The Dancing Plague of 1518: Saint Vitus' Dance, Saint Anthony's Fire and Mass Hysteria

         It is just after sunrise and the heat is already stifling.  The mid-July sun beats down relentlessly on the medieval city of Strasbourg in the Alsace region of France.

Strasbourg is a quaint old city with a vibrant market in the center of town, busy but not quite bustling, large enough to have wares from all over Europe, but still small enough for nearly everyone in the market this morning to know each other by name.

It is the summer of the year 1518.  The previous year had been a difficult one for the citizens of Strasbourg.  Drought had come to the region in 1517 and the local harvest had nearly failed completely.  In addition to that, the Alsace region due to its central location, has for generations been trapped in a near perpetual state of warfare, with Strasbourg being at the epicenter of that conflict because of its location on the banks of the Rhine River.  Alsace, and by extension the city of Strasbourg, is alternately host to the armies of the powerful Frankish Kingdom to its west and the bellicose and belligerent German principalities to its east.  So that by the year 1518 Strasbourg is on the brink of famine and its citizens are stressed to the breaking point.

Still, on this mid-July morning, merchants fill their stalls with whatever goods they have to offer and farmers bring their crops, albeit scanty ones, to market just as they have done for a thousand years in the past.  Children play on the cobblestoned square and robed Catholic clergy keep a watchful eye on the piety of their congregants outside the structured confines of Sunday mass.  Laborers wipe sweat from their brows as they trudge to their day’s tasks in the heat and humidity.

At first no one takes much notice when a woman, around forty years of age with a face that is pinched and wrinkled beyond her years from poverty and hunger, begins to dance with her arms flailing and feet stomping right smack dab in the middle of the market square.

--It’s only another woman, probably a prostitute, lost in drink and going insane--most passerby think as they walk past her and through the square.

--It’s the heat.  It must be the heat--others think.  This heat wave has lasted for weeks now.  It’s like a curse and it’s been more than enough to drive anyone out of their mind.

But her dancing doesn’t stop.  Her dancing, seizure, possession by devil spirits, her uncontrollable movements or whatever you want to call it, keeps going on all day and all night.

Soon, large crowds of people do begin to take notice.  Many laugh and hurl insults at the woman and some even accuse her of being a witch.  Most, including the Bishop of Strasbourg, simply stare at her, dumbfounded and try in vain to figure out what the Hell is going on.

The woman’s name is Frau Troffea.  She will dance until her feet bleed.  She will dance until she passes out and dies from sheer exhaustion.  She will be the beginning of what history will call the Dancing Plague of 1518.

Forever after the residents of Strasbourg will call what happened that July a plague because even stranger than what Frau Troffea did that morning in the public square was the fact that before it was all over she would be joined by four hundred other uncontrollable dancing women, some of whom would dance themselves to death as well.

The Dancing Plague of 1518 will continue for two whole months.  The entire region will be thrown into an uproar.  Dozens will die from exhaustion and hundreds more will be thrown into hospitals in an attempt to stop the inexplicable epidemic.

And just as quickly and unexpectedly as the 1518 Dancing Plague appeared--it will also disappear.  Neither the church, nor any of the medical experts of the time, will have any true explanation for why it came or why it left so quickly.

The medieval Catholic Church will say that the Dancing Plague is a sign of divine intervention, a warning of sorts, that the pious should not give into the radical Protestant ideas that are then sweeping across Europe and undermining the traditional values and authority of the Church.

Catholic Bishops and Priests will name the epidemic St. Vitus’ Dance and admonish the faithful  to heed such an illness as a warning from Saint Vitus himself.  Outbreaks of St. Vitus Dance occurred throughout parts of central Europe sporadically from the middle of the 14th century until the beginning of the 17th century, with the incident in Strasbourg being both the largest and the most noteworthy.  

At that time Catholic leaders believed that any form of communication from a saint was a sign of that saint making intercession to God on behalf of the holy, and that therefore, this intercession by its very nature had to be a good thing.  So that at first reactions to the Dancing Plague of 1518 were quite mixed.  Some in the City of Strasbourg believed that because it was a direct sign from St. Vitus, then the uncontrollable dancing must in fact be positive even if some got so caught up in the Spirit that they danced themselves to death. 

Both municipal and clerical leaders at the time were unsure of how to proceed in response to the outbreak of non-stop dancing.  Members of the Strasbourg city council even hired local bands to play instruments to help given the dancer’s inspiration and support while ecclesiastical leaders tended to encourage hospitalization and medical treatment. Many of the holy believed that the Dancing Plague of 1518 represented a sort of spiritual reawakening or a fight against non-traditional and threatening Protestant beliefs.

Saint Vitus, according to Church belief, originally hailed from Sicily and died during the Roman Emperor Diocletian’s bloody persecution of Christian believers in the fourth century.  Vitus is the patron Saint of both dancers and epileptics and his feast day is celebrated on June 15th.  During the middle ages devout Catholics throughout central Europe would celebrate St. Vitus feast day by dancing in circles around a large icon of the saint, hence the Catholic name of St. Vitus’ Dance for what happened in Strasbourg France.

Given the fact that such epidemics occurred only between the middle of the 14th century and the start of the 17th century, and that these were the exact years in which Christianity first split between traditional Catholicism and iconoclastic Protestantism, there are some historians and religious scholars who believe that the uncontrollable dancing epidemic was in some part caused by the societal stressors being placed on individuals who had been exposed to new and radical (for the time) Christian doctrines.

Keep in mind that many, if not most individuals in central Europe in 1518 were illiterate, and that even if they could read in their own native vernacular, Bibles printed in anything but Latin were still a rare commodity at the time and rumors regarding the nature of the Church and of scripture would have swept through local populations like wildfire and caused emotional and uncontrollable reactions such as those demonstrated by the Dancing Plague of 1518.

Divine intervention aside it is possible that the Dancing Plague of 1518 could have been caused by something called ergot poisoning.  Ergot poisoning is caused by eating grains, particularly wheat or rye, that have been contaminated by a purple fungus called Claviceps Purperea or ergot.

Historically, ergot contamination was common in parts of France and western Europe and ergot poisoning has been reported as recently as the middle of the twentieth century and it is still a problem in livestock to this very day..  

When a person ingests cereal grains over an extended period of time that have been contaminated by ergot the symptoms that are produced will often resemble those that are induced when someone takes LSD or has an acid trip.  Episodes of ergot poisoning did occur rather frequently in medieval Europe especially during times of famine when people would have been more likely to eat grains that had gone bad simply because they had no other choice.

The theory of ergot poisoning to explain the Dancing Plague of 1518 is both plausible and makes a lot of sense given the conditions under which the citizens of Strasbourg were living at that time, however, to attribute the entire incident to the ingestion of fungus has some obvious drawbacks and inconsistencies.

For one thing, people during the middle ages were quite familiar with the symptoms of ergot poisoning, so much so, that the Catholic Church even had a name for that--Saint Anthony’s Fire.  Saint Anthony’s Fire was described as being characterized by extreme convulsions, diarrhea, nausea and uncontrollable vomiting and none of these symptoms match those that were described by the citizens of Strasbourg who witnessed the Dancing Plague in the summer of 1518.

Johan Schiller, a Strasbourg citizen and a respected lawyer who witnessed the event in 1518 described it thus:

“Many hundreds in Strasbourg began to dance and hop in the public market, in alleys and in streets, day and night they danced until the sickness left them.  The affliction was called St. Vitus Dance.”  --Memoirs of Johann Schiller

The famed medieval physician, Paracelsus, would visit Strasbourg only a few years after the Dancing Plague and even he would record that the residents who had witnessed the incident clearly referred to it as some sort of dance.  Given the fact that the residents of Strasbourg at the time would have been very familiar with the signs and symptoms of ergot poisoning, or Saint Anthony’s Fire as it was called, it is strange indeed that all firsthand accounts so ardently refer to what occurred in Strasbourg in the summer of 1518 as a plague of uncontrollable dancing and that practically no other symptoms at all are mentioned in the historical reference.

The Dancing Plague of 1518 is definitely a story from history that leaves more questions than answers.  Could it have been some episode of mass hysteria exhibited by a population that had been pushed to the breaking point by years of hunger and strife?  Was the Dancing Plague of 1518 simply the manifestation of stress and collective consciousness?

Many contemporary psychologists believe that this, mass stress induced hysteria, is the true cause behind the Dancing Plague that gripped Strasbourg in the summer of 1518.  And to our twenty first century mind’s this explanation may seem the most plausible, but it too leaves some very important questions unanswered.

For one thing--why did mostly only women participate in the events in Strasbourg in the summer of 1518?  Does stress and hysteria somehow discriminate between genders?  And why did outbreaks of what the Church called St. Vitus’ Dance suddenly ceased in the early 17th century?  Did people somehow become less stressed, less hysterical or less spiritual as western culture entered the enlightenment?

No matter what theory is proposed to account for the Dancing Plague of 1518 we today, just like our medieval forebears, are left with more questions than answers.  Today we know that several hundred people were “infected” by the dancing plague, but much debate still rages as to how many, if any, actually died as a direct result of dancing and not as a result of sickness and disease that were contracted after they had been committed to the hospital.

Perhaps, the Dancing Plague of 1518 is one of those rare, but truly bizarre events in history that will never be explained.  We, just like the frightened and confused residents of Strasbourg France in the summer of 1518, can never be sure why it came, why it left, or if it will come again.  All we can do today is to heed the divine warnings of St. Vitus’ Dance...or not.