There are exactly two groups of people who usually associate dancing with death:
- middle schoolers with sweaty armpits, and
- unwitting parents who find themselves stuck busting a move in the Salem High School gymnasium.
In case you’re not a big pumpkin spice latte drinker, let me explain the latter reference: in the cult classic Hocus Pocus, Bette Midler plays a witch named Winifred, one of three 16th century sisters who is reborn in the late 1990s and flits off in search of eternal beauty, youth, and children to eat. Part of Winifred’s (admittedly not airtight) plot involves storming the stage at a party she’s not invited to, performing an elaborately choreographed musical number with backup dancers, and cursing the audience with a painful and slow death. Otherwise known as reenacting any of my average Friday nights in college.
While Winifred’s chosen hex of “Dance, dance until you die!” may seem a little out of left field, it makes more sense when you consider that Winifred would have lived through a time when a cruel and terrible illness swept through Europe, killing hundreds of people and leaving onlookers fearful and mystified.
The cruel and terrible illness I’m talking about, of course, is the dancing plague.
A Dancing Plague? Excuse Me, WHAT?!
Yes, you read that correctly.
For six centuries, villages across Europe experienced a phenomenon now known as the dancing plague. And before you call BS, let me assure you that yes, this phenomenon was very much real and the reason I know it was real is because it has its own WebMD page1. As any hypochondriac with the Internet knows, if an illness has a WebMD page, it is a.) real, and b.) probably brain cancer.
The first known occurrence of the dancing plague dates back to the tenth century, with the most famous case happening in 1518 in the city of Strasbourg (at that time a free city in the Holy Roman Empire, now a free city2 in modern-day France).9
In the late Middle Ages, people in parts of the Holy Roman Empire often celebrated the feast of St. Vitus by dancing before his statue.10 It was thought that the citizens of Strasbourg had (albeit inadvertently) offended the martyr, leading to the onset of the dancing plague. In fact, after the whole hire-a-band-and-hope-for-the-best strategy didn’t pan out, victims of the disease were taken to a mountaintop to pray to St. Vitus for absolution.11 The plague did seem to die down after that trip, but scholars, for some reason, don’t seem to put much faith in this theory.
Dancing Plague Cause No. 3: The Tarantallegra Curse
If you have been reading this article and saying to yourself, “Why, that sounds like the Tarantallegra curse!”, a.) we should be friends, and b.) I bet you’d really enjoy our Completely Unofficial & Definitely Unlicensed Boy Wizard Tours in NYC and San Francisco.
Personally, when I first heard about the dancing plague, I thought it sounded a lot like a wizard with a sick sense of humor on a power trip. As far as I can tell, though, there were no known Death Eaters in sixteenth-century Strasbourg.12
Dancing Plague No. 4: Fungal Disease
As a deep lover of all things dairy and carb, I have often romanticized the stereotypical medieval European meal of ale, bread, and cheese. After all, ale, bread, and cheese remain my staunch foods of choice in a world that tells me to eat lots of kale and enjoy it.
Modern examination of the dancing plague, however, has done its part to convince me that, just perhaps, the peasants forced to subsist on bread and cheese weren’t actually very lucky. One of the most credible theories about the dancing plague is that the dancers were actually suffering from fungal poisoning.
