The physicians stood aloof. Acknowledged as a demoniacal possession, they left the treatment of the disease entirely to the priesthood; and their exorcisms were not without avail. But it was necessary to this species of remedy that the patients should have faith in the church and its holy ministers. Without faith there would certainly, in such a case, be no cure; and, unhappily, the report had been spread by some irreverend schismatics that the disorder itself was owing—to what will our readers suppose?—to an imperfect baptism—to the baptism of children by the hands of unchaste priests. Where this notion prevailed, the exorcism, we need not say, was unavailing.
The malady first bore the name of St John’s Dance, afterwards that of St Vitus’s. This second name it took from the mere circumstance that St Vitus was the saint appealed to for its cure. A legend had been framed with a curious disregard—even for a legend—of all history and chronology, in which St Vitus, who suffered martyrdom, as the church records, under the Emperor Domitian, is described as praying, just before he bent his neck to the sword, that he might protect from the Dancing Mania all those who should solemnise the day of his commemoration, and fast upon its eve. The prayer was granted; a voice from heaven was heard saying, “Vitus, thy prayer is accepted.” He became, of course, the patron saint of those afflicted with the dancing plague. But the name under which it first appeared, of St John’s Dance, receives from Dr Hecker an explanation which points out to us a probable origin of the disease itself, or of the peculiar form which it assumed.
“The connection,” he says, “which John the Baptist had with the dancing mania of the fourteenth century, was of a totally different character. He was originally far from being a protecting saint to those who were attacked, or one who would be likely to give them relief from a malady considered as the work of the devil. On the contrary, the manner in which he was worshipped afforded an important and very evident cause for its development. From the remotest period, perhaps even so far back as the fourth century, St John’s day was solemnised with all sorts of strange and rude customs, of which the original mystical meaning was variously disfigured among different nations by superadded relics of heathenism. Thus the Germans transferred to the festival of St John’s day an ancient heathen usage—the kindling of the ‘hodfyr,’ which was forbidden them by St Boniface; and the belief subsists even to the present day, that people and animals that have leaped through these flames, or their smoke, are protected for a whole year from fevers and other diseases, as if by a kind of baptism by fire. Bacchanalian dances, which have originated from similar causes among all the rude nations of the earth, and the wild extravagancies of a heated imagination, were the constant accompaniments of this half-heathen, half-christian festival.”
In a note at a subsequent page Dr Hecker cites some curious passages to show what in the middle ages took place at “St John’s fires.” Bones, horns, and other rubbish were heaped together to be consumed in smoke, while persons of all ages danced round the flames as if they had been possessed. Others seized burning flambeaus, and made a circuit of the fields, in the supposition that they thereby screened them from danger; while others again turned a cartwheel, to represent the retrograde movement of the sun. The last circumstance takes back the imagination to the old primitive worship of the sun; and perhaps the very fires of St John might date their history from those kindled in honour of Baal or Moloch. Dr Hecker suggests that mingling with these heathen traditions or customs a remembrance of the history of St John’s death—that dance which occasioned his decapitation—might also have had its share in determining the peculiar manner in which this saint’s day should be observed. However that may be, as we find that the first dancers in Aix-la-Chapelle appeared with St John’s name in their mouths, the conjecture is very probable that the wild revels of St John’s day had given rise, if not to the disease, yet to the type or form in which it appeared.
At a subsequent period, indeed, when the disorder had assumed, if we may so speak, a more settled aspect, the name of St John was no otherwise associated with it than the name of St Vitus. People danced upon his festival to obtain a cure. And these periodical dances, while they relieved the patients, assisted also to perpetuate the malady. Throughout the whole of June, we are told, prior to the festival of St John, many men 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; they 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. Nor were they disappointed. By dancing and raving for three hours to the utmost scope of their desires, they obtained peace for the rest of the year. For a long time, however, we hear of cases which assumed the most terrific form. Speaking of a period which embraced the close of the fifteenth century, Dr Hecker says:—
“The St Vitus’s dance attacked people of all stations, especially those who led a sedentary life, such as shoemakers and tailors; but even the most robust peasants abandoned their labours in the fields, as if they were possessed by evil spirits; and thus those affected were seen assembling indiscriminately, from time to time, at certain appointed places, and, unless prevented by the lookers-on, continuing to dance without intermission, until their very last breath was expended. Their fury and extravagance of demeanour so completely deprived them of their senses, that many of them dashed their brains out against the walls and corners of buildings, or rushed headlong into rapid rivers, where they found a watery grave. Roaring and foaming as they were, the bystanders could only succeed in restraining them by placing benches and chairs in their way, so that, by the high leaps they were tempted to take, their strength might be exhausted.”
Music, however, was a still better resource. It excited, but it hastened forward the paroxysm, and doubtless reduced it to some measure and rhythm. The magistrates even hired musicians for the purpose of carrying the dancers the more rapidly through the attack, and directed that athletic men should be sent among them, in order to complete their exhaustion. A marvellous story is related on the authority of one Felix Plater: Several powerful men being commissioned to dance with a girl who had the dancing mania till she had recovered from her disorder, they successively relieved each other, and danced on for the space of four weeks! at the end of which time the patient fell down exhausted, was carried to an hospital, and there recovered. She had never once undressed, was entirely regardless of the pain of her lacerated feet, and had merely sat down occasionally to take some nourishment or to slumber, and even then “the hopping movement of her body continued.”
Happily, however, this mania grew more rare every year, so that in the beginning of the seventeenth century we may be said to be losing sight of it in Germany. Nor shall we follow out its history further in that country, because the same disorder, under a different form, made its appearance in Italy, and we must by no means neglect to notice the dancing mania which was so universally attributed to the bite of the tarantula. Whatever part the festival of St John the Baptist performed in Germany, as an exciter of the disease, that part was still more clearly performed in Italy by the popular belief in the venom of a spider.
We shall not go back with Dr Hecker into the fears or superstitions of classical times as to the bite of certain spiders or lizards; we must keep more strictly to our text; we must start from the period when men’s minds were still open to pain and alarm on account of the frequent return of the plague.
“The bite of venomous spiders, or rather the unreasonable fear of its consequences, excited at such a juncture, though it could not have done so at an earlier period, a violent nervous disorder, which, like St Vitus’s dance in Germany, spread by sympathy, increasing in severity as it took a wider range, and still further extending its ravages from its long continuance. Thus, from the middle of the fourteenth century, the furies of The Dance brandished their scourge over afflicted mortals; and music, for which the inhabitants of Italy now probably for the first time manifested susceptibility and talent, became capable of exciting ecstatic attacks in those affected, and thus furnished the magical means of exorcising their melancholy.”