Of St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania

It’s been a while since we’ve done a new post on a Saint-based or seasonal Feast Day within the Pagan-Christian cultural continuum. (Previous examples: St. John, St. George, St. Bartholomew, lots having to do with St. Nicholas, St. Patrick, and St. Andrew, and of course the Solstices and Equinoxes). We introduced this content stream because theatre and religion have so much to do with each other, sometimes in parallel, sometimes intertwined, sometimes mutually antagonistic.

St. Vitus is, among other things, a Patron Saint of dance and entertainment. I find this strange because my primary association with the name has always been with the phenomenon known as St. Vitus’ Dance, otherwise known as chorea, a spasmodic twitching of the muscles associated with certain illnesses. The function of the Saint therefore has two aspects — you pray to him NOT to give you spasms, but you also pray to him to inspire the RIGHT kind of dancing. This is a key to understanding the ancient Gods and the Saints. Their identification with certain “departments” contains both positive and negative dimensions. Sometimes you pray for rain, sometimes you pray for the rain to stop. The rain god does both jobs.

Traditionally on St. Vitus Day (June 15 old style, June 28 by today’s calendar), people who had epilepsy and similar diseases would be brought before shrines to the saint, where prayers and offerings of chickens and eggs would be made. And that’s how the Chicken Dance was born! (No, no, I’m kidding. Chickens and eggs were pretty standard sacrificial offerings, especially at this time of year).

But we haven’t gotten to the cool part yet: a bygone affliction that was peculiar to Europe during the Middle Ages. This illness was also known as St. Vitus’s Dance, but also choreomania, dancing mania, or dancing plague. (It was also known as St. John’s Dance, for St. John’s Day comes very near St. Vitus’s on the calendar). This one was not about a fit or a spasm as we conventionally think of then, but something that in a way is even more disturbing: mass outbreaks of people who couldn’t stop dancing. I mean everything in that sentence literally: 1) people, 2) conventionally dancing as we all do to music, and 3) they could not stop. This phenomenon is very well recorded as having happened throughout the Medieval era countless times. It might be just a handful of people overcome with the mania, but the largest on record was in the tens of thousands.

Modern theories abound as to what may have caused it, from speculations about some sort of poisoning or drugging (which is frankly silly), to the idea that they were faking it to avoid work or stress (plausible), to just general mass hysteria. These were not educated people. This is before the printing press. Were they “possessed” or made to think they were? Were they hypnotized? At any rate, it could go on for days or longer, and it could honestly be a serious problem. People would drop to the ground in exhaustion. They couldn’t eat or drink or sleep or otherwise take care of the needs of the body. They couldn’t do the work that helped them keep body and soul together. At any rate, dance mania too was regarded as a malady and one of things that St. Vitus was prayed to in order to obtain a cure.

Things this phenomenon reminds me of: marathon dancing and also flash mobs, though both of those fads were quite voluntary. And the concept of “Dance Fever” referred to in so many disco songs. It also reminds me of the story of the Pied Piper of Hamlin, which was supposed to be based on a real event, by the way. And it also reminds me of how zombies are depicted in certain films.

At any rate, for some reason the Catholic Church put the Feast of St. Vitus in mothballs in 1969. I wonder if it had anything to do with Tina Turner?