Dancing manias
In 1374, hundreds of people along the River Rhine compulsively danced for days at a time, swept up in a terrifying mania of mass, compulsive, dancing. The hysteria spread through north-Eastern France and the Netherlands, lasting for months. Similar "dancing epidemics" broke out over the next two centuries. The new issue of The Psychologist features a scientific look at this incredibly strange kind of hysteria. From The Psychologist:
An important clue to the cause of these bizarre outbreaks lies in the fact that they appear to have involved dissociative trance, a condition involving (among other things) a dramatic loss of self-control. It is hard to imagine people dancing for several days, with bruised and bloodied feet, except in an altered state of consciousness. But we also have eyewitness evidence that they were not fully conscious. Onlookers spoke of the dancing maniacs of 1374 as wild, frenzied and seeing visions. One noted that while ‘they danced their minds were no longer clear’ and another spoke of how, having wearied themselves through dancing and jumping, they went ‘raging like beasts over the land’ (Backman, 1952). The hundreds of possessed nuns described in chronicles, legal records, theological texts or the archives of the Catholic Inquisition were equally subject to dissociative trance (Newman, 1998; Rosen, 1968). Some may have simulated the behaviour of the demoniac as a means of eliciting positive attention (Walker, 1981), but the detailed descriptions of astute and cautious inquisitors leave little doubt that most were genuinely entranced."Looking Back: Dancing plagues and mass hysteria" (via Mind Hacks)
How might we explain these epidemics of dissociation? Ergot could have induced hallucinations and convulsions in nuns who ate bread made from contaminated flour, but it is highly unlikely that ergotism would cause remorseless bouts of dancing (Berger, 1931). Nor is there any evidence that what the victims of mass possession ate or drank made any difference. Rather, as explained below, there are very strong indications that fearful and depressed communities were unusually prone to epidemic possession. And given that there is a well-established link between psychological stress and dissociation, this correlation is immediately suggestive of mass psychogenic illness.
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Didn't know the Dead were touring back then.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Trqfeg-5Duo
Forgeweld posted the answer
http://www.gruitale.com/art_fall_of_gruit.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBrsV7ouSLQ&feature=related
So, this is what we have to look forward to in our Orwellian future? Man, I almost can't wait for the police state, now! Dept of Homeland Security FTW!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eijanaika
Ee ja nai ka (translating roughly to "isn't life great?" or "meh, what the hell?") is pretty badass. Pretty much the year Japan decided it would rather just go nuts and party.
Akage features some Eijanaika dancing.
Like this? (Worth watching all the way to the end)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA8z7f7a2Pk
Be ready for all kinds of stuff like a new St. Vitus' dance, UFO sightings, and all that fun shit come 12/21/2012. Societies, especially sick societies, need to sweat and hallucinate in order to ride out the toxins. Whether it's simple poison or something like a passage ritual remains to be seen.
Or, you know, enough people will expect shit to go down because we've mandated it psychologically now for a bit.
"Prophesies exist for a reason." - Hagbard Celine, I think...
I just hope the CDC has contingency plans ready for the next outbreak of Saturday Night Fever.
It seems to me like this article has it all backwards. Festive mass dances were the norm in human societies up until the dark ages. During the dark ages, however, Christianity outlawed dancing. To get around this religious edict, people claimed that they were not in control of themselves when they danced. All sorts of diseases and psychoses were invented to explain why people were still dancing. As long as you could claim you were afflicted with some sort of dancitis, the pope wouldn't burn you at the stake. One of the more notable examples was "tarantism". This was a disease supposedly caused by spider bites that led to uncontrollable fits of dancing. The disease was very popular and spread all over Europe. The name tarantula comes from this "disease". It's not surprising that the records of the time fail to admit that anyone was dancing of their own volition.
Yeah, I was pretty sure raving was dead since 1374.
"fearful and depressed communities were unusually prone to epidemic possession. "
Note to self: avoid any community that is fearful and depressed so as to not expose myself to daemonic incursions.
The devil you say...Maybe possession is POSSESSION
Ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight ?
Reminds me of that Phish concert a few weeks ago. One knee was bouncing on its own, like a VU meter of the energies throughout.
I could control it, but it was quite the strange phenomenon between dancing to the songs.
Maybe that cupcake my friend gave me wasn't quite a standard Betty Crocker recipe.
Oh, like in Ferris Bueller's Day Off!
This kind of mass weird behavior might be just as common today, if the people who start these kinds of trends didn't get locked up before they could set a bad example for the rest of us. More Big Brother means more fear and depression but also more prisons and definitely not more dancing in the street. Dancing at carefully regulated and separated clubs, with plenty of downer drugs on tap, that's fine.
Right, the Joker said that in Tim Burton's Batman. It sounds like a quotation from something older, but it's not. And it doesn't mean anything in the Joker's backstory either. "I just like the sound of it," he said. A half-finished screenplay shot by a guy who should stick to still photography. I know, let's put the hero in a stiff rubber suit so he can't act with his body, and not give him any lines either. Brilliant.
Sounds like my last Saturday night but one. Except for the ergotism. Hard to find ergot lately.
To number 11,
Is that spider thing the origin of the Tarantella
dance? Anyway, all this dancing and raving reminds of the mythological Bacchae, the entranced dancing women who followed the wine god Bacchus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarantella
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maenad
#6- so- a whole country perceives (correctly) that it is the end of the world as they know it, and dances? That's beautiful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxIrQPffSIg
Just ask Dempsey.
You know, Disco started in 16th Century England.
They would dance in a tent, during Winter.
This is evidenced in Shakespeares' "Richard III" -
"Now is the winter of our disco tent"
thequickbrownfox @25 "Now is the winter of our disco tent"
Argh, that's terrible! That is a bad pun worthy of KoL, and it would actually fit in with the plot lines pretty well, too.
This winter will see the onset of the mutant flu, H1D1-H1D1-H0, aka St. Viper's Dance. You have been warned.
@25
Genius. Though you did use the word you were punning on in the setup.
Super clever, though.
Dancing days are here again
As the summer evenings grow
I got my flower
I got my power
I got a woman who knows
I said its alright
You know its alright
I guess its all in my heart
You'll be my only, my one and only
Is that the way it should start?
Crazy ways are evident
In the way you wear your clothes
Suppin boze is precedent
As the evening starts to glow
I said its alright
You know its alright
I guess its all in my heart
You'll be my only, my one and only
Is that the way it should start?
I told your mamma Id get you home
But I didn't say I had no car
I saw a lion he was standing alone
With a tadpole in a jar
I said its alright
You know its alright
I guess its all in my heart
You'll be my only, my one and only
Is that the way it should start?
Dancing days are here again
As the summer evening grows
You are my flower, you are my power
You are my woman who knows
I said its alright
You know its alright
I guess its all in my heart heart heart
You'll be my only, my one and only
Is that the way it should start?
OW!, Fox.
"Now is the winter of our disco tent"
I just told that one to my friend Gloria and she loved it. Made her summer.
"Now is the winter of our disco tent"
...made glorious Donna Summer...
Brings to mind the Tanganyika laughter epidemic, featured in the Laughter episode of RadioLab.
"As in the case of the Loudun nunnery, a deep, guilty longing for human intimacy could trigger collective breakdowns. This is in part why, during their possession attacks, dissociating nuns often behaved with alarming lewdness: lifting their habits, simulating copulation, and giving their demons names such as Dog’s Dick, Fornication, even Ash-Coloured Pussy. Guilt and desire could drive a nun to distraction (Sluhovsky, 2002)."
Mother Superior?
After 9/11 a lot of folks were dancing on the US Constitution.
maybe it was a future flash mob that went back in time...