The dancing plague of 1518

[Kyriakos]

 

[AdamCrock]

^
....
Dance epidemic tonight ! Yeah baby !

v v

 

[Berzerker]

maybe they were ingesting fungi or mold and it messed them up

 

[Gori the Grey]

Urban legend, I'm gonna guess.

 

[CavLancer]

Its fact, I was there, I'm old. Besides, its in the town and church records if you read the wiki link in the OP

 

[The_J]

So people started dancing and danced themselves to death, and this was before disco. Something akin to LSD they say, yet it must be one hell of a high to last for the days it took to die of dancing. I don't buy the LSD bit. Certainly at Woodstock lots of LSD high folks danced, but I've never before heard they couldn't stop and died. It seems that something can occur that will cause us to dance ourselves to death, en mass. W T F.

Does not seem to unreasonable to me.
The drug users know how much they take.
If people ate something made out of grain which was infested with ergot producing fungi, and repeatedly did (because that's the food you have, and might have been drought period or whatever), then they might have taken up an incredible amount of the alkaloid. Overdose, basically.
In some of the related wiki links for similar events it also says that hysteria and psychosomatic effects can also play a role.
So yeah, it's not tooooo crazy at the end (IMHO).

 

[Hygro]

 

[CavLancer]

Does not seem to unreasonable to me.
The drug users know how much they take.
If people ate something made out of grain which was infested with ergot producing fungi, and repeatedly did (because that's the food you have, and might have been drought period or whatever), then they might have taken up an incredible amount of the alkaloid. Overdose, basically.
In some of the related wiki links for similar events it also says that hysteria and psychosomatic effects can also play a role.
So yeah, it's not tooooo crazy at the end (IMHO).

Just for purely academic reasons, if bread can make LSD it can't be all that difficult...

Anyway LSD has been around since the 70s, yes? So why don't we see many such events?

 

[The_J]

Just for purely academic reasons, if bread can make LSD it can't be all that difficult...

True, apparently producing LSD is a relatively simple thing, and it seems that every chemistry graduate student should be able to do it (If I heard this correctly, and wiki reads relatively simple about this).
(the fungi only produce a precursor though)

Anyway LSD has been around since the 70s, yes? So why don't we see many such events?

A few different things here:
- when LSD was developed, the people were probably taken some precautions while taking it, figuring out the right dose
- people who ate moldy bread did not
- we have pretty good food safety regulations in the meantime

 

[shadowplay]

True, apparently producing LSD is a relatively simple thing, and it seems that every chemistry graduate student should be able to do it (If I heard this correctly, and wiki reads relatively simple about this).
(the fungi only produce a precursor though)



A few different things here:
- when LSD was developed, the people were probably taken some precautions while taking it, figuring out the right dose
- people who ate moldy bread did not
- we have pretty good food safety regulations in the meantime

LSD was discovered in the 40s... the chemist who discovered it (Hoffman) actually accidentally dosed himself with it. He wrote about his experience, you can find it online of you're interested.

 

[The_J]

I think this is how most drugs get discovered ^^.
At the beginning it was also a medicine (or was that speed?), so there was probably some control on it.

 

[Hygro]

Mrs. Troffea was the hip girl everyone liked and was like everything is pointless but we can dance and the other people caught on and got it. Some of them got carried away and some of them found meaning in it and whether or not they started with hallucinogens they danced sober and found purpose and that was that.

 

[Kyriakos]

Wasn't LSD the drug that Timothy Leary was taking?

 

[CavLancer]

That or acid. This chick is sooo sexy. Besides, she's pretty high.

Thanks for the reminders about LSD. At one time I knew this stuff...no longer.

 

[warpus]

There's been tests done to see if LSD can help with things like depression, social anxiety, alcoholism, etc. and from what I remember the results were positive. But research was moving slowly due to various roadblocks put up by various governments in the name of the war on drugs or whatever.

I wouldn't be surprised if the dancing plague was.. okay, here's my latest theory:

What if the guy who usually delivers mushrooms and other edibles to the town picked the wrong kind of mushroom. I know, a mushroom guy should know his mushrooms, but maybe he was desperate or something. Or somebody maybe sold him a batch of mushrooms and he was just the middleman.

Either way, the mushrooms arrive at this town's market, and people start buying them. There is a big feast, a lot of people there, mushroom soup is served, and a whole bunch of people eat these "funny" mushrooms at the same time. Next thing you know everybody's starting to peak at the same time. Hundreds of people all feeling funny, and so.. It seems like people are going to start looking at their hands, standing up, walking around, trying to talk and being confused by how weird everything was getting. It can't just be in their heads! Everybody is seeing it, from their pov, so they would all be caught up in this weird fantastical phenomenon. And then some guy just .. breaks into dance. I mean.. You can also expect people lying down, laughing, feeling their faces, hugging trees, etc. But at some point one of these people dancing is definitely not something that sounds outlandish. In fact it sounds like something that is probably just going to happen. If you have 400 people on drugs just standing around, odds are that at least one of them is eventually going to start dancing, with or without music. In fact I would guess what happened was people started playing instruments and/or forming impromptu bands. There you go, next thing that happens after some guy starts beating a drum is another guy dancing to it.

And once one person is dancing, and committed to dancing, then that's really all you need. That's the catalyst. After that people will just start joining in. If everybody was sober, it could go either way, but if everyone's on mushrooms, and they don't know that they're on mushrooms, and most people probably think it's some divine thing that's happening, and they see a guy dancing.. Somebody's going to join in. I mean, everybody's confused, and this guy is dancing. He looks happy and in control. He must obviously be onto something. And so then another person joins in.. and another.. And all of a sudden you have a whole bunch of people dancing and probably having a lot of fun. Once that group dynamic starts, it would be hard to stop.

Then somebody yells: "Who wants more mushroom soup? I brought some more. There's also beer!"

And so at that point in everyone's minds it's Dance day and that's just what you do. You keep dancing because that's what's happening and that's that. It was meant to be, so they danced until people started dying.

 

[Broken_Erika]

 

[Gori the Grey]

You can't dance yourself to death. Your muscles just get tired and you stop dancing.

It's a puritanical early modern cautionary tale designed to keep women from enjoying themselves.

 

[CavLancer]

There's been tests done to see if LSD can help with things like depression, social anxiety, alcoholism, etc. and from what I remember the results were positive. But research was moving slowly due to various roadblocks put up by various governments in the name of the war on drugs or whatever.

I wouldn't be surprised if the dancing plague was.. okay, here's my latest theory:

What if the guy who usually delivers mushrooms and other edibles to the town picked the wrong kind of mushroom. I know, a mushroom guy should know his mushrooms, but maybe he was desperate or something. Or somebody maybe sold him a batch of mushrooms and he was just the middleman.

Either way, the mushrooms arrive at this town's market, and people start buying them. There is a big feast, a lot of people there, mushroom soup is served, and a whole bunch of people eat these "funny" mushrooms at the same time. Next thing you know everybody's starting to peak at the same time. Hundreds of people all feeling funny, and so.. It seems like people are going to start looking at their hands, standing up, walking around, trying to talk and being confused by how weird everything was getting. It can't just be in their heads! Everybody is seeing it, from their pov, so they would all be caught up in this weird fantastical phenomenon. And then some guy just .. breaks into dance. I mean.. You can also expect people lying down, laughing, feeling their faces, hugging trees, etc. But at some point one of these people dancing is definitely not something that sounds outlandish. In fact it sounds like something that is probably just going to happen. If you have 400 people on drugs just standing around, odds are that at least one of them is eventually going to start dancing, with or without music. In fact I would guess what happened was people started playing instruments and/or forming impromptu bands. There you go, next thing that happens after some guy starts beating a drum is another guy dancing to it.

And once one person is dancing, and committed to dancing, then that's really all you need. That's the catalyst. After that people will just start joining in. If everybody was sober, it could go either way, but if everyone's on mushrooms, and they don't know that they're on mushrooms, and most people probably think it's some divine thing that's happening, and they see a guy dancing.. Somebody's going to join in. I mean, everybody's confused, and this guy is dancing. He looks happy and in control. He must obviously be onto something. And so then another person joins in.. and another.. And all of a sudden you have a whole bunch of people dancing and probably having a lot of fun. Once that group dynamic starts, it would be hard to stop.

Then somebody yells: "Who wants more mushroom soup? I brought some more. There's also beer!"

And so at that point in everyone's minds it's Dance day and that's just what you do. You keep dancing because that's what's happening and that's that. It was meant to be, so they danced until people started dying.

I'm guessing more than just the guy picking knows mushrooms. Being from Oregon I can tell you that a lot of the people do. That's today with all the distractions. Back in 1518 there were fewer entertainments. Copulating, hunting, picking berries, planting, harvesting, dancing, and picking mushrooms. With only these few things to do, I'm guessing experts abounded. Plus, the mushroom guy would have to keep them coming for a month. That's a lot of psychedelic mushrooms. He would also have to hate mushrooms himself or he would just dance, and the mushrooms would stop coming. However unlikely its as good a theory as any I've seen. The month is the problem. If they are ingesting something that makes them dance they have to continue to do so for a month. If its bread and they stopped dancing long enough to eat, and chose potatoes instead, the effect would soon end. This is Germany too, lots of potatoes. In 1518 there should still have been plenty of game as well. That said, bringing down a wild boar while dancing might be a trick.

 

[CavLancer]

You can't dance yourself to death. Your muscles just get tired and you stop dancing.

You never met my first girlfriend.

 

[Yeekim]

No potatoes in Europe in 1518.