"Peasants left their ploughs, mechanics their workshops, housewives
their domestic duties, to join the wild revels. Secret desires were
excited, and but too often found opportunities for wild enjoyment; and
numerous beggars, stimulated by vice and misery, availed themselves of
this new complaint to gain a temporary livelihood. Girls and boys
quitted their parents, and servants their masters, to amuse themselves
at the dances of those possessed, and greedily imbibed the poison of
mental infection. Above a hundred unmarried women were seen raving about
in consecrated and unconsecrated places, and the consequences were soon
perceived."[185]
Once attacked, the hypnotic character of the complaint was shown by its
annual recurrence. Again to quote Hecker:--
"Most of those affected were only annually visited by attacks; and the
occasion of them was so manifestly referable to the prevailing notions
of that period that, if the unqualified belief in the agency of saints
could have been abolished, they would not have had any return of the
complaint. Throughout the whole of June, prior to the festival of St.
John, patients 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, and 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. This hope was
not disappointed; and they remained, for the rest of the year, exempt
from any further attack."[186]
In addition to John the Baptist, the dancing disease was also connected
with another saint--St. Vitus. He is said to have been martyred about
303, and a body, reputed to be his, was transported to France in the
ninth century. It is said that just before he was killed he prayed that
all who would commemorate the day of his death should be protected from
the dancing mania. Whereupon a voice from heaven was heard to say,
"Vitus, thy prayer is accepted." The fact that the prayer was offered a
thousand years before the dancing mania appeared is a circumstance that
to the eye of faith merely heightened its value.
Within recent times epidemics of dancing have been more local, less
persistent, and of necessity not so public in their display, but nearly
always their appearance has been in connection with displays of
religious fervour. In most cases the dancing has tended more to a
species of 'jumping,' and--although this may be due to more careful
observation--has been accompanied by actions of a clearly epileptoid
nature. One of the most famous of these outbreaks was that of the French
Convulsionnaires, which lasted from 1727 to the Revolution. In 1727, a
popular, but half-crazy priest, François de Paris, died. During his life
Paris had fasted and scourged himself, lived in a hut that was seldom or
never cleansed, showed the same lack of cleanliness in his person, and
often went about half naked. Very shortly after his death, it was said
that miracles began to take place at his grave in the cemetery of St.
Médard. People gathered round the tomb day after day, and one young girl
was seized with convulsions. (She is called a girl in the narrative, but
she was a mature virgin of forty-two years of age.) Afterwards other
miracles followed in rapid succession. Some fell in fits, others
swallowed pieces of coal or flint, some were cured of diseases. From the
description of the behaviour of some of these devotees there seems to
have been a considerable amount of sexual feeling mixed up with the
display. Sometimes, we are told, those seized "bounded from the ground
like fish out of water; this was so frequently imitated at a later
period that the women and girls, when they expected such violent
contortions, not wishing to appear indecent, put on gowns made like
sacks, closed at the feet. If they received any bruises by falling down,
they were healed with earth taken from the grave of the uncanonised
saint. They usually, however, showed great agility in this respect; and
it is scarcely necessary to remark that the female sex especially was
distinguished by all kinds of leaping, and almost inconceivable
contortions of body. Some spun round on their feet with incredible
rapidity, as is related of the dervishes. Others ran with their heads
against walls, or curved their bodies like rope dancers, so that their
heels touched their shoulders."
Women figured very prominently among the Convulsionnaires, particularly
when the epidemic passed from convulsive dancing to prophecy, and thence
to various forms of self-torture. Women stretched themselves on the
floor, while other women, and even men, jumped upon their bodies. Others
were beaten with clubs and bars of iron. Some actually underwent
crucifixion on repeated occasions. They were stretched on wooden
crosses, and nails three inches long driven through hands and feet. Some
of the occurrences remind one of what is now seen to take place under
hypnotic influence. People labouring under strong excitement, it is
known, become insensible to pain.
Outbreaks of jumping and dancing followed the introduction of Methodist
preachers into country districts in the eighteenth century. In Wales, a
sect of 'Jumpers' originated from this cause, and many of the American
'Jumpers' and 'Dancers' seem to have had their origin from this Welsh
outbreak. In all such cases the spread of the mania was helped, if not
made possible, by the preachers. They themselves looked upon these
exhibitions as manifestations of the power of God, and so encouraged
their hearers in their behaviour. Not every minister has the common
sense of the Shetland preacher cited by Hecker. An epileptic woman had a
fit in church, which a number of others hailed as a manifestation of
the power of God. Sunday after Sunday the same thing occurred with other
women, the number of the sufferers steadily increasing. The thing
threatened to assume such proportions, and to become so great a
nuisance, he announced that attendants would be at hand who would dip
women in the lake who happened to be seized. This threat proved a most
powerful form of exorcism. Not one woman was affected. Similar conduct
might have been quite as efficacious in preventing many religious
manifestations that have assumed epidemic proportions.
Unfortunately, the influence of preachers and religious teachers was
most usually cast in the other direction. Very often, of course, they
were no better informed than their congregations; at other times they
undoubtedly encouraged the delusion for interested reasons. The most
striking recent illustration of this latter behaviour was seen in the
Welsh revival led by Evan Roberts. Of this man's mental condition there
could be little doubt. Just as little doubt could there be that the
behaviour of the congregations was wholly due to the power of
suggestions upon weak and excitable natures. Yet scarcely a preacher in
Britain said a word in disapproval. Hundreds of them used the outbreak
to illustrate the power of religion. Many prominent preachers travelled
down to Wales and returned telling of the great manifestations of
'spiritual power' they had witnessed. How little removed such behaviour
is from that of the savage watching with awe the actions of one
suffering from epilepsy or insanity, readers of the foregoing pages will
be in a position to judge.
From the middle of the third century onward, Europe had been subject to
wave after wave of religious fanaticism. All along, religious belief had
been verified and strengthened by the occurrence of phenomena that now
admittedly fall within the purview of the pathologist. And from one
point of view the secularisation of life served but to emphasise the
dependence of religion upon the occurrence of these abnormal conditions.
For the more surely the phenomena of nature and of social life were
brought within the scope of a scientific generalisation, the more people
began to look for the life of religion in conditions that were removed
from the normal. But, above all, this long succession of waves of
fanaticism served to permeate the general mind with supernaturalism.
Each one cleared the way for a successor. And in the next chapter we
have to deal with one that, in some respects, is the most remarkable of
all, viz., that of the belief in witchcraft.