Once attacked, the hypnotic character of the complaint was shown by its annual recurrence. Again to quote Hecker:—
"Most of those affected were only annually visited
by attacks; and the occasion of them was so manifestly referable to the prevailing notions of that period that, if the unqualified belief in the agency of saints could have been abolished, they would not have had any return of the complaint. Throughout the whole of June, prior to the festival of St. John, patients felt a disquietude and restlessness which they were unable to overcome. They were dejected, timid, and anxious; wandered about in an unsettled state, being tormented with twitching pains, which seized them suddenly in different parts, and eagerly expected the eve of St. John's Day, in the confident hope that by dancing at the altars of this saint they would be freed from all their sufferings. This hope was not disappointed; and they remained, for the rest of the year, exempt from any further attack."[186]
In addition to John the Baptist, the dancing disease was also connected with another saint—St. Vitus. He is said to have been martyred about 303, and a body, reputed to be his, was transported to France in the ninth century. It is said that just before he was killed he prayed that all who would commemorate the day of his death should be protected from the dancing mania. Whereupon a voice from heaven was heard to say, "Vitus, thy prayer is accepted." The fact that the prayer was offered a thousand years before the dancing mania appeared is a circumstance that to the eye of faith merely heightened its value.
Within recent times epidemics of dancing have been more local, less persistent, and of necessity not so public in their display, but nearly always their appearance has been in connection with displays of religious
fervour. In most cases the dancing has tended more to a species of 'jumping,' and—although this may be due to more careful observation—has been accompanied by actions of a clearly epileptoid nature. One of the most famous of these outbreaks was that of the French Convulsionnaires, which lasted from 1727 to the Revolution. In 1727, a popular, but half-crazy priest, François de Paris, died. During his life Paris had fasted and scourged himself, lived in a hut that was seldom or never cleansed, showed the same lack of cleanliness in his person, and often went about half naked. Very shortly after his death, it was said that miracles began to take place at his grave in the cemetery of St. Médard. People gathered round the tomb day after day, and one young girl was seized with convulsions. (She is called a girl in the narrative, but she was a mature virgin of forty-two years of age.) Afterwards other miracles followed in rapid succession. Some fell in fits, others swallowed pieces of coal or flint, some were cured of diseases. From the description of the behaviour of some of these devotees there seems to have been a considerable amount of sexual feeling mixed up with the display. Sometimes, we are told, those seized "bounded from the ground like fish out of water; this was so frequently imitated at a later period that the women and girls, when they expected such violent contortions, not wishing to appear indecent, put on gowns made like sacks, closed at the feet. If they received any bruises by falling down, they were healed with earth taken from the grave of the uncanonised saint. They usually, however, showed great agility in this respect; and it is scarcely necessary to remark that the female sex especially
was distinguished by all kinds of leaping, and almost inconceivable contortions of body. Some spun round on their feet with incredible rapidity, as is related of the dervishes. Others ran with their heads against walls, or curved their bodies like rope dancers, so that their heels touched their shoulders."
Women figured very prominently among the Convulsionnaires, particularly when the epidemic passed from convulsive dancing to prophecy, and thence to various forms of self-torture. Women stretched themselves on the floor, while other women, and even men, jumped upon their bodies. Others were beaten with clubs and bars of iron. Some actually underwent crucifixion on repeated occasions. They were stretched on wooden crosses, and nails three inches long driven through hands and feet. Some of the occurrences remind one of what is now seen to take place under hypnotic influence. People labouring under strong excitement, it is known, become insensible to pain.
Outbreaks of jumping and dancing followed the introduction of Methodist preachers into country districts in the eighteenth century. In Wales, a sect of 'Jumpers' originated from this cause, and many of the American 'Jumpers' and 'Dancers' seem to have had their origin from this Welsh outbreak. In all such cases the spread of the mania was helped, if not made possible, by the preachers. They themselves looked upon these exhibitions as manifestations of the power of God, and so encouraged their hearers in their behaviour. Not every minister has the common sense of the Shetland preacher cited by Hecker. An epileptic woman had a fit in church, which a number of
others hailed as a manifestation of the power of God. Sunday after Sunday the same thing occurred with other women, the number of the sufferers steadily increasing. The thing threatened to assume such proportions, and to become so great a nuisance, he announced that attendants would be at hand who would dip women in the lake who happened to be seized. This threat proved a most powerful form of exorcism. Not one woman was affected. Similar conduct might have been quite as efficacious in preventing many religious manifestations that have assumed epidemic proportions.