place.
And you thought that QAnon shit was fucked up.
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