Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 94 - Death By Dancing

Episode Date: March 30, 2021

Patreon - http://www.patreon.com/chilluminatipod BUY OUR MERCH - http://www.theyetee.com/collections/chilluminati Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - http://www.youtube.com/user/ThatOneLazerClown Art Commissioned by - http://www.mollyheadycarroll.com Theme - Matt Proft End song - POWER FAILURE - https://soundcloud.com/powerfailure Video - http://www.twitter.com/digitalmuppet

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Design like a pro with Canva right now. You can get a free 45-day extended trial when you use our promo code. Just go to canva.me slash chill and get your free 45-day extended trial. It's over a month. That's c-a-n-v-a dot m-e slash chill. Canva.me slash chill. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Chaluminati Podcast Episode 94. As always, I am one of your hosts, Mike Mardrum. My two other co-hosts, Jesse Cox and Alex Fosyane.

I'm the boys from the West. The boys from the West? The boys must think anybody's ever said to describe us as a pair. That's just what I do. I try to pick the most vague, obvious thing about you and I apply it as your descriptor. Beautiful. Yeah, you know, but we can, I can... Man, what's a good segue?

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All kinds of dope shit. Go do it. Patreon.com slash chaluminati pod. And now... What about our world famous... Look, I gotta help. What about our world famous other show we do? Our world famous other show?

The Minisoad? Yeah. It's so famous that I didn't even talk about it. But yeah, that's right. In 15 minutes, chunks, we are bringing back sexy 15 minutes at a time. Every time you're done listening to the Chaluminati podcast, 15 more minutes of it exists where we talk about current events, those things that you always tweeted about, that's where we talk about it.

So go find it. Go listen to it. Check it out. And now I'm going to effortlessly segue back to the rest of the episode. There you go. I gotta chill a tiny bit more because the time of this episode going up, we have a huge sale happening over at the Yeti.com slash collection slash Chaluminati, 30% off the stuff that's going to be coming out of the store.

We're basically wiping out what's left and we're going to have new stuff going up, a new poster, a new t-shirt. The Chupacabra shirt is now going to be a poster and the Jeff the Mongoose t-shirt will be going up alongside of it. We have pins in the works as well, some new ones. So if you want some of the old merch before it disappears, you get it now. Do we have like question? I love it.

Do we have a logo pin? Have we just ever made that? No, we've never made a logo. How do we not have a logo pin? How do we not have a logo pin? Have we not have a logo pin? Has you guys made Slorper or whatever the hell? We didn't make a logo?

We only made pins of important shit. That logo pin glow in the dark then is that I'd own one of those. We did the logo stickers and that was like where we kind of stopped. Yeah, I'd at least put it on my dresser. I'd at least kind of sit in it. Exactly. You're mad of not very many promises. Where am I going?

I'd at least like, I don't know. Where am I going that I need to throw a different pin on every day? I mean, I mean, fair, maybe just want a suit and you wore it on your lapel. It's different when it's your own show. You know, like when you're with when you're when you're out somewhere and you're wearing a six to the money pin and just love the show, you're happy to talk about it. You have no, but when you're like, hey, and then they're like, well, you're saying it's weird to identify with something like they're like, oh, what's that pin?

And you're like, oh, it's this great show that you can support on Patreon and they're like, what are you talking about? And I'm like, it's it's my show. And they're like, oh, I want to say that. That's the difference. I would say it's a show called. You can't see. I listen to it all the time.

Yeah, you guys should check it out. Imagine, imagine that's the beginning of a friendship and then three months in, you have to be like, by the way, it was my show. No, that perfectly encapsulates who I am as a person. They would immediately be like, ah, ah, all right, I know who he is. I guess you. I know we got I got to kind of hand this off because we got another exciting special episode, but I didn't want to say one thing.

Bitter honeys are still S tier. Has Boston baked beans are like C tier or lower. I just can't. It's just taken a while to get through the box. I was wrong on the Boston baked bean candies. They're really not great. You think the bit of honey that went through and they hold the whole. The whole is the whole box.

Are you right up there? Peanut M&M right up there. Still the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. We're talking up there with the with the great. I when I went. Yeah, I crushed that whole box in like under like three hours. Well, then I say watermelon sour patch kids are S plus because those are the best candies ever made period.

You want to burn your fucking mouth off? No way. Watermelon sour patch. Those are the best candies. It's like when you used to eat warheads when you were a kid. I should do a chlubinati on warheads when you're a kid and if they can really burn a hole through your cheek and eat all the ones I'm trying to.

The answer is no. Jesse. Yeah, today's today's special because we're hitting the reins to you. Congratulations, by the way. The Lost Colony of Roanoke is being recommended by college professor now for their history class to listen to. So basically college professors ourselves now. Am right.

Yeah, my ego has been fluffed enough that I was like, I got to do another one of these. Got it. That college professor is going to listen and be like, I've made a mistake. Oh, so today is another history's mysteries. Yes, one of the things when trying to come up with these and trying to delve through history that I've noticed is there's a lot of things that say, for example, you or Alex will talk about that technically

are a history mystery, right? Except the explanations are a little more out there or was a fair, as I say, or maybe they didn't happen at all. No one really knows, right? It's like that vibe like who knows who can say. Well, I've decided to make a solid thing for history mysteries that I do that it definitely happened. I like the historical record says it definitely happened.

And today's story is one that is so bizarre, so strange. And it's one of those things where I think most people when they hear about it, they initially will be like, there's no way never happened. This is unbelievable, but it did. And we're going to talk about it today. So today's trip is going back in time to tell a story that is unsettling. It's creepy. It's totally unbelievable.

It is something that we definitely need to talk about on this podcast. It's something that is totally unexplained, but did happen. Now, when we think of the Middle Ages, there's a lot of things that come to mind. Alex, first thing comes to mind, Middle Ages. Getting really sick because we don't know what the fuck we're doing. Great. All right. Now there's Middle Ages.

I'm just going to go with like, you know, sword and shield knights, you know, kings, that shit. Everyone thinks that, right? Kings and knights and epic quests and bloody wars and weird, you know, like poop diseases and everybody just ate this one meat and then like a town died. Yeah. Yeah. Great castles and sweeping country sides. And that's kind of Alex, you know, you like hit the nail on the head when it comes to exactly what I want to talk about today,

because everyone thinks about sort of the upper class of the Middle Ages, but rarely do you think about the peasants who during this time had it bad. Your life was a mess. Today, we're focusing on France, especially during the 13, 14 and 15th century. Well, 16th century. So from the 1300s to the 1500s. And during this time period, France was in a war with England for, you know, we call it a hundred years war,

but it was longer than that. It was primarily fought in France, which led to economic distress and compounded with bad weather and overpopulation and commercial dislocation and famines and all sorts of it was a bad time to be a peasant for that period from the 1300s into almost the 1600s. Things were not OK. And so by the time the 1500s rolled around during this, you know,

the story we're taking place in, the people of France were definitely over it and they needed to let loose. And that is where our story begins. So come back with me, if you will, to the Middle Ages, to Strasbourg, France. What do you do in Strasbourg, France, when you want to let loose? Alex, you go up, you go look in the sky. And if you see a silver craft, you just get ready for the gist of all. In the scorching summer heat of July 15, 18,

a woman named Frau Trophia or Trophia. Not sure how to actually pronounce that exited her home, stepped out onto the street and began to dance. Oh, my God. She continued dancing. And dancing. And dancing until she collapsed from exhaustion. When she later awoke, she immediately began dancing again

this time without rest onlookers began to clap and cheer. And they were just amused by what is a pretty strange display for this time period. She's just dancing in the street. But it soon took a grim turn because one day passed, then another day passed and another day passed and she kept dancing. No, no breaks.

She would sometimes you'd pass out and then immediately get back up. So she literally just danced her ass off every waking moment of her life for like several days. Oh, wait. But wait, there's more. Things took an even stranger turn when over the course of that first week, 30 additional people from the town joined her. They danced and they flailed about seemingly without a care. But onlookers described their faces as pained.

And it makes sense. Oh, yeah, it makes sense because as they danced, they did not stop. They danced to the point of injury, seldom stopping to eat or drink or use the bathroom or take care of their bruised feet or the mounting fatigue they had, they just kept dancing. Did they at least like have fun with it? Like, like, you know what I mean? Like, like, was it like dancing?

Like, as if like to me, I mean, I'm just a stereo. I mean, let me I will try to describe this to you. It did not stop there. Over the course of the first month. Four hundred additional people joined the dancing. Completely neglecting their family, their friends, what their responsibilities, just so weird dancing. I'm honestly surprised that was that many people alive in one place.

Well, this is this. I mean, there's there's another stat that when I was doing this research, there's another stat about the babonic plague and stuff like that. And they were talking about how, you know, some towns, the population dropped from 40 to 20,000, right? So there was, yeah. It was there were still a lot of people, even though it was bad time. But, you know, these four hundred people to start dancing,

completely neglecting everything in their life. They just danced and they went on dancing until to the horror of onlookers. People just started collapsing, just dying right on the spot. And then the dancers around them would just dance over their bodies. So that's creepy. That's that's that's like some midsummer-esque kind of horror, right? I know the dancing doesn't stop. I got to know what the vibe is.

Like, are we loving this? Are we are we just let me let me continue? Or is there like middle middle age cocaine epidemic that just like ripped through some people? Like God damn city elders were like, what is going on? They were not amused by any of it. One of them, a man named Sebastian Brant, who actually wrote a book called Ship of Fools.

Oh, he was the crab from the Kingdom of Atlantis. Yeah, right, except he was not into love. If anything, in his book, he wrote a chapter on the folly of dancing. So this dude was pissed when he saw the people in this town just openly in the street, just shaken and flailing and doing their thing. And so they said, you know, we got to get together and talk about this. He gathered the council and he said, look, we need to get them out of the streets.

We need to do something. The dancers aren't spread throughout the city. This isn't like a citywide thing. They all seem drawn to certain places. And we don't know why, but we do know is they're causing huge traffic jams of people. We cannot handle this. This is just like that Santa thing where all those Santas get like fucked up and like run through the streets in New York.

Santa con. Yeah. Yeah. It's like it's like a like a wild whatever those things are where people like a flash mob, right? Oh, yeah, it feels like that flash mob. They probably just didn't know when to stop because they didn't have Twitter. So they were just like, are we good? It's going. And so Brant and the others were like, we got to put a stop to this.

And so they tried to do so. But those who frolicked would not be removed. They simply kept dancing, even though it seemed as if the people themselves wish they could stop at first. And this is going to what Alex was talking about or asking. They would cry and they would wail for help, but eventually entered sort of like a trance like state and danced with a passion that prevented people from holding them down.

Their bodies were just like fling. Oh, no. Maybe somebody left the like British computer on and then there's somebody who's playing like some sick, like some like Prince music or something through the rhythm is going to get you, dude. Yeah, like through the computer into the olden days. And they're just like, what is that? I can't help it. It's just too good.

First, they cry because they're like moved by it because they're like, they hit that part where he's like, dearly beloved, we are going to talk about this thing called life. And they're like moved by that. And then when it starts, that's when they give in. So Brant and the other city counselors consulted local doctors who, keeping with the medical wisdom of the time, concluded. It must be overheating of the blood on the brain

and their passions are just flared up. That's why they're dancing this way. That, of course, that does that does cause your passions to flare, the overheating of your blood. And the only way to solve it is to chop off your own penis or some fucking stupid ass cure. So they figured if we could just. If holding them down, isn't going to do the trick.

There's only one thing left that we can do. Kill them more dance. Oh, more dancing. Yes, perfect. It's kind of like the idea of if your dad catches you smoking, he brings the whole box of cigarettes. He's like, you have to smoke all it's that it's that vibe. And so when Bobby Hill did that and then he just got addicted to cigarettes.

Yes. I was thinking the exact same thing. All in the bathroom on that last one. So what the town did? This is this is amazing. What the town did? They cleared an open area for the dancers to be moved to. Commandering guild halls, erecting an actual honest to God giant stage,

bringing in performers, pipers, drummers, you name it. And they've literally created a concert venue and heard them all into it. And that was the origin of French electron music. The theory here is the theory was. If they could get all these people to sort of turn their dancing up from like prom to rave, they would shake off the sickness. They would wipe it out. Yeah. So they hired this.

They even like the sickest DJ in France. Yes. They hired they hired all of these obviously not DJs, but like whatever at the time was the music people were like knights, but they had like digital displays on their faces. Absolutely. And they hired these people to come in and dance and they just play the music so that people would dance and real. What a fucking solution.

I want to I want to be governed by these people. And so they just kept them dancing and dancing and dancing. They even went as far as to hire the strongest people in town to hold up the dancers who are too weak so they could keep going. Oh, my God. Now, what the fuck do we know? If they could we know if they could they could communicate with these people or were they just like I said at first at first. They you know, it seemed like they didn't want to be dancing, right?

Like yeah, when they first started, when most people first started, they they had the look of like, please help me. And then eventually sort of entered a trance and we're just gone. Got you. Like dancing machines. So weird. At least they're helping them by holding them up. Hiring the strongmen. They hired them all to come in and hold them up. This must have been an economic boom time to have that type of fucking money.

I think it was because for two months, this continued during the summer every day. At its height, Bacchanalian, at its height, there is no actual information about how many people were actually dancing. But at its height, at least 15 residents were dying a day from strokes, artifacts and exhaustion. Just from the dance party. Just from this dance party because they like didn't do anything else but dance.

Dude, literally even partying was killing people back then. That's nuts. Are they fighting like what's going on? Yeah, well, we'll get to a poem in the city archives. Explain what happened next. And I, you know, it's short, but I'll just include this and we'll give it to Mathis to read for the free play for me. A fucking poem right there.

It's not a poem. It's just a line. Oh, in their madness, people kept up their dancing until they fell unconscious and many died. Oh, that was the music of the line. Just dances off of the verse. Yeah, just that's less of a poetic feeling and more of just kind of a blunt statement. Everyone went crazy and fucking danced and they died. Whoa.

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Well, the city council realized I think we may have goofed and decided instead that at the end of the summer, boiled brains probably wasn't the problem. And the dancers were suffering from what is. We would all we would all associate in the Middle Ages, the most obvious of answers, Holy Rath. Oh, like, can we just like take a minute and just recognize it took them two months to come to the conclusion

that it was not boiling blood or a lot slower. Did you have a lot going on day to day? I feel like to come to that conclusion. Damn, I mean, like if there was no dancing going on, they'd probably just be like tend into their like filthy stew. You know what I mean? It's probably not a lot else going on besides like, I don't know, going out and what do you even do?

Like, are you a farmer as a peasant in a town? I don't know, maybe a baker or a candlestick. You're just like judging Bell from Beauty and the Beast all day. Just looking at young independent women and judging them silently from your windows. Absolutely. That's that's one of the things you can do. Isn't that right? Guys, she should get married. We we we.

So they said, Holy wrath, right? It had to have been God and this seemed to make sense to them because you see, this wasn't the first time this type of dancing plague had struck Europe. Ava in the 80s. No. Legend tells that in 1021. So we're already going back 500 years before this in 1021.

Eighteen people in the German town of Colby Colby Colby nailed it. Began dancing with wild abandon outside of a church. And the priests of that church was trying to perform mass on Christmas Eve. Oh, my God. He was like, Oh, hell no. You went outside, told them to stop, begged them to stop. They would not. So the priests cursed the dancers with a full year of dancing as punishment for their outrageous levity.

He said to them, you must dance a full year. No, and according to the legend, it worked. And they were like, you got it, dude. Ah, not until the following Christmas, the dancers are gained control of their limbs, exhausted and repentant. They fell into a deep sleep, some never waking up again. They dance for a whole year. That's the legend.

That's what the priest said. OK, that's it. Later, God's command from 1247 to 1374. There were other cases of similar dancing. In one case, 200 people danced wildly on a bridge, collapsing it, killing every one of them. Oh, my God. Mothman was probably chilling off to the side, just like, what the fuck are they

doing? Yeah, they're doing in Germany and France and other nearby lowland regions. Thousands of people died to this during this time period. Thousands of people died to dancing. Yeah. In large groups, they danced in agony for days or weeks. Many of them mentioning terrible visions imploring priests to save them. So, of course, the council was like, this is some religious stuff.

Oh, my God, because they're actually nearby in this town was a saint, a shrine to Saint Vitus or Vitus. I'm not sure how you say that, but he is the he is a saint who now is associated with dance for obvious reasons. You'll see her in a minute. But one of his festivals that honored him was like, you would go and like have a feast and dance in front of the Saint statue. Like, that's the thing you would do.

And so they obviously got to the point where, hmm, there's something holy about this. We got to like look for penance. And so in 1518 and in the end of the summer, the council opted to take the Holy Road and forced a period of penance on those who were dancing. They banned music, dancing in public. The dancers were taken to the shrine of Saint Vitus. And like I said, he was, you know, they celebrate the feast of dancing and stuff like that.

And they were taken out of town to the sort of musty grotto and the nearby hills where this shrine was. And now their feet were put into red shoes, which I believe is associated with the saint. I don't know why, but they were put into red shoes and they were led around figures of the saint. Is that what the Elvis Costello songs about? Shoes. And in the following weeks, most of them ceased their wild movements

and the epidemic eventually came to an end. They're like, I'm cooking my stew. And soon this dancing plague, even though it had occurred, you know, off and on in different places throughout Central Europe for, I don't know, the last 200, 300 years, eventually ceased by the 1600s. It was gone completely, never to be seen again. At what in the fucking world? I just want to, like, know what it was like to sit there and be like,

you good, dude? And the guy's like, I just got this rhythm, dude. I can't stop. It's a devil's rhythm. Maybe they just were fucking tired of their fucking lives. You know what I mean? Like, maybe this is all you could do as a fucking peasant is just to, like, go stand in the fucking street and dance your ass off. So you didn't, like, get killed by some fucking fungus.

Well, let's talk about this. Let's discuss what happened. Uh, we as a, you know, a modern people have no clue what caused this. There are guesses, there are ideas, but we don't know why it went on for so long. We don't know why it just suddenly stopped. There are so many unanswered questions to this, but it's in the historical record. It happened. There are, there are countless examples of people just dancing wildly and then dying, like dropping dead and no one quite understands.

Obviously, at the time, the, the answer that I think satisfied everyone in the 15s, 1500s and 1600s and so on since then. At the time, the idea was, well, it's probably related to something holy, this holy wrath. It's a curse. It's some sort of religious thing. You know, they, they mentioned they were seeing demons. They, you know, it makes perfect sense to people living then and even during the, you know, because that's also part of the renaissance, right?

That time period. So, you know, as they're becoming enlightened, even then they were like, well, that's the best explanation, right? They're like, it still seems the most logical God. Yeah. It's a God thing. The biggest theory at the time was that people in the town failed to honor Saint Vitus and were cursed to dance and it made sense to them because, you know, there was a shrine, they went to the shrine, it stopped, right?

It just made sense. However, since then, yeah, sorry. There have been scientific theories. What are you going to say? All I can think of is like, you know, in anamorphs, when the little like brain slugs go in your ear, the yurks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The yurks, right? And then they like control your mind.

Yeah. All I can think of is that like something like the yurks came and then they got in the human heads and they were like, this shit is like, you know, like when you're in inside Pacific Rim, but there's only one guy so you can't like drift compatibly with the with the brain and they're just in there just like trying to be humans and just messing up their brains, doing like a little dance. I mean, it's there are questions about was it really even a dance? Like, would we today consider it a dance?

Yeah. What the hell does their music even sound like? Right? It's just like because at the time when you think about dance, it's like, they do that, you know, like I'm trying to do the thing like you see in movies where they do like really crappy dance or like hold their hands up and don't touch each other, that kind of thing. And I don't imagine it was like that because they talk about flailing and like moving the. I don't imagine peasants have that kind of. I'm picturing. You say peasants.

I'm picturing that scene from Titanic. Where they're inside. Spin around in a circle, holding hands with people in rags. I don't know. I mean, worse than that, worse than that. So there's there's a lot of attempts at scientific explanation. The one thing everyone does agree on, both old and new theories, is that these people were victims, right? They writhed, they screamed, they begged for help until they answered

entered a trance like state. And it's very obvious they didn't want to be dancing. So besides a curse, what could have caused it? I'm sorry. This is a reminder to cut you off. But this is just like it reminds me of a Junji Ito like horror. Imagine waking up one morning and just your body is dancing. You're like, help, help. And like the people outside are like calling you in a weird way.

It's like that, like that hole, like the hole that fits you almost. That other Junji Ito horse, that's what it feels like to me. It's like, oh, God, it's bizarre and creepy. And it's also one of those things that as you talk about it, it does sound unbelievable, right? Like it doesn't sound like this is just a thing that happens because we have no context. No, none of us just get up and begin to dance

and I'm picturing like Mick Jagger and David Bowie dancing in the street. You know what I mean? That's what I'm picturing much. But I mean, OK, like, do you remember Spice or whatever that stuff is called? K2. Remember that that biz is like kind of trendy for a little while. Oh, yes. OK, yes, yes, yes, yes, like fake weed. Yeah. Oh, yes. So like one of the things that would happen when you smoked fake weed that people like there was this whole thing about like blood

coming out of your face and out of your nose and stuff. But then also there was this thing, I think it's fake weed where people would just be like they'd like see someone just like some cops would roll up and they'd see a dude just like stand in there like just kind of like like frozen on the street like he just all of a sudden he just shut down. You know, oh, God. And I can, you know, like if if I feel like peasants in the Middle Ages were probably pretty bored, you know, maybe they found some sort of

like fucking dirty ass, little goofy, little designer drug, you know, it's a little mushroom somewhere in a corner fucking making all sorts of nasty chemicals. One dude had one good trip and then he was just like, yo, you got to find this shit. That fake weed has rat poison in it. I don't know what the deal is with this shit. But well, let's let's let's talk about that. We'll make that theory number one. So one of the more famous theories that was a theory for a while.

Like this was the number one theory for a while was that the town folk had ingested ergot, which is a species of mold that grows on damp rye and produces a chemical brain reaction that induces terrifying hallucinations and violent twitching. It is actually the substance used to originally make LSD 25. Yeah. All right. And if you're got up and dance in the street, well, well, again, peasant dancing, flailing, you know, I mean,

if you are a fan of the Salem witch trials, one of the big theories there is that ergot was linked to possibly why all that went down. Right. It's actually a surprisingly common thing to have happened in the like 14, 15, 16, 17, 18th century. Like people would just get this ergot on their food and then they would just go loopy. It was so common. It was actually called St. Anthony's fire.

As you would start seeing things and, you know, a lot of people believe that they would have these visions like, you know, most when you're on this, you would see like, you know, you have altered states of consciousness or you would see crazy shit and you could you could almost assume that's why they were shouting about stuff. And then they would enter this trance, right? And also, apparently it makes you afraid of the color red, which could be associated with the red shoes.

Oh, I don't know. But what the fuck? That's a weird thing to do from this theory. The one thing that never made sense is this, like every other drug, eventually runs through your system. So why would they have been dancing for weeks and weeks and weeks, especially if they weren't eating things? I mean, the obvious answer is got to be like just they got on like a fucking

Zag and like monkey see monkey do. Like I remember that story of those Australia, that Australian family that just like suddenly just like was like, oh, shit, we're being fucking followed. Throw your phones. Go, go, go. Like the brain can trick you into doing shit. I don't know. Maybe that's what it was. I mean, great question. Like if I saw everybody dancing, like would I start dancing?

I don't know. I don't know how strong willed I am if I talk about that. We will live. That is another theory. They're because, again, it makes so little sense. It has to be these kinds of theories, right? So another theory by John Waller was extreme psychological mass psychosis. Much like in 1374, when people had, you know, broken out and dancing. This the time period had appalling harvests.

It was the advent of syphilis. There was leprosy. The plague had been just ravaging the hell out of Europe. It was a rough time to be alive. And, you know, all you have to do is think of today and the last year and how people are getting more and more angry and angsty and argumentive and wildly combative and all sorts of. And this is just being told to wear masks.

So imagine living in a world where like you wake up one day and you poop your guts out and die the end. Like that's it. It was that bad of a time. Yeah. So. That would be such a rough way to go down. You'd be like, I think I need some water and you just like be dead. Waller theorizes that because all these dancing plagues occurred at roughly the same time and roughly the same area

for that, you know, little short span of a couple hundred years, um, that the people had this idea of a curse planted into their mind. And this is a statement for Alex to read. Every so often, when physical and mental distress rendered people more than usually suggestible, the specter of the dancing plague could quickly return. All it then took was for one or a few poor souls believing themselves to have been subject to the curse to slip into a spontaneous trance. Then they would unconsciously act out the part of the accursed

dancing, leaping and hopping for days on end. Wow. And so maybe they just sort of like got themselves riled up into this curse. And because of everything that was going on, it was, you know, it was this mass psychosis. They all sort of were so worked up and so completely stressed out that they snapped. And then because one person did it, everyone else was just kind of like, yeah, and they just like had the rape.

They were like, effort, let's go. And because life was so bad, they just danced without abandon until they died. You know, like it sounds crazy. It sounds insane. But then I think about those like those like televangelical priests that come out and they're just like the people who just like, buy them and people just like go down and he just like wipes them out like Sauron at the beginning, the Lord of the Rings. They're just going down.

And I, you know, I'm not trying to talk against anybody's specific beliefs, but, you know, not every priest out there that's preaching a certain religion is not is necessarily, you know, as as adherent to that religion, as they might say. And you see some things like, you know, people get caught up in that stuff or like where they like whip out the snake during church or anything like that. Or they speak in tongues like that shit. It's not that it's particularly true or false. It's just that humans have this sort of like surprising

tendency to like, oh, yeah, I'm on the zone, baby. Like, like, you know what I mean? It's weird. Well, this is that's actually what the third theory is. It's the one I think I tend to believe most because, you know, the mass psychosis, that's the assumption that everyone was just like, yeah, right? Yeah. I think I think the third theory is probably my favorite one.

And this is a, you know, the case of classic spirit possession that you were just talking about, Alex, which is, you know, these people act as if their souls are being taken over. It's like watching someone on TV pretend to like have a ghost speak through them or something. U.S. anthropologist Erica Oh, poor Erica. I'm sorry about this. Boy, you know, boy, you know,

it is she's kind of like parallel to Waller and has written about it this way. And Mathis, this big hunk of text is for you. Oh, I love being a big text, boy. Oh, my goodness. All right. Every so often when physical and mental distrust is this one. Oh, shit, shit. Where am I? Oh, raised, raised in an environment.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gotcha. Sorry, sorry, raised in an environment of belief in which spirit possession is taken seriously, primes people to enter a disassociative mental state where normal consciousness is disabled. People then act according to culturally prescribed ideas of how the possessed should behave. This is what happened in European

convents before the early 1700s, when nuns would writhe, convulse, foam at the mouth, make obscene gestures and propositions, climb trees and meow like cats. That's fucking wild to think of a nun just foaming at the mouth and like hissing at me from a tree. Honestly, I get it. That tickles me. I get it. Yeah. I feel in it lately.

Their behavior seemed strange, but the nuns lived in communities that encouraged them to obsess about sin and were steeped in a mystical supernaturalism. Those who became convinced that demons had entered their souls were prone to fall into this disassociative states in which they did exactly what theologians and exorcists said the diabolically possessed to do. In such cases, the possession trance also spread to witnesses

who shared the same theological fears. You can see why I enjoy this theory, because it's pretty much how I view everything on this show where I'm like, we've been told that's what aliens look like. So everyone sees a gray every damn time like that vibe. And this is during this time period, you know, everyone knew what being tortured by demons was like or everyone had that fear. And so when they saw this happening and when people in town were like, it must be that you didn't, you know, praise this saint enough.

Demons are here. People just like got it in their system. You know, like the people when I was talking about when they go to the church and they're like, right. And then they're like, you've cured me. It's like nothing happened here. You just got it in your head that something happened. You just you just fell down because you felt fucking excited.

Yeah. And that's the same thing here. It's it's because of all that stress in their life. All these things happening, you know, there's all these outside factors and the way they dealt with it, it wasn't, you know, a mass hysteria. It might have been like one or two people had a break and then everyone else was like, I'm in like it could have been like that. Who knows? I got another theory. OK, what if you guys ever done a drum circle?

No, no. So it's a pretty hippie, dippy activity a lot of the time, the drum circle, but you get in one. Everybody's got that little thing. And then you start like a little jam. And then like everybody's just sort of like doing their little take a take a take a take and then you start to like get into the zone. And then suddenly it's like three hours later, you know what I mean?

I feel like maybe they could have just like all like got into the vibe of this like we're dancing and suddenly instead of it being like three hours later, just suddenly you're dead. I mean, if you're tired, if you're if you're if you're if you're not strong enough for the rhythm of life, you know what I mean? Like if it's coursing through you and it takes your essence away, you know, like I could see you deserve that essence in the first place. Maybe they're just on some sort of like super flow state, Zag, where they're

just like, I've never had a super flow state, except, except for Civilization six, when you play as the creep. And it's literally just this drum like and 12 hours later, I'm still bopping my head till it's great. If you got strongmen to hold you up, if you got the finest DJs in the land of France, I'm doing their sidechain beats all day and all night in the green, the musty grotto of dance up there. So wrapping up Erica's thing, basically she sees this kind of like it makes

sense and the reason why it ended so quickly, right? Because, you know, these people are so devout or maybe emotionally frail. Who knows what happened? You know, it was a bad time period. They were these are broken people that they could have felt compelled to dance for days or weeks based on their faith. And then it also explains why when they were given faith as an answer and they went to the temple, it stopped, right?

Like it, it like wraps up nicely that way. Man, if that was that, I would imagine they would have wrapped that shit up real quick. They're like, actually, I'm tired. Like, I guess people just walked around the statue a bunch. And then over time, people just stopped. That is just, yeah, it's, I don't think it's fucking. It's scary to think about, like I said, it's got that kind of obscene

horror, revive, there's many books about this. Waller, I believe, even has a book you can find on Amazon. But I think it's like college book prices and things like 50 bucks. It's ridiculous. But there's a lot of books about this. It isn't the only type of weird plague that happened in Europe during this time period, because if you recall the middle age, I mean, like, I think we all need to have the history lesson of, like, after the fall,

the Roman Empire, the Roman Empire, they, it was like they had running water. They almost have the internet. Like it just felt like literally like you watch hercules. You know, I know that's the Greeks, but like you watch hercules and you see like the like, oh, like some guy, he's like selling like a concession stand. But it's like, I get it. It's like being at a Laker game, but it's like in ancient Greece. And then I go to like a museum and I dead ass see like a snack stall

from ancient Greece that's like 50% off today only. And you're like, oh my God. It's almost like, yeah, it's almost like history repeats itself. And they get the Coliseums and straight up the Coliseums, there would be dude to walk up and down the aisle and literally, you know, you're like, get your, I don't know, bread here. They would then they throws it like 700 feet to like some kids. I'm just spiced.

Get your spiced beef, Jackie. They would have some poor bastards being ripped apart by lions down as the main attack and the Christians. Yeah. Yeah. And so they, you know, during that time period, Rome and, you know, even it's kind of like a cyclical thing, right? Like you were saying, Matthew's like, yep. Egypt, there was a height of the Egyptian empire.

And then it faded away. And then over time, there was the height of the Roman empire. And that faded away. And during that time period, everything faded away was, in this case, the medieval period in the Middle Ages before the Enlightenment. And it was bad. Like it was, you know, we wipe our hand or we wipe our butt with our left hand and shake with the right kind of bad.

Right. Like that's, you know, that's why left handed was was a bad thing. Right. Being left handed was bad because you used that hand to wipe your butt. That's that's what it was like. It was so stupid, man. How do we let this happen over and over again? I don't know.

You know what's scary, man? And I'm sure Jesse probably feels similarly is that like as somebody who was like went to school and like majored in history and shit. It's like watching, like knowing that history of all the empires coming and then watching America hit that 250 year mark and just watching us struggle with the same exact shit that caused every empire previous to topple, because America is an empire. We even call as a country, but we're very much an empire in a lot of ways.

I mean, the way the Romans treated their sub states are the same way we treat our states. You agree to be part of our empire in the new of your state's rights and that kind of thing. I was watching that crazy to watch. I was watching that QAnon documentary on HBO and I was just like, Oh my God, like, yeah, this is just really like they're just it's literally like crazy superstitions.

Like it's literally just the same thing. It's like, you know, wearing red shoes and going to church. It's the same shit. It's like as based in fact as any of that. But if we had ten thousand dollars on our Patreon, we too will consume our get and go out into the streets of your I will not do that. It messed it messed it up either. But so either way, those are our best guesses.

There are there are many other theories, all of them wild and like, you know, the possession sort of aspects are, but there's no real information on these events, you know, most of it happened during the Middle Ages. There was piss poor record keeping during the Middle Ages. You know, this type of dancing mania, you know, hasn't appeared in the last 500 years and only appeared during this time period of the Middle Ages. It wasn't happening in Rome, for example. So, you know, no one truly knows what caused this.

But for a time during the darkest part of Europe's past, even dancing was a plague. Unbelievable. That's nuts. Just like the laughing plagues, too. Like, you know, what's so funny that you're laughing for two months? I've never heard anything that funny. I know, like, nowadays, I know nowadays they're like, you know, all jokes have been done, but maybe back then they just weren't. And people were just like, oh, my God, that is hilarious.

Get to the other side. Are you serious? Are you shitting me? That's so new. The first guy who was like, and boy, on my arms tire, people died from that. Oh, I was just saying, here was the one lying. You get it? It is the one.

Literal deaths. Cowards, people died. It's terrible. Oh, my God. There's a Monty Python sketch about that. That's what that's what that joke killed means. Yeah. Yeah. Unreal.

Hmm. So that is our mystery. Still never know so much. Yeah, that's that is a I never heard of that. That was nuts. That's just like I said, it's got such interesting horror flavors to it. I enjoy that. So thank you so much, Jesse, for for doing that. And now we've got to go do what Alex said and we're going to do some extra

dance in your town, assuming you're French soon when we all have our vaccine. That's how we're going to perform from now on. We just the next two million live shows is going to be fucking wild. Let me promise you that. We all just take a little urgot before we get on stage next live. I'm going to dump my knees in my own pee before I get on stage this time. Yeah, it'll be a spiritual experience. You know, I'm really I'm really looking forward to our next live show,

mostly because we'll have a new memory of a live show. And I hope it's better than your previous one, Alex. I don't have to keep going back to the same pissing on my own pants story. But you didn't. You just slipped in somebody else's piss and shit while I was being, you know, like, that's the thing that sucked about it the most is that it was just like a release for me. I've been waiting to do it.

I wasn't going to do it on stage. I got in there real quick. And then I like got like full on Charlie Brown's by life on Charlie Brown. I can't wait to go to the next live show and have the guy be like, I was the guy who said I wouldn't turn around or else I would have peed on you. Speaking of live show, like I don't want to. I don't want to say nothing, but I'm going to say something. Plans are in the works.

And if we get the venue. It's exciting. I would say, you know, I would love to be what he's talking about. I would love to do a show there. I've always wanted to my whole life and it could be anywhere. It could be anywhere. So, you know, I'm excited. Yeah, I'm excited.

It could be anywhere, but like I'm very excited. I want to do my whole life. So all I'm saying is. Narrows it down as the pandemic slowly winds down, hopefully fingers crossed, please, um, make some October plans to be in LA, you know, end of October, just like make some plans. God, it's been it'll be a two years. You know, just make some plans for the last live show.

Yeah, just, you know, make some plans. Just think about October. It's a ways off. Walk out. Walk out late October. Let it you know, you know, reach out to Luminot. No, we got to go speak to some other Chiluminots in a chill mini.

I'll show you guys some actual good candy, too, when you guys come to the show. You'll see. Yeah, I got some bit of honeys. I'll hand out my bags to everybody. He's from zigzags. Thank you so much for listening. If you if you want to, you can head over to the Patreon. Like Alex said, you can jump on and go listen to the mini.

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