We've seen these videos all over the internet for years.
But what if I told you the first flash mob actually happened 1000 years ago?
Alright, now that we got that out of our systems
Dancing plague, dancing mania, choreomania, St John's Dance, St Vitus' Dance, and tarantism.
These are all names for allegedly the same thing:
people breaking into dance spontaneously and uncontrollably.
The first recorded outbreaks of dancing mania happened in the 7th century CE,
but the most we could find about this was a possible relation to the dancing procession
following St Willibrord's death in 739.
The first notable instance of the dancing plague was in the 1020s.
At a Christmas Eve service in a church in Bernburg, Germany,
18 peasants got up, sang, and danced around the church.
But one of the most interesting cases of the disease occurred in 1237
when a group of children traveled 20km from Erfurt to Arnstadt in Germany,
dancing the entire 4+ hour trip, falling to the ground with exhaustion upon reaching their destination.
While children dancing and singing for hours at a time doesn't sound so out of place
hello, kids on a field trip
the earliest known record of The Pied Piper came from the stained glass window of a church in Hamelin
built around the year 1300,
and now some puzzle pieces are beginning to fall into place.
There's no evidence linking these two events,
but the since-destroyed church's window included the sentence:
"In the year 1284, on the day of John and Paul, it was the 26th of June,
came a colorful Piper to Hamelin and led 130 children away."
Later Hamelin town records from 1384 say:
"It is 100 years since our children left".
Choreomania has since been proposed as a possibility for the children's disappearance.
There were a few more minor outbreaks between the 7th and 17th century.
1381 saw an outbreak in Augsburg, Germany.
In 1418 there was an outbreak in Strasbourg.
In 1428 in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, a monk danced himself to death,
while that same year a group of women in Zurich were bitten by the dancing bug.
The two biggest incidents, however, occurred over 100 years apart from each other.
The first was in 1374 in Aachen, Germany.
On June 24th of that year, residents poured out of their homes and danced in the streets.
They were described as writhing and whirling for days or weeks, sometimes not even stopping to sleep or eat.
Their faces were painted with anguish, dancing until pain and exhaustion set in.
But when they finally collapsed to the ground, they continued to kick and tremble even then.
This particular outbreak spread up and down the river Rhine to other towns and countries,
including Liege, Utrecht, Strasbourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium.
Having come just a few decades after the Black Death in the mid-1300s,
the disease was treated in much the same way: isolation, prayer, and exorcism.
Prayers were sent to St Vitus or St John the Baptist,
as people at the time thought that the dancing was a curse from one of the two saints,
giving the alternate names to this dancing mania.
Others thought that the uncontrollable dancing was due to demonic possession, hence the exorcisms.
The second big outbreak occurred from July to September of 1518.
A woman referred to as Frau Troffea exited her house in Strasbourg, France
and on her narrow street she began a dance that would last for days.
By the end of the week, over 30 people had joined her.
And by the next month, nearly 400 people were dancing.
Again, people were isolated or sent away, prayers were offered, and exorcisms were performed.
In an attempt to curb it, authorities banned public dancing, to no avail.
At times, musicians offered their services and space was cleared in town squares.
Some sources claim that dancers eventually succumbed to exhaustion, stroke, and ultimately death,
though there are no contemporary accounts of such occurrences.
It sure sounds like something was in the water of the Rhine,
but other reports come from England and Italy as well,
completely unconnected to the river and its source.
In the 15th century in Apulia, Italy, a woman was taking a midday nap in the summer sun.
She jumped up and screamed that a tarantula bit her.
The venom induced dancing in her, and on the way to the town doctor,
she attracted several other people to dance with her.
They treated it like a party: dancing for days, wearing bright colors, and drinking wine.
But to them, tarantism had set in and they needed to dance away the symptoms of this strange disorder.
Many believed they needed the right music, leading authorities to employ musicians to aid the dancers
a practice that was continued with the 1518 outbreak.
Some doctors even prescribed consumption of sheet music.
The dancing plague of Italy spread to Basilicata and Calabria
with the three territories making up the recognizable shoe of Italy's boot
and the tarantella dance lives on today.
It's now known that spider bites, demonic possession, and saintly curses aren't to blame.
So now you're probably wondering what really happened and how does any of this relate to flash mobs.
While there's no consensus, either broadly or specifically, as to what caused any of these outbreaks,
one contending theory is that the dancers were all faking it.
That's right.
Just like flash mobs, there are some people who think that these incidents were staged
as Greek or Roman religious rituals were banned for paganism,
the guise of dance mania provided the cover these people needed to perform their rites.
Characteristics of some of the dances, especially the outbreaks in the historic Roman empire,
involved people jumping, singing, whooping, acting like animals,
making obscene gestures, and even engaging in sexual acts in public,
with many people also claiming to have visions and hallucinations.
Several of the events also took place around what would have been religious holidays in midsummer and midwinter,
such as vestalia, saturnalia, juvenalia, and kronia.
But flash mobs is not the only theory floating around.
The leading hypothesis is that choreomania was caused by St Anthony's fire, also known as ergot poisoning.
Ergot is a group of fungi, with claviceps purpurea—rye ergot fungus—being the likely culprit.
While this theory remains popular and supports accounts of hallucinations, mania, spasms, and convulsions,
there are additional symptoms of ergotism that would be present such as nausea, vomiting, gangrene, and edema,
and leaving additional reported symptoms of dancing mania unaccounted for.
It's also highly unlikely that ergotism would lead to days or weeks of dancing,
and many of these outbreaks occurred neither in regions associated with consumption of rye,
nor during wet seasons that would have fostered growth of the fungus.
A third theory is that people were simply stressed out.
But like, really stressed out.
Years of cold winters, raging summers, floods, and hailstorms leading to destroyed crops and famine;
smallpox, syphilis, the plague, leprosy, and sweating sickness ravaged the continent;
people were living in extreme poverty and had a lot of anxiety.
What we now call mass psychogenic illness is caused by intense psychological stress.
MPI involves the spread of symptoms through a group of people where no common physical cause can be found.
Onset tends to be fast and happens in the presence of high anxiety,
which you can definitely say was the case in the Middle Ages.
While we may never know what caused the dancing plagues,
the likely answer is that it's all of the above.
Spanning centuries and hitting different regions in Europe,
it seems that these cases were unrelated to each other.
We can only postulate that some were indeed covers for religious ceremonies,
some were caused by psychotropic poisoning, some were stress-induced,
and some people just saw the dancing and wanted to join in.
Whatever the true culprit,
who among us hasn't felt the need to dance in the street after a particularly grueling period in our lives?
Thanks for falling down that rabbit hole with me.
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If we don't see you there, we'll see you on the dance floor.