Alaina
speaker
635 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard May 2025
Alaina’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So this was kind of the beginning of like dancing plagues being documented. Yeah. Now, 200 years later, in a German town of Erfurt, looked it up, a similarly crazy and bizarre outbreak of dancing mania broke out in 1247. So this time, at least 200 people are said to have gathered on a bridge. Oh, wow. And it was over the Moselle River in Maastricht, where they danced until the bridge collapsed.
Stop it. And all of them died. It said, rocket till the wheels fall off.
And then they died. That was it. Bridge collapsed. Everyone died. That was it. And then there's, so that happened.
It doesn't say how long, but I feel like it probably wasn't that long, because 200 people on a bridge. That's a lot of people. I don't think the structural integrity of bridges in 1247 was, like, something of note. Not quite the same as today. So I'm assuming they all just went down. But there is a second version of this story, so there is, like, a little wiggle room. Okay.
So this one, in this version of the story, the same thing happened, except everyone didn't die. People died, but there were survivors. And people say that some of those survivors were taken to a nearby chapel. Where they kept insects.
And this nearby chapel was dedicated to St. Vitus, which, or Vitus, excuse me, where these people received treatment for their quote unquote mania. And many of them were restored to full health. So they said they went to the specific chapel and that's what cured them. And they never danced again. Never danced again.
Flash mob gone horribly wrong. And then a chapel was able to heal any of the survivors. And St. Vitus comes up a few times. Yeah.
Apparently, he has something to do with dance. He has something to do with this, and he gets brought up a lot. Because the dancing madness actually gets translated into being called St. Vitus dance.
Is he a patron saint of anything? Hold on. Let's look. Wait a second. I'm excited for this. Because he comes up a lot. Is he a patron saint of standing still?
Of chilling.
Exactly. Didn't help them. Now, it's from this like second telling of that story that the affliction got the name Koros Mania, which is Greek and it translates to dancing madness. And now it's more well known as Saint Vitus Dance. So he gets to be named in the affliction. That's fun. Yeah.
Now over time, the terminology would change a little bit, but the behavior would end up being called chorea, which is an actual disorder. And it's incorrectly that, like referred to as that, because this disorder, chorea, is a disorder of the central nervous system that causes like irregular, like brief jerking moment, like movements, but it's not dancing. Like it's just- They meant choreo.
Yeah, it's just, they meant choreo and then chorea is not that.
So if you ever hear somebody say it, you correct them if you ever hear them saying it. I'm sure it comes up a lot.
So these two early examples were contained to Germany. But a similar form of hysteria that kind of had similar symptoms to it was known as Tarentism, and it emerged in the 13th century in Italy. And according to Robert Bartholomew, which I am obsessed with the name Bartholomew. Same, I love it a lot. Why isn't it used anymore? I don't know.
He said, people asleep or awake would suddenly jump up, feeling an acute pain like the sting of a bee. Some saw the spider, others did not, but they knew that it must be from the tarantula. Like capital T, the spider? The spider. Okay, not a spider. Nope. The spider. The only spider. The only spider. They ran out of the house into the street to the marketplace dancing in great excitement.
Soon they were joined who like them had been bitten or by people who had been stung in previous years for the disease was never quite cured. The poison remained in the body and reactivated every year in the heat of the summer.
This is amazing.
I feel like it probably does.
Let's make it happen. Let's make it. Flash mobs are actually this. Yeah, pretty much.
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