It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Originally posted by xynephadyn
That is absolutely fantastic! Never heard of it before. Makes you wonder if they were under possession. Very interesting that no one back then called them Witches considering the witch trials were going on- especially when they couldnt stop- when a normal person cannot dance 24 hours straight.
Or maybe they just got into some really good drugs- Ayahuasca, marijuana, coc aine, ergot?
Originally posted by Absence of Self
P.s.
Sorry, should have said. I'm interested in original sources. (thats eye witness accounts since by my logic if a witness account can be quoted sometime in the 80's it must exist somewhere else in a better form and thats the form i want)
This accounnt of Frau Troffea's dance is based largely on Paracelsus' description in his 1531 work, Opus Paramirum; only he provides a name for the first person to succumb to the dance frenzy. See Theophrastus Paracelsus, Volumen Paramirum und Opus Paramirum (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1904). A translation of this and other contemporary accounts can be found in Eugene Louis Backman, Religious Dances in the Christian Church and in Popular Medicine, translated by E. Classen (London: Allen & Unwin, 1952), pp. 314-15. See also George Rosen, Madness in Society: Chapters in the Historical Sociology of Mental Illness (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1968), which contains a detailed discussion of the dancing manias; the English language version of Justus Friedrich Carl Hecker, The Black Death and the Dancing Mania, translated by B.G. Babington (London: Cassell, 1894); and the highly incisive analysis in H.C. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). ...
The authorities did this because they believed that the dancers would only recover if they danced continually night and day.
Originally posted by xynephadyn
Or maybe they just got into some really good drugs- Ayahuasca, marijuana, coc aine, ergot?
Having occurred to thousands of people across several centuries, dancing mania was not a local event, and was, therefore, well-documented in contemporary writings. More outbreaks were reported in the Netherlands, Cologne, Metz, and later Strasbourg (Dancing Plague of 1518), apparently following pilgrimage routes.
Men, women, and children would dance through the streets of towns or cities, sometimes foaming at the mouth until they collapsed from fatigue.