June 24

Curse of the Plague Dance

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On this day in 1374, in the German city of Aachen, people began dancing in the streets and could not stop. They had not chosen to dance. They did not want to be dancing. Witnesses described them grimacing in pain, foaming at the mouth, shaking and twitching as they moved, utterly unable to control their own limbs. The affliction spread along the Rhine within days—to Liège, to Utrecht, to Tongres, to towns whose names have otherwise vanished from the historical record. Some danced for hours; some danced for days. Some, according to the chronicles, danced until their hearts simply gave out beneath them.

Because the outbreak began on the feast day of St. John the Baptist, it was named St. John’s Dance. It would not be the last such episode (nor even the first—a smaller incident is recorded as early as 1021 in Kölbigk, Saxony, when eighteen peasants reportedly danced wildly around a church through an entire night). But Aachen in 1374 was the first major eruption of what medieval Europe would come to call “dancing mania”: a phenomenon that would recur, in various forms and various cities, for roughly three centuries, reaching its most famous and best-documented expression in Strasbourg in 1518.

Frau Troffea and the Streets of Strasbourg

The Strasbourg outbreak it is the case for which we have the richest contemporary documentation:

On July 14, 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea stepped out of her house and began to dance in the street. There was no music. There was no celebration. She simply began moving—spinning, twisting, hopping—and could not stop. Her husband tried to intervene and failed. Neighbors gathered, first curious, then alarmed, as she continued through the day until she collapsed from sheer exhaustion, rested briefly on the cobblestones, and then rose and began again. A contemporary chronicle from the Imlin family records what happened next with a kind of stunned, plain-spoken precision: "A woman began to dance and continued for six days. Then the city council had her conducted to St. Vitus near Zabern, and there she was cured. But many others began to dance, and thirty-four men and women were involved within four days."

Within a month, more than four hundred people were afflicted. The city council, faced with a crisis they could not comprehend, sought medical advice. The verdict: "overheated blood." Working from this diagnosis, the council made a decision that reads now as almost unbearably ironic in hindsight—they decided the cure for compulsive, involuntary dancing was more dancing. They cleared a market square. They commissioned a stage. They hired musicians and hired strong men specifically to help support the afflicted so they could continue moving. The theory was that the dancers needed to "dance it out," to exhaust the malady from their systems through its own mechanism.

The results were catastrophic. Far from curing anyone, the encouragement appears to have intensified and prolonged the affliction, and people began to die—from heart attacks, from strokes, from sheer physical exhaustion, with some chronicles claiming as many as fifteen deaths a day during the worst stretches. The council eventually reversed course entirely, banned public music and dancing outright, and pursued the only remaining option available within their theological framework: they loaded the afflicted onto wagons and carted them thirty miles into the mountains, to a shrine dedicated to St. Vitus near Saverne, to be healed by the saint who had, in the prevailing belief, cursed them in the first place.

St. Vitus was the patron saint of dancers and of epileptics, and medieval and early modern Christian theology held a position that can feel genuinely strange to modern sensibilities: saints were not merely benevolent intercessors. They could be offended. They could withdraw favor. They could, under the right theological conditions, curse the very people who failed to honor them properly. A painting that survives in Cologne Cathedral, more than two hundred miles downstream from Strasbourg, depicts exactly this belief made visible—three men dancing joylessly beneath an image of St. Vitus, their faces, in the words of one historian, wearing "the divorced-from-reality expressions of the delirious."

This was not fringe folk superstition operating at the margins of official belief; rather, it was, for a significant portion of the population, simply how the world worked. Possession, divine punishment, and the affliction-and-cure power of saints were understood as live, operative forces, and the cultural script for what to do when struck by inexplicable compulsive behavior was already written: identify the offended power, seek its specific shrine, perform the appropriate propitiation. The dancers themselves often could not explain what was happening to them or why—witnesses recorded that those afflicted, when asked, frequently made no eye contact and gave no answer at all. The explanation came from the community around them, not from the sufferers themselves.

Modern historians remain divided, though one explanation has gained the widest acceptance. American medical historian John Waller, who has studied the Strasbourg case more extensively than perhaps anyone else working today, argues for a diagnosis of mass psychogenic illness—a genuine, physically real affliction with a psychological rather than infectious or toxicological origin, triggered and shaped by extreme communal stress operating within a specific cultural belief system. Strasbourg in 1518 was a city suffering through repeated crop failures, famine, and disease, including smallpox and syphilis moving through the population. A population that physically weakened, psychologically strained, and saturated in genuine belief in saintly curses and demonic possession had, in Waller’s analysis, exactly the conditions necessary to produce a contagious dissociative trance state that expressed itself through the specific cultural vocabulary available to it. In a culture that believed dance could be a curse, the body found dance. In a different culture, under different beliefs, the same extremity of stress might have produced fainting, or visions, or glossolalia, or any of the other forms mass psychogenic phenomena have taken across history and across the world.

Other theories have been proposed and largely set aside. Ergot poisoning—a fungal contamination of rye that produces LSD-like hallucinations—was a popular twentieth-century explanation, but ergotism typically constricts blood flow and tends to produce convulsive contraction rather than the sustained, complex, days-long choreographed movement the chronicles describe; nor did every affected region grow the rye that would have carried the contamination. The suggestion that traveling religious pilgrims spread the behavior runs into the same basic problem the chroniclers themselves noted: pilgrims danced by choice, in celebration. The Strasbourg dancers, by every contemporary account, were in visible agony and wanted desperately to stop.

Tarantism and the Wider European Pattern

Dance mania was not confined to the Rhineland. In southern Italy, a related phenomenon called tarantism took hold across the same general centuries: sufferers believed themselves bitten by a venomous local spider, the tarantula, and danced compulsively as the prescribed cure for the bite—convulsing, sweating, and moving with a desperate, frenzied energy until the affliction supposedly worked itself out through exhaustion. The folk remedy that developed alongside it, a specific frantic regional dance style, eventually gave its name to an entire musical and dance tradition that survives today as the tarantella, its origins in genuine medical terror long since softened into festive performance.

What unites Aachen, Strasbourg, and the tarantula-bitten dancers of Puglia is the same basic structure: a population under genuine physical and psychological strain, operating within a coherent supernatural framework that explained affliction as the work of an offended power, and a body that expressed its distress through whatever channel that framework made culturally legible. The cure, in every case, mirrored the diagnosis. If a saint cursed you, only that saint’s shrine could release you. If a spider’s venom moved in you, only matching its frenzy with your own could draw it out.

Dance mania, as a recurring large-scale European phenomenon, faded by roughly the middle of the seventeenth century—not because the underlying human capacity for collective psychogenic affliction disappeared, but because the specific cultural and theological framework that gave it its particular shape began to dissolve. As Protestantism spread and rationalist medical and philosophical frameworks gained ground across Europe, the cult of the saints lost its previous explanatory authority over inexplicable bodily affliction. The vocabulary changed. The body, it seems, still requires a vocabulary; it simply found different words.

The pattern has not vanished from the world; it has only changed costume. In 1962, at a mission boarding school in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), an outbreak of uncontrollable laughter began among a small group of girls and spread, eventually affecting close to a thousand people across the surrounding community over eighteen months. No saint was blamed. No curse was named. But the underlying mechanism—genuine physical affliction, born of communal stress, expressed through a culturally available channel, spreading through proximity and belief rather than infection—was recognizably the same animal wearing a different mask. The body finds the vocabulary the culture gives it: Strasbourg danced, while Tanganyika laughed. Both, in their own time and idiom, were genuinely and helplessly afflicted.

OCCULT READS PRESENTS: DAILY OCCULT REVIEW

Modern Occultist is proud to present today's "Daily Occult Review" from our new ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads...

Crafting the Arte of Tradition

By Shani Oates, Maid of the Clan of Tubal-Cain | Illustrations by Lupe Vasconcelos | Anathema Publishing

To practice genuine magic, Shani Oates writes, is to literally throw your life away upon impulse—to align one's will so completely with the current of Wyrd that the distinction between self and fate becomes permeable. Crafting the Arte of Tradition is her sustained attempt to map that alignment: to show how folk magic, community custom, ancestral wisdom, and the lived practice of the Clan of Tubal-Cain constitute not a museum piece but a living, breathing, demand-making tradition.

The book is expansive—392 pages in the paperback edition, a genuinely substantial work of traditional Craft theology—covering the engagement of the Other in Wind-walkers, Wights, Covenants and Kings, Ancestors and Fools, Old Gods, Law and Lore, custom and culture, Fate and Magick, Divination and prophecy, tools of Craft and of Trade, and Mysteries and Mysticism. It is both gnostic and Promethean in orientation, insisting that the practitioner hone the faculties of memory and mindfulness—foresight and hindsight, the web of Wyrd seen whole—rather than simply accumulating techniques.

Oates writes in a register that rewards patience: dense, allusive, steeped in the specific lore of the Cochrane current and the broader streams of British traditional witchcraft and folk magic. This is not an introductory text, and it makes no concessions to readers unwilling to meet it on its own terms. For those who are willing, it constitutes one of the most complete statements of traditional Craft theology available in print—a theology that insists on the relationship between the practitioner and the living landscape of ancestors, spirits, and gods rather than the acquisition of power or technique.

Lupe Vasconcelos's illustrations throughout convey a visual sensibility in harmony with the text's devotional weight. The hardcover binding—quarter-leather in British Tan Flanders and Iris Tobacco cloth, gold foil on the spine, blind-debossed CtAoT seal, Ebony Marble endpapers—gives the book the physical authority of a genuinely ceremonial object. Each copy was hand-numbered, and the first edition copies were ritually consecrated by the author—a detail that feels less like marketing than like accurate description of what this book is and does.

Essential reading for the serious student of British traditional witchcraft and the Cochrane current.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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