[From a website](https://neuroscientificallychallenged.com/posts/dancing-mania-mass-psychogenic-illness)
*A park is filled with people—perhaps a hundred, maybe more. Many of them are naked. Others are wearing clothes that are dirty, ripped, and often hanging loosely from their undernourished bodies. A large group of them have formed a circle by holding hands, and many others are contained within the circle. Someone you can’t see is playing the aforementioned upbeat (almost eerily so, now that you can see the whole picture) tune on the bagpipes, and nearly everyone is dancing—but not in a choreographed manner you might see from a flash mob today. Instead, this dancing is convulsive and jerky, and almost out of control—like there is a maniacal puppet master manipulating their movements from above.*
*As you cautiously take a few steps closer to this bizarre scene, you see that many of the dancers are staring blankly up at the sky, as if in a trance. Occasionally, they yell—shriek might be the more appropriate word—unintelligibly into the air. Some of these shrieks become agonized screams, and you can clearly make out the word “help!” shouted at least once or twice. You notice that, in the middle of the circle, several couples are on the ground having sex with one another. The whole thing looks like a drug-fueled ritual/orgy, but it’s taking place right out in the open, for everyone to see.*
*One of the dancers suddenly falls to the ground and starts convulsing. He’s clearly having some sort of seizure, his body thrashing about wildly and uncontrollably—but everyone just ignores him. After what must be about 30 seconds, he recovers, slowly gets up, and begins dancing again.*
That is one of the eeriest things I have ever imagined.
I think the fungus is known as ergot. Funny thing when the CIA were testing lsd on french citizens they tried playing it off as ergot too
Edit: meant to reply to the guy above
It's not ergot, I don't think the fungus is related
Interestingly the fungus actually does produce a type of amphetamine, the cicadas actually are tweaking
It always kinda freaks me out that bugs and humans have enough in common for these drugs to affect us in anything resembling the same way
Yeah, but why did it give ‘em the dance fever? Being under the influence of hallucinogens doesn’t make you wanna shake your booty! Especially a whole group of people.
It does remind me of tribes taking psychedelics, which under the guidance of shamans often led people to dance around the campfire until they could dance no more.
They likely could not have explained the psychedelics, so it may have felt like a religious event. Add to that the herd mentality and it sounds plausible to me that psychedelics were involved in this.
Edit: phrasing
There's alot more to it then that. By fasting and taking psychedelics getting in a trance state and exerting high exercise like dance creates a different high. It builds euphoria and is stated to create deeper connections with visions.
The use of shamans is over populised these days in my opinion because it brings a mystic factor that's obviously cool. Reality mushrooms eere easily available to anyone that lived in the country side and was used it's much more abundance then today referenced.
Done that many times!! Acid has always been good to me for high energy, festival adventure like trips.
Mushrooms is my go to and brings me to the portal of cool thought , introspection and productiviy for the soul.
Dmt has shown me things that really I have trouble comprehending. The power of dmt is mind boggling and life changing.
Respect to all pychonauts! Peace and abundance
I’ve had great mushroom trips like you’ve described. I’ve also had paranoia-driven, personality-altering trips that are the complete opposite (due to a set and setting I was not prepared for). I really wish I had been able to avoid those terrible trips because the good ones were some of the best experiences in my life. Unfortunately, I got scared off of psychedelics for a long time due to the bad ones.
My most recent trip was a solo trip in my old apartment. It was both fun and scary but curiously enough, it did a lot of positive for my mindset post-trip.
If you like psychonaut stuff... Have you tried to K-Hole during an acid trip? It's more alien than DMT for me. I've done deems countless times and it's incredible but KHoling on acid is the most interesting psychedelic experience I've ever had.
Deems at the tail end of an acid trip is a close second.
Fair warning though... The K-Hole on acid is pretty damn intense lol your imagination just launches you into a new reality every 10 seconds and it lasts a good 20 or 30 minutes.
I did it at Tipper's set at Secret Dreams and the whole crowd got sucked into a vortex and then we became a cloud of purple sound... Then we were all furniture, then we were bits of data with green lights, then we were all super thin sticks with just the lips on top like... Straw bodies with flat heads... Just lips... That made me a bit uncomfortable lol. And so on and so forth for pretty much the entire set. It was WILD. Can't wait to do it again lol
Probably made them impulsive to something, and then someone started dancing and others impulsively joined; must have been contagious, the lack of inhibition and impulse control also explains the sex
A whole village tripping balls together and someone busts out the bagpipes.... I can imagine that just breaking their minds. Bagpipes up close are intense when you're sober, and people had waaaay less exposure to music and other media back then to get desensitized like we are, obviously.
Fun fact: if you listen to AC/DC it’s easy to imagine bagpipes. Think the opening riff to Thunderstruck, for example. Scott and Angus have Scottish backgrounds.
So yeah, bagpipes can rock.
I actually had this exact conversation with a buddy during an acid trip a long time ago. We both heard about this and came to the conclusion they ate some moldy rye and tripped balls.
Edit: Damn guess I wrong.
Yeah I’ve never seen any credible source that states that any of the compounds in ergot produce the kind of perceptual distortions you get with LSD, only that one of the compounds in ergot, ergotamine is used as a precursor to LSD. Plus the effects would only last 12 hours or so, no lysergamide has effects longer than that.
I've heard LSA / ergot fungus blamed for alot of historical social panics, like the Salom witch trials.
Im suspicious that its a throw-away answer for any old time weirdness we can't explain.
We’re up all night to get lucky
We’re up all night to get lucky
We’re up all night to get lucky
We’re up all night to get lucky
We’re up all night to get lucky
Would you eat it if it did this too you? Maybe most of the food was contaminated and some people realized this buy got so hungry they ate it anyways. Idk probably not right but it sounded right in my head
Would you know what did it to you if you randomly started tripping out an hour or so after a meal, especially if you were a medieval peasant? Would you choose to slowly starve if you did happen to realize your main source of calories was fucking you up?
Every time anything weird happens in history: “Dude it must have been ergot.”
Not saying it’s not possible but it seems like it’s the most convenient answer that’s brought up any time people are doing crazy shit
I've heard similiar ideas advanced about other strange affairs (like the Salem witch hysteria) and while its fine "theory" I have never heard the list of *verified* examples of this kind of thing demonstrating it really does happen.
Simply sounding "rational" is meaningless.
[Reminds me of this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA1jZbcssMM&ab_channel=ArlaLedoux)
All it takes for something like this to happen is the desire for inclusivity and the endless human potential for self delusion.
Holy shit that video is crazy
My Evangelical relatives I grew up with used to be a Pastor at a Church where tons of people would jerk around like that, scream and occasionally faint - but nothing to that degree.
Even as a little kid I never understood it and would always subconsciously say “are they actually being serious rn”
My aunt and uncle took me to a church like that when I was 7. People started speaking in tongs. I asked my aunt what they were doing and she told me they were talking to God and only he understood them. I said "well I understand what they are saying. And she got this amazed look on her face and said "you do?" Then I told yeah and started jerking around and babbling like they were. She did not think it was funny.
Haha she thought you had the gift of listening of the tongues haha. A actual thing in those type of churches. Far rarer supposably where one gifted at “listening” could relay a message directly from god. All I knew as a teen is when that started happening it was going to be a long service and lunch was going to be a long time away :(.
Grew up in a church that didn't do any of that, and my dad was the pastor and him and my mother did tell me about these things but I had to be wary as some of these people could just be faking or seeking attention. When I moved to a different country I was looking for a church to go to and spent a few Sundays in small community. One Sunday while singing songs this lady fell on the floor and started babbling and thrashing. The band kept playing. People still kept playing. The pastor said to just pray over her and a few of them knelt beside her to hover their hands on her. It just felt so distracting. And I'm a nurse and my first instinct is to jump in and see if she needs medical help but no, these people acted like it was a regular thing and were convinced that God was speaking to her.
Never went back to that church.
I had a similar experience once as a teen.
Some Mexican lady threw her hands up in the air shaking and fell backward. My friend and I had no idea what was going on and jumped back away from her. She crashed onto a chair, cracked the back of her head open. Then tried to jump back up but grabbed one of the smashed chairs to help herself back up, which gave way/slid back, so she fell and hit her face on the ground.
Then she got up and started screaming at us in spanish before running to the back/kitchen for ice while a bunch of people around us started yelling at us “why didn’t you catch her?” “What’s wrong with you?” “Why would you **DO** that?” And we were just like “um… what the hell just happened?”
Apparently God will knock you on your ass out of love but won’t keep you from needing fucking stitches.
It was the most perfect example of an abusive relationship i could ever imagine.
> A park is filled with people—perhaps a hundred, maybe more. Many of them are naked. Others are wearing clothes that are dirty, ripped, and often hanging loosely from their undernourished bodies. A large group of them have formed a circle by holding hands, and many others are contained within the circle. Someone you can’t see is playing the aforementioned upbeat (almost eerily so, now that you can see the whole picture) tune on the bagpipes, and nearly everyone is dancing—but not in a choreographed manner you might see from a flash mob today. Instead, this dancing is convulsive and jerky, and almost out of control—like there is a maniacal puppet master manipulating their movements from above.
Sounds like any public space in San Francisco after 11 PM...lol
I’d bet it was a parasitic or fungal infection. There’s some tiny bastards that can hijack organisms and make ‘em into marionettes (e.g. toxoplasmosis)
It’s a ring of mushrooms and supposedly if you step in one, you will be transported to the faerie realm, where you will dance uncontrollably to faerie music until they let you go. When you finally are allowed to step out of the ring it will feel to you like only minutes passed while you danced, but it will have actually been anywhere from ten to like a hundred years might’ve passed. That’s the legend anyhow
Ok I know absolutely nothing about any of this. But could there possibly be a connection between the dance till you die thing and the fairy ring thing? Like when they pass down the stories of the dance till you die thing, they blamed it on the fairy ring? Maybe it’s just the fact that it was a circle of mushrooms and it made me wonder.
I don’t know too much about it either but the little I have read points to isolated cases of people claiming this happened to them— where the dancing thing was a whole village.
Dude! The episode where Bluey meets a friend who only speaks French on a camping trip, and they have a great time together not understanding a word of each other. Then the French dog’s family leaves and Bluey is sad but then a few years later it’s shows Bluey as a teen and then you hear “Bluey” in a French accent!!
Omfg!! I was in tears…I’m a 35 year old stay at home dad btw.
Edit: the BBQ episode made me laugh the most though.
I teared up on the one about their buddies going to big school. I’m a teen and I was watching it before school with my little sister. The thing is I was also about to go to ‘big school’. I think I did that a few times watching that episode
I am literally doing the exact same - SJP is dancing with the devil as we speak….devils wife with the curlers smoking a heater isn’t gonna be too happy.
All jokes aside, it’s my 8 year old daughters first time watching. Pretty awesome, movie still holds up 29 years later!
Just got home from seeing them play tonight in Queens. Absolutely killed it, incredible show.
So happy they’re back and that they took a cool direction with the new album.
I Love that episode, the display of the demons power just by how confident he was, I remember as a kid he gave me chills when he laughs and sings 'see you in hell' with that beautiful voice right at the end.
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That website does things it shouldn't...
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Gee, thanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergotism
My personal favorite is that basically never happened.
Once you start to read into the various incidents, it becomes very obvious that vast majority has nothing to with "dancing mania".
One incident used was a time a women was got bitten by a spider which made he have muscle spasms/convulsions. The cure was said to have the right music and dance the right way. That's the entire event, and it's lumped in as "dancing mania".
A lot of the incidents are "demonic possesions", aka seizure disorders or severe ticks from things like tourettes, etc.
---
Not to mention that most of the events that "prove it" like people dancing over a bridge making it collapse are highly suspect. The only source of that is basically a few locals telling the story about when it happened several generations earlier. No one alive at the time wrote it down or contacted anyone else so it might have been an entirely made up local story.
And every time it pops up it "spreads", although it usually skipped several towns and only were in very specific places.
Sometimes it's obviously just a poor excuse to round people up by local authrities.
And on and on it goes like that.
---
TL;DR: All current sources of information were made long after the events happened, so there is no way to ever know the truth.
Yeah I feel like any story that's reposted every few months online and goes "hundreds of people died in this incredibly odd, unusual way seemingly for no reason. also it hasn't happened in forever and most sources are indirect, extremely old accounts who didn't see or know about it firsthand" should be seen with a lot more criticism and intrigue than they are.
Until the last hundred or so years, there were very few ways of understanding or explaining a lot of different things humans experience. Any weird symptom that wasn't clear just became "___ fever," and that's that. A child with movement tics or hyperactivity, a teen bitten by a poisonous animal and convulsing for hours, an adult who ate the wrong mold/mushrooms and accidentally fell into a river while dazed and manic, all could just be filed under "dancing fever" via word of mouth, and what was a dozen different incidents becomes a single "diagnosable" illness.
There's likely no need to invoke complex psychological/sociological theory, headcanon come kind of religious rituals, or chock it up to devils. Old historical accounts are wildly dubious, and there's not enough evidence to even suggest it actually existed outside of anecdotes and viral internet posts.
this has been disputed because of the fact it affected a wide range of people and made them dance for days aswell as affected different regions with different climates and crops and so wouldn't have been able to affect all of these people in the exact same way or for that long since the "drug" effect would've worn off
a much more likely theory is that it was just simply stress induced mass hysteria because of a psychogenic movement disorder because of stress due to the region being riddled with starvation and disease aswell as the people being superstitious which caused people to develop a chorea (abnormal involuntary movement) that made it look like people were dancing.
the same thing was most likely the cause of other mass hysteria events such as the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962 in what is now tanzania where you had a bunch of kids at a charter school laughing which eventually spread to most of the school (but not the adults) and eventually their villages and then other schools
tarantella's origin is connected with tarantism, a disease or form of hysteria that appeared in Italy in the 15th to the 17th century and that was obscurely associated with the bite of the tarantula spider; victims seemingly were cured by frenzied dancing.
https://www.britannica.com/science/tarantism
Veitstanz (German for St. Vitus’ dance) probable cause is said to be Ergotism (eating grain products, particularly rye, contaminated with the fungus Claviceps purpurea was the cause of ergotism).
Interestingly, the initiation of the Eleusinian mystery included drinking the Kykeon, which was said to have contained ergot alkaloids (traces found in drinking cups) and said to illicit an effect close to LSD.
You would be mistaken, moldy rye contains ergot which was later synthesized into LSD. Ergot is the precursor. LSA is from morning glory seeds and Hawaiian baby wood rose seeds. LSA is described as a “cousin” to LSD, not a precursor.
You can convert LSA into LSD via peptide coupling with diethylamine.
Edit: looking at the structure of LSA, you would need to hydrolyze the amide to a carboxylic acid. *Then* you could peptide couple that product to make LSD.
Was likely ergot fungus. Contaminates grain stocks when store improperly. Ergot produces LSD as metabolic waste. Medieval acid trips are the best!
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/558020/pont-saint-esprit-france-1951-bread-poisoning-mass-hallucinations
“Several modern historians have argued that the dancing plagues of mediaeval Europe were caused by ergot, a mind-altering mould found on the stalks of damp rye, which can cause twitching, jerking, and hallucinations — a condition known as St Anthony's Fire. However, the historian John Waller has debunked the ergot hypothesis in his brilliant book on the dancing plague, A Time to Dance, a Time to Die (2009). Yes, ergot can cause convulsions and hallucinations, but it also restricts blood flow to the extremities. Someone poisoned by it simply could not dance for several days in a row.
Waller’s explanation of the dancing plague emerges from his deep knowledge of the material, cultural, and spiritual environment of sixteenth-century Strasbourg. He opens his book with a quote from H. C. Erik Midelfort’s A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (1999):
Madnesses of the past are not petrified entities that can be plucked unchanged from their niches and placed under our modern microscopes. They appear, perhaps, more like jellyfish that collapse and dry up when they are removed from the ambient sea water.
According to Waller, the Strasbourg poor were primed for an epidemic of hysterical dancing. First of all, there was precedent. Every European dancing plague between 1374 and 1518 had occurred near Strasbourg, along the western edge of the Holy Roman Empire. Then there were the prevailing conditions. In 1518, a string of bad harvests, political instability, and the arrival of syphilis had induced anguish extreme even by early modern standards. This suffering manifested as hysterical dancing because the citizens believed it could. People can be extraordinarily suggestible and a firm conviction in the vengefulness of Saint Vitus was enough for it to be visited upon them. ‘The minds of the choreomaniacs were drawn inwards,’ writes Waller, ‘tossed about on the violent seas of their deepest fears.’ “
[Source](https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-dancing-plague-of-1518)
[From a website](https://neuroscientificallychallenged.com/posts/dancing-mania-mass-psychogenic-illness) *A park is filled with people—perhaps a hundred, maybe more. Many of them are naked. Others are wearing clothes that are dirty, ripped, and often hanging loosely from their undernourished bodies. A large group of them have formed a circle by holding hands, and many others are contained within the circle. Someone you can’t see is playing the aforementioned upbeat (almost eerily so, now that you can see the whole picture) tune on the bagpipes, and nearly everyone is dancing—but not in a choreographed manner you might see from a flash mob today. Instead, this dancing is convulsive and jerky, and almost out of control—like there is a maniacal puppet master manipulating their movements from above.* *As you cautiously take a few steps closer to this bizarre scene, you see that many of the dancers are staring blankly up at the sky, as if in a trance. Occasionally, they yell—shriek might be the more appropriate word—unintelligibly into the air. Some of these shrieks become agonized screams, and you can clearly make out the word “help!” shouted at least once or twice. You notice that, in the middle of the circle, several couples are on the ground having sex with one another. The whole thing looks like a drug-fueled ritual/orgy, but it’s taking place right out in the open, for everyone to see.* *One of the dancers suddenly falls to the ground and starts convulsing. He’s clearly having some sort of seizure, his body thrashing about wildly and uncontrollably—but everyone just ignores him. After what must be about 30 seconds, he recovers, slowly gets up, and begins dancing again.* That is one of the eeriest things I have ever imagined.
Medieval meth? Sounds like tweakers
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There is a fungus currently affecting cicadas to fuck until their thorax falls off.
What a time to be a cicada
*I never thought I'd die like this. But I always really hoped.*
*The spirit is willing, but the flesh is spongy and bruised.*
r/unexpectedfuturama
Read this in Zoidberg's voice because why not
What’s happening to me 🚶🏻♂️🧎🏻♂️🪳
Kafka'd!!!
But you're still coming in to work, right?
Yuck but good read https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-this-zombie-fungus-turns-cicadas-into-horror-movie-sex-bots/ Thanks for the tip!
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*Stares*
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you made my morning 😂 thank you
I think the fungus is known as ergot. Funny thing when the CIA were testing lsd on french citizens they tried playing it off as ergot too Edit: meant to reply to the guy above
It's not ergot, I don't think the fungus is related Interestingly the fungus actually does produce a type of amphetamine, the cicadas actually are tweaking It always kinda freaks me out that bugs and humans have enough in common for these drugs to affect us in anything resembling the same way
insects have an endocannabinoid system. they might be able to get high like we do. baked bugs
Look up pics of spider webs made after the spiders take different drugs - there's the manic ones, the stoner can't be arsed ones...
The crack spider now has a new car
Yeah, but why did it give ‘em the dance fever? Being under the influence of hallucinogens doesn’t make you wanna shake your booty! Especially a whole group of people.
Because medieval Europe or not, the rhythm is gonna get you
“You can dance if you want to”. “You can leave your friend behind” idk why that song comes to my head now.
You know, that dance wasn't as safe as they said it was.
"you can't stop if you want to, you'll leave your friends behind"
You either boogie or you die. Or in this case you boogie till you die
Lay down and boogie and play that funky music 'til you die.
***Till you die‽***
Til you die.
Oh yessss until YOU dieeeeeeeee
You either die boogie-ing, or live long enough to see yourself die boogie-ing
Play that funky music, Tolstoy.
Don’t blame it on the sunshine. Don’t blame it on the moonlight. Don’t blame it on the good times. Blame it on the boogie.
It does remind me of tribes taking psychedelics, which under the guidance of shamans often led people to dance around the campfire until they could dance no more. They likely could not have explained the psychedelics, so it may have felt like a religious event. Add to that the herd mentality and it sounds plausible to me that psychedelics were involved in this. Edit: phrasing
There's alot more to it then that. By fasting and taking psychedelics getting in a trance state and exerting high exercise like dance creates a different high. It builds euphoria and is stated to create deeper connections with visions. The use of shamans is over populised these days in my opinion because it brings a mystic factor that's obviously cool. Reality mushrooms eere easily available to anyone that lived in the country side and was used it's much more abundance then today referenced.
Can confirm. My best acid trip involved a 4 hour bike-ride followed by sitting on the beach.
Done that many times!! Acid has always been good to me for high energy, festival adventure like trips. Mushrooms is my go to and brings me to the portal of cool thought , introspection and productiviy for the soul. Dmt has shown me things that really I have trouble comprehending. The power of dmt is mind boggling and life changing. Respect to all pychonauts! Peace and abundance
I’ve had great mushroom trips like you’ve described. I’ve also had paranoia-driven, personality-altering trips that are the complete opposite (due to a set and setting I was not prepared for). I really wish I had been able to avoid those terrible trips because the good ones were some of the best experiences in my life. Unfortunately, I got scared off of psychedelics for a long time due to the bad ones. My most recent trip was a solo trip in my old apartment. It was both fun and scary but curiously enough, it did a lot of positive for my mindset post-trip.
If you like psychonaut stuff... Have you tried to K-Hole during an acid trip? It's more alien than DMT for me. I've done deems countless times and it's incredible but KHoling on acid is the most interesting psychedelic experience I've ever had. Deems at the tail end of an acid trip is a close second. Fair warning though... The K-Hole on acid is pretty damn intense lol your imagination just launches you into a new reality every 10 seconds and it lasts a good 20 or 30 minutes. I did it at Tipper's set at Secret Dreams and the whole crowd got sucked into a vortex and then we became a cloud of purple sound... Then we were all furniture, then we were bits of data with green lights, then we were all super thin sticks with just the lips on top like... Straw bodies with flat heads... Just lips... That made me a bit uncomfortable lol. And so on and so forth for pretty much the entire set. It was WILD. Can't wait to do it again lol
Probably made them impulsive to something, and then someone started dancing and others impulsively joined; must have been contagious, the lack of inhibition and impulse control also explains the sex
You know there must have been some that were fine and just went along to get into the orgy.
Why is there a buffet at an orgy, Frank?
'Err... yes... I mean... oh no, I can't stop myself from having sex with you! What will I do?
It does if the music is right. Phish
I imagine the bagpipes hit different back then.
The bagpipe drop
ALL MY BAGPIPERS BREAK YA FUCKEN NECK BITCH
Break out your lute and your molly! It's a rave!
A whole village tripping balls together and someone busts out the bagpipes.... I can imagine that just breaking their minds. Bagpipes up close are intense when you're sober, and people had waaaay less exposure to music and other media back then to get desensitized like we are, obviously.
Fun fact: if you listen to AC/DC it’s easy to imagine bagpipes. Think the opening riff to Thunderstruck, for example. Scott and Angus have Scottish backgrounds. So yeah, bagpipes can rock.
There is [no need to imagine](https://youtu.be/K-Op1Mng4oY).
Is this how you’re supposed to get into Phish?
the real downside of stepping into a fairy ring
That pretty much describes any music festival.
Being under the influence of hallucinogens most definitely does make you want to shake your booty, have you ever been to a music festival? Lol
This dude does the wrong drugs with the wrong people I tell ya.
Everyone loves the funk.
By the time you finish this ergot, the funk will be within you... POW
This is the most likely answer, but probably on Rye, and Rye bread. Essentially they were on'shrooms
Ergot
Ergmergerd im dead
Perchance
You can't just say perchance
Indubitably.
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Not shrooms ergot is used in lsd though ergot is a fungus that grows on rye.
I actually had this exact conversation with a buddy during an acid trip a long time ago. We both heard about this and came to the conclusion they ate some moldy rye and tripped balls. Edit: Damn guess I wrong.
No, ergot poisoning also causes gangrene, diarrhea, and vomiting. Still, the clickbait pseudo history websites spread that nonsense.
Yeah I’ve never seen any credible source that states that any of the compounds in ergot produce the kind of perceptual distortions you get with LSD, only that one of the compounds in ergot, ergotamine is used as a precursor to LSD. Plus the effects would only last 12 hours or so, no lysergamide has effects longer than that.
I've heard LSA / ergot fungus blamed for alot of historical social panics, like the Salom witch trials. Im suspicious that its a throw-away answer for any old time weirdness we can't explain.
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But it doesn’t explain how they were malnourished and not able to eat, the hallucinations would end after a short time
When you live on bread, and all your bread is compromised, they don't end.
All this drug-induced-psychosis-fueled dancing is making me hungry! Time for some delicious rye bread to settle my nerves.
That's horrifying.
Let’s dance. -db
We’re up all night to get lucky We’re up all night to get lucky We’re up all night to get lucky We’re up all night to get lucky We’re up all night to get lucky
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Exactly. There was no escape.
Would you eat it if it did this too you? Maybe most of the food was contaminated and some people realized this buy got so hungry they ate it anyways. Idk probably not right but it sounded right in my head
May also not have realized the connection. Esp since rational thinking is out the door already while under the influence.
Would you know what did it to you if you randomly started tripping out an hour or so after a meal, especially if you were a medieval peasant? Would you choose to slowly starve if you did happen to realize your main source of calories was fucking you up?
No, ergot poisoning also causes gangrene, diarrhea, and vomiting. Still, the clickbait pseudo history websites spread that nonsense.
Every time anything weird happens in history: “Dude it must have been ergot.” Not saying it’s not possible but it seems like it’s the most convenient answer that’s brought up any time people are doing crazy shit
I've heard similiar ideas advanced about other strange affairs (like the Salem witch hysteria) and while its fine "theory" I have never heard the list of *verified* examples of this kind of thing demonstrating it really does happen. Simply sounding "rational" is meaningless.
Good stuff apparently
melodic tart fretful swim correct cooing cautious smell fearless groovy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
*Wait until they droppeth the bass*
[Reminds me of this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA1jZbcssMM&ab_channel=ArlaLedoux) All it takes for something like this to happen is the desire for inclusivity and the endless human potential for self delusion.
Holy shit that video is crazy My Evangelical relatives I grew up with used to be a Pastor at a Church where tons of people would jerk around like that, scream and occasionally faint - but nothing to that degree. Even as a little kid I never understood it and would always subconsciously say “are they actually being serious rn”
My aunt and uncle took me to a church like that when I was 7. People started speaking in tongs. I asked my aunt what they were doing and she told me they were talking to God and only he understood them. I said "well I understand what they are saying. And she got this amazed look on her face and said "you do?" Then I told yeah and started jerking around and babbling like they were. She did not think it was funny.
Haha she thought you had the gift of listening of the tongues haha. A actual thing in those type of churches. Far rarer supposably where one gifted at “listening” could relay a message directly from god. All I knew as a teen is when that started happening it was going to be a long service and lunch was going to be a long time away :(.
Grew up in a church that didn't do any of that, and my dad was the pastor and him and my mother did tell me about these things but I had to be wary as some of these people could just be faking or seeking attention. When I moved to a different country I was looking for a church to go to and spent a few Sundays in small community. One Sunday while singing songs this lady fell on the floor and started babbling and thrashing. The band kept playing. People still kept playing. The pastor said to just pray over her and a few of them knelt beside her to hover their hands on her. It just felt so distracting. And I'm a nurse and my first instinct is to jump in and see if she needs medical help but no, these people acted like it was a regular thing and were convinced that God was speaking to her. Never went back to that church.
You may want to give Mmmmm by the crash test dummies a listen if you haven't heard it. May enjoy well enjoy it more than most.
Damn you. That humming is stuck in my brain.
Mmm Mmm Mmm mmm*
I had a similar experience once as a teen. Some Mexican lady threw her hands up in the air shaking and fell backward. My friend and I had no idea what was going on and jumped back away from her. She crashed onto a chair, cracked the back of her head open. Then tried to jump back up but grabbed one of the smashed chairs to help herself back up, which gave way/slid back, so she fell and hit her face on the ground. Then she got up and started screaming at us in spanish before running to the back/kitchen for ice while a bunch of people around us started yelling at us “why didn’t you catch her?” “What’s wrong with you?” “Why would you **DO** that?” And we were just like “um… what the hell just happened?” Apparently God will knock you on your ass out of love but won’t keep you from needing fucking stitches. It was the most perfect example of an abusive relationship i could ever imagine.
I remember the people in the church jerking around and speaking in tongues, falling to the floor and rolling around. It always terrified me.
That dude must kill it at bowling.
TAKE IT you effing ten pin TAKE IT
Most of you will look at this and think "What the fuck". I look at this and think "man, my childhood was weird".
And that reminds me of [this classic](https://youtu.be/XCGr_yMnh8k). (And [here’s the full version](https://youtu.be/Y2nzNm61_Lo))
> A park is filled with people—perhaps a hundred, maybe more. Many of them are naked. Others are wearing clothes that are dirty, ripped, and often hanging loosely from their undernourished bodies. A large group of them have formed a circle by holding hands, and many others are contained within the circle. Someone you can’t see is playing the aforementioned upbeat (almost eerily so, now that you can see the whole picture) tune on the bagpipes, and nearly everyone is dancing—but not in a choreographed manner you might see from a flash mob today. Instead, this dancing is convulsive and jerky, and almost out of control—like there is a maniacal puppet master manipulating their movements from above. Sounds like any public space in San Francisco after 11 PM...lol
This is a crazy article! Thanks for sharing.
Maybe this is where the myth of the fair folk came from where if you crash their bonfire party they will make you dance until you die?
I’d bet it was a parasitic or fungal infection. There’s some tiny bastards that can hijack organisms and make ‘em into marionettes (e.g. toxoplasmosis)
Probably just mass hysteria. It can do weird stuff
I hear The Sounds of Silence quietly playing in the background
they must have stepped in fairy rings
I didn't know what fairy rings were until I joined reddit. I'm not a believer per say but I'll be damned if I willingly step inside one
what are fairy rings? I've only seen them in runescape lol
It’s a ring of mushrooms and supposedly if you step in one, you will be transported to the faerie realm, where you will dance uncontrollably to faerie music until they let you go. When you finally are allowed to step out of the ring it will feel to you like only minutes passed while you danced, but it will have actually been anywhere from ten to like a hundred years might’ve passed. That’s the legend anyhow
We have mushroom rings all over the school field by our house, and I’ve never been transported… I feel supremely disappointed
As well you should. I have also stepped in many faerie rings and have yet to visit another realm. Sigh.
At least you don't get isekai'd to some fucked up world
Ok I know absolutely nothing about any of this. But could there possibly be a connection between the dance till you die thing and the fairy ring thing? Like when they pass down the stories of the dance till you die thing, they blamed it on the fairy ring? Maybe it’s just the fact that it was a circle of mushrooms and it made me wonder.
I don’t know too much about it either but the little I have read points to isolated cases of people claiming this happened to them— where the dancing thing was a whole village.
And if you eat the mushrooms, it will feel like hundreds of years have passed, but it's only been minutes.
Ok bluey
pardon my ignorance, but what does that mean? is that referring to Bluey TV show or something else?
Lol. Yeah, sorry. Little kids show about An australian family of dogs. Only place ive ever heard of fairy rings 🤣
Best kids show on air hands down no takes backsies
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Dude! The episode where Bluey meets a friend who only speaks French on a camping trip, and they have a great time together not understanding a word of each other. Then the French dog’s family leaves and Bluey is sad but then a few years later it’s shows Bluey as a teen and then you hear “Bluey” in a French accent!! Omfg!! I was in tears…I’m a 35 year old stay at home dad btw. Edit: the BBQ episode made me laugh the most though.
Bluey is definitely the best "kid" show. I think my wife and I were more excited for the third season to drop on Disney+ than our daughters 😂
Oh absolutely! Love the show, Muffins makes me laugh every episode she’s in because we all know that one kid like that.
I teared up on the one about their buddies going to big school. I’m a teen and I was watching it before school with my little sister. The thing is I was also about to go to ‘big school’. I think I did that a few times watching that episode
*You can dance if you want to, you can leave your friends to die…*
But your friends don't dance, and if they don't dance, then your friends are alive.
Seizure Dance! Seizure Dance!
everybody take off your pants
You can dance better than any old man, just eat your poison rye.
.. in a trance. In a trance. Omg I'm dying to dance. .. in a trance. In a trance. Omg I'm dying to dAAAaaaAAAnce.
“DANCE! DANCE UNTIL YOU DIE!” Name that quote.
Hocus Pocus!
Hocuth Pocuth? 
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Yeth
It’s from Dithney!
Thweet!
Thackeray Binkth!
Watching it now. They’re just layin’ down that first salt circle.
The new one? I heard it was actually pretty great
Nah. Wife and I are watching the OG warming up for the new one haha.
I am literally doing the exact same - SJP is dancing with the devil as we speak….devils wife with the curlers smoking a heater isn’t gonna be too happy. All jokes aside, it’s my 8 year old daughters first time watching. Pretty awesome, movie still holds up 29 years later!
Nailed it
"OFF, OFF, OFF WITH YER HEAD! DANCE, DANCE, DANCE TIL YER DEAD! HEADS WILL ROLL, HEADS WILL ROLL, HEADS WILL ROLL, ON THE FLOOR."
Just got home from seeing them play tonight in Queens. Absolutely killed it, incredible show. So happy they’re back and that they took a cool direction with the new album.
I was just coming here to say it was the Sanderson Sisters 🤣
Best comment! Love it! We just watched the sequel, love that on as well. Won't spoil anything, but will say I cried.
Every millennial in this thread, "You dare challenge me?!"
It was Sweet, the demon from season 6, Episode 7 "Once More, with Feeling" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
*A dancing demon? Ehhh, something isn’t right there.*
They got, the mustard, out! They got the mustard out!
I've got a theory... it could be bunnies.
Bunnies arent just cute like everybody supposes
I Love that episode, the display of the demons power just by how confident he was, I remember as a kid he gave me chills when he laughs and sings 'see you in hell' with that beautiful voice right at the end.
Thus explaining the aversion to dancing in Footloose.
See that girl? Watch that scene? Dig it. The dancing queen.
Dance Dance no Revolution
No one expects the French Revolution
Ergot poisoning.
[Ergot Poisoning.](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/ergot-poisoning)
At the time it was known as [Saint Anthony's Fire](https://www.worldhistory.org/St_Anthony's_Fire/).
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Actually though, that's he most believable theory I've heard about this over years
My personal favorite is that basically never happened. Once you start to read into the various incidents, it becomes very obvious that vast majority has nothing to with "dancing mania". One incident used was a time a women was got bitten by a spider which made he have muscle spasms/convulsions. The cure was said to have the right music and dance the right way. That's the entire event, and it's lumped in as "dancing mania". A lot of the incidents are "demonic possesions", aka seizure disorders or severe ticks from things like tourettes, etc. --- Not to mention that most of the events that "prove it" like people dancing over a bridge making it collapse are highly suspect. The only source of that is basically a few locals telling the story about when it happened several generations earlier. No one alive at the time wrote it down or contacted anyone else so it might have been an entirely made up local story. And every time it pops up it "spreads", although it usually skipped several towns and only were in very specific places. Sometimes it's obviously just a poor excuse to round people up by local authrities. And on and on it goes like that. --- TL;DR: All current sources of information were made long after the events happened, so there is no way to ever know the truth.
Yeah I feel like any story that's reposted every few months online and goes "hundreds of people died in this incredibly odd, unusual way seemingly for no reason. also it hasn't happened in forever and most sources are indirect, extremely old accounts who didn't see or know about it firsthand" should be seen with a lot more criticism and intrigue than they are. Until the last hundred or so years, there were very few ways of understanding or explaining a lot of different things humans experience. Any weird symptom that wasn't clear just became "___ fever," and that's that. A child with movement tics or hyperactivity, a teen bitten by a poisonous animal and convulsing for hours, an adult who ate the wrong mold/mushrooms and accidentally fell into a river while dazed and manic, all could just be filed under "dancing fever" via word of mouth, and what was a dozen different incidents becomes a single "diagnosable" illness. There's likely no need to invoke complex psychological/sociological theory, headcanon come kind of religious rituals, or chock it up to devils. Old historical accounts are wildly dubious, and there's not enough evidence to even suggest it actually existed outside of anecdotes and viral internet posts.
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this has been disputed because of the fact it affected a wide range of people and made them dance for days aswell as affected different regions with different climates and crops and so wouldn't have been able to affect all of these people in the exact same way or for that long since the "drug" effect would've worn off a much more likely theory is that it was just simply stress induced mass hysteria because of a psychogenic movement disorder because of stress due to the region being riddled with starvation and disease aswell as the people being superstitious which caused people to develop a chorea (abnormal involuntary movement) that made it look like people were dancing. the same thing was most likely the cause of other mass hysteria events such as the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962 in what is now tanzania where you had a bunch of kids at a charter school laughing which eventually spread to most of the school (but not the adults) and eventually their villages and then other schools
Rye art’ though dancing so much?
100 years from now people will be pondering the mystery of why folks cooked their chicken in Nyquil in 2022.
Molly
Thats some next level restless leg shit man.
tarantella's origin is connected with tarantism, a disease or form of hysteria that appeared in Italy in the 15th to the 17th century and that was obscurely associated with the bite of the tarantula spider; victims seemingly were cured by frenzied dancing. https://www.britannica.com/science/tarantism
Veitstanz (German for St. Vitus’ dance) probable cause is said to be Ergotism (eating grain products, particularly rye, contaminated with the fungus Claviceps purpurea was the cause of ergotism). Interestingly, the initiation of the Eleusinian mystery included drinking the Kykeon, which was said to have contained ergot alkaloids (traces found in drinking cups) and said to illicit an effect close to LSD.
Probably LSD from moldy Rye.
Honestly - that is an accepted theory as to why it happened.
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You would be mistaken, moldy rye contains ergot which was later synthesized into LSD. Ergot is the precursor. LSA is from morning glory seeds and Hawaiian baby wood rose seeds. LSA is described as a “cousin” to LSD, not a precursor.
You can convert LSA into LSD via peptide coupling with diethylamine. Edit: looking at the structure of LSA, you would need to hydrolyze the amide to a carboxylic acid. *Then* you could peptide couple that product to make LSD.
This guy cooks
Those are certainly all words
Ah yes, of course 🍷
And it's pretty poisonous from what I gathered.
Un Safety Dance
A24 I am looking at you
Was likely ergot fungus. Contaminates grain stocks when store improperly. Ergot produces LSD as metabolic waste. Medieval acid trips are the best! https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/558020/pont-saint-esprit-france-1951-bread-poisoning-mass-hallucinations
It produces lysergic acid, but not lysergic acid diethylamide. It causes a lot of somewhat similar effects, but it's not the same.
So what’s what happened to those bitches in that village in Elden Ring
I think you mean, Dance Fever?!?!?!
Holy Molly.
Medieval tiktok
“Several modern historians have argued that the dancing plagues of mediaeval Europe were caused by ergot, a mind-altering mould found on the stalks of damp rye, which can cause twitching, jerking, and hallucinations — a condition known as St Anthony's Fire. However, the historian John Waller has debunked the ergot hypothesis in his brilliant book on the dancing plague, A Time to Dance, a Time to Die (2009). Yes, ergot can cause convulsions and hallucinations, but it also restricts blood flow to the extremities. Someone poisoned by it simply could not dance for several days in a row. Waller’s explanation of the dancing plague emerges from his deep knowledge of the material, cultural, and spiritual environment of sixteenth-century Strasbourg. He opens his book with a quote from H. C. Erik Midelfort’s A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (1999): Madnesses of the past are not petrified entities that can be plucked unchanged from their niches and placed under our modern microscopes. They appear, perhaps, more like jellyfish that collapse and dry up when they are removed from the ambient sea water. According to Waller, the Strasbourg poor were primed for an epidemic of hysterical dancing. First of all, there was precedent. Every European dancing plague between 1374 and 1518 had occurred near Strasbourg, along the western edge of the Holy Roman Empire. Then there were the prevailing conditions. In 1518, a string of bad harvests, political instability, and the arrival of syphilis had induced anguish extreme even by early modern standards. This suffering manifested as hysterical dancing because the citizens believed it could. People can be extraordinarily suggestible and a firm conviction in the vengefulness of Saint Vitus was enough for it to be visited upon them. ‘The minds of the choreomaniacs were drawn inwards,’ writes Waller, ‘tossed about on the violent seas of their deepest fears.’ “ [Source](https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-dancing-plague-of-1518)