THE CROW DANCE
To another question she replied emphatically: “If I were at judgment, if I saw the fire kindled and the fagots ablaze and the executioner ready to stir the fire, and if I were in the fire, I would say no more, and to the death I would maintain what I have said in the trial.”
The end came at last in the market place of Rouen, when this young girl, whose name for years had been a terror to the whole English army, was dragged in her white shroud and bound to the stake, and saw the wood heaped up around her and the cruel fire lighted under her feet. “Brother Martin, standing almost in the draft of the flames, heard her sob with a last sublime effort of faith, bearing her witness to God whom she trusted: ‘My voices have not deceived me!’ And then came death.” ([Parr], Jeanne d’Arc.)
DANCE OF SAINT JOHN
In 1374 an epidemic of maniacal religious dancing broke out on the lower Rhine and spread rapidly over Germany, the Netherlands, and into France. The victims of the mania claimed to dance in honor of Saint John. Men and women went about dancing hand in hand, in pairs, or in a circle, on the streets, in the churches, at their homes, or wherever they might be, hour after hour without rest until they fell into convulsions. While dancing they sang doggerel verses in honor of Saint John and uttered unintelligible cries. Of course they saw visions. At last whole companies of these crazy fanatics, men, women, and children, went dancing through the country, along the public roads, and into the cities, until the clergy felt compelled to interfere, and cured the dancers by exorcising the evil spirits that moved them. In the fifteenth century the epidemic broke out again. The dancers were now formed into divisions by the clergy and sent to the church of Saint Vitus at Rotestein, where prayers were said for them, and they were led in procession around the altar and dismissed cured. Hence the name of Saint Vitus’ dance given to one variety of abnormal muscular tremor. ([Schaff], Religious Encyclopedia.)
THE FLAGELLANTS
About the same time another strange religious extravagance spread over western Europe. Under the name of Flagellants, thousands of enthusiasts banded together with crosses, banners, hymns, and all the paraphernalia of religion, and went about in procession, publicly scourging one another as an atonement for their sins and the sins of mankind in general. They received their first impetus from the preaching of Saint Anthony of Padua in the thirteenth century. About the year 1260 the movement broke out nearly simultaneously in Italy, France, Germany, Austria, and Poland, and afterward spread into Denmark and England. It was at its height in the fourteenth century. In Germany in 1261 the devotees, preceded by banner and crosses, marched with faces veiled and bodies bared above the waist, and scourged themselves twice a day for thirty-three successive days in memory of the thirty-three years of Christ’s life. The strokes of the whip were timed to the music of hymns. Men and women together took part in the scourging. The mania finally wore itself out, but reappeared in 1349 with more systematic organization. According to Schaff, “When they came to towns, the bands marched in regular military order and singing hymns. At the time of flagellation they selected a square or churchyard or field. Taking off their shoes and stockings and forming a circle, they girded themselves with aprons and laid down flat on the ground.... The leader then stepped over each one, touched them with the whip, and bade them rise. As each was touched they followed after the leader and imitated him. Once all on their feet the flagellation began. The brethren went two by two around the whole circle, striking their backs till the blood trickled down from the wounds. The whip consisted of three thongs, each with four iron teeth. During the flagellation a hymn was sung. After all had gone around the circle the whole body again fell on the ground, beating upon their breasts. On arising they flagellated themselves a second time. While the brethren were putting on their clothes a collection was taken up among the audience. The scene was concluded by the reading of a letter from Christ, which an angel had brought to earth and which commended the pilgrimages of the Flagellants. The fraternities never tarried longer than a single day in a town. They gained great popularity, and it was considered an honor to entertain them.” ([Schaff], Religious Encyclopedia.) The society still exists among the Latin races, although under the ban of the church. As late as 1820 a procession of Flagellants passed through the streets of Lisbon. Under the name of Penitentes they have several organizations in the Mexican towns of our southwest, where they periodically appear in processions, inflicting horrible self-torture on themselves, even to the extent of binding one of their number upon a cross, which is then set up in the ground, while the blood streams down the body of the victim from the wounds made by a crown of cactus thorns and from innumerable gashes caused by the thorny whips. Such things among people called civilized enables us to understand the feeling which leads the Indian to offer himself a willing sacrifice in the sun dance and other propitiatory rites.
RANTERS, QUAKERS, AND FIFTH-MONARCHY MEN
The middle of the seventeenth century was a time of great religious and political upheaval in England. Hatreds were intense and persecutions cruel and bitter, until men’s minds gave way under the strain. “The air was thick with reports of prophecies and miracles, and there were men of all parties who lived on the border land between sanity and insanity.” This was due chiefly to the long-continued mental tension which bore on the whole population during this troublous period, and in particular cases to wholesale confiscations, by which families were ruined, and to confinement in wretched prisons, suffering from insufficient food and brutal treatment. Individuals even in the established church began to assert supernatural power, while numerous new sects sprang up, with prophecy, miracle working, hypnotism, and convulsive ecstasy as parts of their doctrine or ritual. Chief among these were the Ranters, the Quakers, and the Fifth-Monarchy Men. The first and last have disappeared with the conditions which produced them; but the Quakers, being based on a principle, have outlasted persecution, and, discarding the extravagances which belonged to the early period, are now on a permanent foundation under the name of the “Society of Friends.” One of the Ranter prophets, in 1650, claimed to be the reincarnation of Melchizedek, and even declared his divinity. He asserted that certain persons then living were Cain, Judas, Jeremiah, etc., whom, he had raised from the dead, and the strangest part of it was that the persons concerned stoutly affirmed the truth of his assertion. Others of them claimed to work miracles and to produce lights and apparitions in the dark. In Barclay’s opinion all the evidence “supports the view that these persons were mad, and had a singular power of producing a kind of sympathetic madness or temporary aberration of intellect in others.”