The deadly “dancing plague” of 1518

https://bigthink.com/the-past/dancing-plague-middle-ages/

by Brajeshwar • 3 years ago

53 61 3 years ago

I’ve read about these in the past as well and I honestly find it very hard to believe this story as described. Perhaps my own bias for never being inclined to dance is contributing to the skepticism. Surely there would be people like me who could resist the dancing plague.

ekaryotic• 3 years ago

A healthy person could surely resist, but consider something like toxoplasmosis gondii that is known to modify mouse behaviour to make them more likely to be eaten by cats. couldn't it be possible that the malnourished would be susceptible to rhythmic manipulation.

metadaemon• 3 years ago

I don’t think I could resist, I love dancing more than a lot of things.

mvncleaninst• 3 years ago

Looking at humans, studies using the Cattell's 16 Personality Factor questionnaire found that infected men scored lower on Factor G (superego strength/rule consciousness) and higher on Factor L (vigilance) while the opposite pattern was observed for infected women.[99] Such men were more likely to disregard rules and were more expedient, suspicious, and jealous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii

There's a bunch of literature about this gondii thing. A lot of it sounds like bait for pop psych articles

citizenpaul• 3 years ago

I find high skepticism as well. When things too farfetched to be real like this happen I have to assume human intervention was involved. Perhaps some lord thought it amusing to pay people to dance and not tell anyone. Perhaps a competing king wanted to make these areas look bad or cause a panic.

Especially since nothing similar has ever happened again.

PhasmaFelis• 3 years ago

Especially since nothing similar has ever happened again.

The article says otherwise.

prmph• 3 years ago

Your comment makes no sense. Applying a bit critical thinking, the following are evident:

1. No one could be paid to dance until their own death, and 2. Mass dancing hysteria has happened several times over the ages. Just Google it. And there have been other types of mass psychosis as well, some even in the last century. Heck, Havana Syndrome from a few years ago [1] may be a case of it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome

marginalia_nu• 3 years ago

Ergot is a hell of a drug....

phailhaus• 3 years ago

I don't think anybody said that it had a 100% "infection rate".

weare1382• 3 years ago

I think there's another class of psychoactive compounds in common use in medieval Europe at the time that could explain the dancing plague. Anticholinergic tropanes such as atropine, hyoscyamine and especially scopolamine. These are the psychoactive compounds found in plants like henbane, mandrake, angel's trumpets, jimsonweed (datura) and nightshade (belladonna). These plants were commonly used as adulterants in beer and beer was commonly drunk instead of water because the alcohol sterilized it.

In low to moderate doses they act as a deliriant which is why they were commonly added to low-quality beer but at high doses things get really weird. Some of the bizarre effects of these compounds is it causes people to be easily influenced and causes vivid hyper-realistic hallucinations akin to a psychotic break. Also it's incredibly long lasting especially scopolamine. Effects from scopolamine overdoses have been reported to last for up to 48 hours or more. In fact scopolamine was a compound the CIA experimented with as a 'truth serum' back in the day.

ffhhttt4• 3 years ago

drunk instead of water because the alcohol sterilized it.

No it didn’t. Just think about it, beer is what? 4-10% ABV? That’s not even remotely enough to sterilize anything.

Boiling which is part of the beer making process obviously helped and beer could be stored for longer than some other beverages but people obviously drank water and understood that boiling it made it safer to drink.

treprinum• 3 years ago

People in the past were underfed with all kinds of nutritional deficiencies. We can even today observe what a lack of some vitamins does to people in poor countries, e.g. schizophrenia from the lack of B3 or beri-beri from the lack of B1, scurvy from the lack of C etc. It's quite possible there was some sort of deficiency leading to neural damage manifesting itself as "dancing".

User232• 3 years ago

Also there’s the ever popular ergot/mushroom conjectures for such phenomena. I think it’s a bit overused but probably partly true part of the time.

ndsipa_pomu• 3 years ago

If it was a nutritional deficiency, then surely the symptoms would appear in different people at different times, but this event appears to be synchronised. To me that sounds more like some kind of neurotoxin that they were exposed to.

ReactiveJelly• 3 years ago

Maybe you and I are immune because the plague reduced the number of people who enjoy dancing in the gene pool?

maskedinvader4• 3 years ago

Ah survivor ship bias I think it’s called, that’s one explanation, but how does the original gene mutation work ? How did it survive for apparently so many generations ? Seems to be the kind of mutation that would have not survived if it literally caused you to dance till you die.

NoMoreNicksLeft4• 3 years ago

Surely there would be people like me who could resist the dancing plague.

Intelligent humans are in some ways the dumbest humans. You assume that your consciousness/will is the only "code" executing inside your skull.

It isn't. You're just unaware of the rest. What is it doing, and how much influence or control does it have on your overt behavior? Well, wouldn't you like to know.

The biggest part of the illusion that "you" are in control, is your capacity to re-interpret your behaviors after the fact. Someone asks you, "hey, why'd you A?" and your brain panics at the idea of blurting out "I honestly don't know". There has to be an answer. You're not exactly lying when you come up with that answer, it's more like your best guess. I think in some ways, all those teachers and other authority figures that punished you extra if you said "I dunno" when they asked why'd you break the rules have something to do with this too.

Finally, if you could be the one person immune to so-called dancing plagues... would you really want to be the inhuman freak who didn't?

jazzyjackson• 3 years ago

Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders What the part that isn't thinkin', isn't thinkin' of Should you worry when the skullhead is in front of you Or is it worse because it's always waiting Where your eyes don't go

Where your eyes don't go a part of you is hovering It's a nightmare that you'll never be discoverin' You're free to come and go, or talk like Kurtis Blow But there's a pair of eyes, in back of your head

Where your eyes don't go a filthy scarecrow waves its broomstick arms When you turn around to look it's gone behind you On its face it's wearin' your confused expression Where your eyes don't go

dmvdoug3• 3 years ago

I don’t know of any teachers, who punish teenagers extra when they say they don’t know why they did something. Honestly, they’re just being honest. They really don’t know why they do impulsive things.

lostlogin2• 3 years ago

You assume there isn’t a disease process at play. There could have been, eg Sydenham’s chorea.

bigfryo2• 3 years ago

Yes, humans are evolved to be very conformist and to act in accordance with the rest of the tribe, even though we are evolved also to see ourselves as independent actors.. sociobiologist E O Wilson said that mankind is the primates species that adopted the social model of the ants bees and termites.. and those insects are of course highly conformist and they imitate each other

maskedinvader4• 3 years ago

Alright fair that as a human myself I wouldn’t know what I’d fall prey to, but until we can see this in modern times with video recordings and learn more about the actual mechanism here , I’d like to continue believe this is BS and probably an urban myth.

maxbond3• 3 years ago

There have been similar modern phenomena, like the "dancing" cats of Minamata, a town exposed to organic mercury.

It seems plausible to me that a bunch of people were exposed to a neurotoxin and that they moved around in a sort of dance.

AbrahamParangi3• 3 years ago

In 1978, 918 people committed suicide at Jonestown. I think we should all understand that an average human being surrounded by people acting insane will act insane themselves. Some won't, some have contrary convictions or just don't like to go with the flow, but this isn't typical.

Better to understand that this is innate human nature and guard against it than to just say "couldn't be me".

jncfhnb2• 3 years ago

fwiw These people were drugged up and surrounded by armed guards threatening to kill them.

lostlogin2• 3 years ago

It doesn’t have to be hysteria or mass psychosis or whatever Jonestown was.

There are disease processes which cause some pretty distinctive movements, and this was pointed out last time this topic came up here.

The leg movements in the below case report are dance-like and it’s epilepsy. https://bmcneurol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12883-...

In the first link Dang has posted (early 2023) user c3534l started a thread that is interesting. St. Vitis' Dance and Sydenham’s chorea are discussed and it’s an interesting and convincing read.

dragonwriter• 3 years ago

In 1978, 918 people committed suicide at Jonestown

Almost certainly not; somewhat more than that died related to the cult on the day in question, but many of them, including at the compound, were murdered either outright (as occurred in the mass killing/assassination used deliberately by Jones to justify the call to suicide as the only option for his followers, painting a picture that they would otherwise be killed for their association with the act, an idea that had been carefully prepped by extensive prior indoctrination into the idea that they were targeted), or coerced into taking the poison.

But closed coercive authoritarian cults are a separate phenomenon than any that would explain the “dancing plague”.

zzzeek• 3 years ago

that is a totally different kind of event, it was not a spontaneous event among people who a day earlier didn't know each other and without any apparent cause. The Jonestown massacre was an intentional, orchestrated event among leaders of a cult and its victims were people who had gone through a substantial cult mind control process for months or years beforehand. There were also people who were murdered in connection with the same event including a US congressman.

in short, the Jonestown massacre was an organized mass murder that had nothing to do with mass psychogenic illness, as the mechanisms of cult mind control have been studied and documented for decades and are well understood.

emmelaich• 3 years ago

For contemporary examples, find a video of a evangelistic / revivalist meeting.(0)

People will dance, jog, shriek 'spontaneously'. Some of it would be acted but there's strong social pressure to join. The booming sounds and bright lights contribute.

(0) or better, don't unless you use an incognito window lest you get recommendations for more.

hattmall2• 3 years ago

That's a really good point I once accidentally wandered into something like this because I saw hordes of kids my age going into a convention center so I slipped in. It was absolutely insane and there were 1000s of teenagers, all speaking in tongues and falling on the floor rolling around. People walked around splashing water and a "the preacher" was in the boom of like a power company truck and he was flying over the crowd while the truck drove around and people threw money at it. There were several cars with hydraulics bouncing in the crowd as well. It was completely nuts, then later I talked to some of the kids that were there and they said that it was their first time speaking in tongues and they didn't really remember everything that was going on.

NovaDudely• 3 years ago

It is hard to tell, as someone else said Jones town is a good example of insane ideas taking hold of a group.

Historical accuracy is difficult even on short time scales. Penn and Tell on their show BS used the "official" recipe of Elvis Presely Banana Bacon Sandwich as an example of how even in living memory two people in a position of authority on these things could have two very different recipes.

To be a little more high brow, Pliny the Elder was the one that wrote of Emperor Nero playing the harp as watching Rome burn. He wrote this 150 years (?) after the fact and was very skeptical of this claim as it had been passed along verbally and manipulated heavily along the way.

Could be similar here.

sufehmi• 3 years ago

People are more cattle-like than they'd like to believe.

Once I realized this, the world makes more sense.

psychoslave• 3 years ago

At large scale, it’s unlikely any random virus/bacteria won’t hit some healthy carrier. Except if the whole infected population counts only clones, of course.

dang• 3 years ago

Dancing Plague of 1518 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35509132 - April 2023 (84 comments)

Dancing Plague of 1518 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27028941 - May 2021 (2 comments)

Historic Hysteria: The Dancing Plague of 1518 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25957689 - Jan 2021 (5 comments)

The Dancing Plague of 1518 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17499671 - July 2018 (6 comments)

Dancing Plague of 1518 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7571625 - April 2014 (2 comments)

Dancing Plague of 1518 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6083844 - July 2013 (1 comment)

EGreg• 3 years ago

Thanks @dang for posting the # of comments. The exact same content received only a few comments whenever it was posted, but once received 84 comments! What happened that time which didn’t happen other times?

Among other things the list you posted illustrates a counterpoint I often made — that engagement on HN is often not due to how compelling the actual content posted is but rather is highly dependent on “group contagion” or serendipitous factors, like a few people coming to comment and upvote early on.

That’s why there is a large incentive for people to “astroturf” their first few comments and votes, by asking friends to upvote, or something. Having posted on HN since 2009 without any such “cheating” I have seen it get harder to “go viral” than in the past, it’s basically the Red Queen theory.

I also noticed that posting long videos or long thoughtful articles that take a while to read results in far less chance of it being upvoted — by the time people finish reading it, it has been “outcompeted” by shorter and more shallow content - because more people come back and upvote it sooner, so the algorithm prioritizes it.

I would suggest A/B testing other algorithms for ranking on HN, like Google did with their search engine, rather than just using pagerank as a single signal.

holografix• 3 years ago

So they had interns in 1518

“In the hopes of wearing the dancers out, the Strasbourg city council decided to build a stage and hire musicians. Their theory was that the dancers had fevers, “hot blood” that could only be cured by dancing it out. This was obviously a terrible idea: The performance merely encouraged more citizens to join the crazed dancers.”

swayvil• 3 years ago

In 1518, if you asked around, the dancing made perfect sense. All the smart people were doing it.

In the future, crazy tales will be told about the early 2020s.

User232• 3 years ago

Social contagion is an absolutely crazy phenomenon.

southernplaces7• 3 years ago

If during the recent pandemic we were able to see many, many groups of people mutually driving each other into hysterics of hygiene theater, to the point of doing utterly pointless and irrational things beyond the scope of anything scientific or practical, something like the dancing plague of 1518 (assuming it was a case of group hysteria and not something else), doesn't at all surprise.

bondarchuk2• 3 years ago

It's funny that people immediately look to drugs or pathogens as an explanation. There's a lot of crazy stuff people will do completely sober, especially in groups. Also underappreciated is how much the stimulus of a group of frenzied dancing people would stand out from the daily level of mental stimulation back then.

MadcapJake• 3 years ago

I have this crazy belief that this was just an early meme that took hold and the elite of the time just didn't get it.

The deadly “dancing plague” of 1518

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