The Blindboy Podcast - St Vitus Dance

Episode Date: October 21, 2020

How lads doing shots of Goldschlager in Celtic Tiger nightclubs got me thinking about 15th century dancing pandemics that killed thousands Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fumble and the Bus Conductors Custard you furious Ewans. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If you're a brand new listener, go back and listen to some earlier episodes. There's hundreds to choose from and it'll give you a better idea of what this podcast is. There's lots of fun stuff, lots of hot takes. If you're not a brand new listener, what's the crack? How are you getting on? I hope you've been well. In Ireland we've just

entered a brand new lockdown for the next six weeks. Fuck it man, we're used to it at this stage. We're used to it. Embrace the chaos. Embrace the chaos of what's outside of your control and worry about what's inside of your

control. And you can't control lockdown just a tiny plug before I move forward I haven't done a gig I haven't done a gig in a long time obviously because of the pandemic I won't do a gig for a long time I'm kind of used to it now I don't really mind

you know but I for the crack I got offered an online podcast festival right so it's like it's like an online streaming podcast

which I decided to take because just to see what it's like just to see is this something I can do is this something I enjoy so I'm doing one gig at the unmuted podcast festival

Thursday 22nd of October which is tomorrow if you're listening to this today, Wednesday and I'm interviewing Fern Brady who's a comedian from Scotland

and it's a live podcast but it's streamed it's going to be streamed online live at 9pm Thursday 22nd of October so if you want a ticket for that go to unmutepodcastfestival.com

look for Blind Buy and come along if you're interested in it fuck what have I got to lose what have I got to lose there's no live gigs I'm not doing a live gig there's no fucking live gigs I thought

this is how naive I am. Last June right, which was in the middle of the pandemic I was booking I thought I'd be in Australia and New Zealand and Asia right now doing a tour but

I won't be gigging for another year. You know, at a minimum. So fuck it. I'm going to do a live online year. You know? At a minimum. So fuck it. I'm going to do a live online podcast festival. And see what the crack is. And. I reckon it'll be fun. Come along if you want to.

And get a ticket. Alright? No harm if you don't want to. So this week. I. I won't say I have a hot take. Rather what I have is a collection of thoughts, a collection of things that I've been considering all week that exist in the territory of a hot take and I want to try and find the hot take with ye here.

One thing I'm continually fascinated with is, and you'll know from listening to previous podcasts the the impact of society and culture on how we behave in in ways that we behave and ways that we produce art um something that popped into my head this week i remember back in like 2005, 2006 and I'd be a young fella going to nightclubs in Limerick and

this was the height of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland, okay it was a time of unprecedented economic strength in Ireland Ireland being a traditionally poor country and I grew up during the Celtic Tiger so I grew up during economic success

and the thing about the Celtic Tiger was that it was there was a great naivety to it when Ireland suddenly became wealthy and people could have like when I was in fucking school there was lads in 60' with cars like teenagers with fucking cars

and lots of them you know and all they needed for cars was to have a weekend job well paid weekend jobs but we didn't think the money was ever going to go away so everybody in the country went really silly but in this in these in this tacky expression of this silliness people had to have cars that

were if it was 2006 people had to have 2006 cars people were buying excessive amounts of decking for their back gardens. Bouncy castles whenever their child had a fucking communion. And fucking helicopters. Like, normal people had bouncy castles and bootcut jeans and Ronan Keating CDs. But then there was like all these millionaires. There was a lot of millionaires in Ireland and did fucking helicopters. Like, there was a student complex near the college that I was going to and the owner used to land on the roof in his helicopter once a week to collect his money and this was normal. Nightclubs, like limerick nightclubs

on a Saturday, not even a special Saturday, just a Saturday, would have giant chocolate fountains with strawberries and they'd hand out free strawberries covered in chocolate and there'd be fire dancers breathing fire and then like I remember like

it was just a Saturday just a regular Saturday and the nightclub flew in the DJ Deadmau5 on a private fucking jet so he could play Limerick on a Saturday no special occasion he could play Limerick on a Saturday.

No special occasion. Just obscene amounts of money and the belief that the money will never, ever, ever disappear. And then this got me thinking about the insanity of that climate. Because the thing is, people didn't, I didn't know what a fucking recession was my brothers had told me about oh there was a recession in the 80s oh people used to emigrate I didn't know that

in the time of the Celtic Tiger no one thought it was going to end so then I started thinking what were we drinking in the nightclubs in 2006 and then it all hit me as just as an example of if the world around you

is this ostentatious irrational expression of never ending wealth if Deadmau5 is playing and then you're going with your friends in college to where they live in their apartment and the owner is landing his helicopter on the roof. In fucking Limerick. How then does this express itself.

In something as simple as the drink that you choose. In the nightclub. And I remember in. What we were drinking. Everyone was drinking this fucking drink right. Called Goldschlager which was a cinnamon liqueur

right and people were doing shots of this cinnamon liqueur and it was clear but the thing is with this drink it had actual

gold in it so it was this really hot shot with gold gold flakes gold in it so it was this really hot shot with gold flakes floating in it and I remember being younger and asking like why the fuck

why are people drinking this and then someone would say to me oh man that's Goldschlager if you drink that because it has gold flakes in it and what happens is the gold flakes in the drink they slit your throat on the inside, the gold flakes

slit your throat and they make tiny cuts and then the alcohol absorbs into your body quicker and you get really wrecked so order a Goldschlager so I'd go up and order a Goldschlager and everyone else in the pub or in the nightclub

was doing it too and just everyone in Limerick is essentially drinking these drinks to slit their own throats with gold and knowingly doing it not And knowingly doing it.

Not only knowingly doing it. But wanting to do it. I'm drinking gold to slit my own throat on the inside. To get as drunk as possible. And the naivety of it was too. It was cinnamon. It was a cinnamon drink. So when you drank it.

It burned your throat. But it burned your throat because it's fucking cinnamon. Cinnamon is a burny substance. But no, no, not for the people of Limerick. The people of Limerick were going, my throat is burning, therefore it must be slitting from gold. And now I'm pissed, really drunk. And like the internet was a thing,

but people didn't... You didn't use Google like that in 2006. It took a while for our brains to start asking the internet questions. In 2006, you couldn't just type into the internet, is Goldschlager really slitting my throat you wouldn't really get an answer the search engines weren't intelligent like that

firstly smartphones didn't exist so you'd have to remember it then think of it the next day type it into Google which was like a year old and search engines weren't intelligent so you might never find the answer so you just accepted it and everyone accepted it

we're slitting our own throats with gold and it's grand it's the Celtic Tiger there's Deadmau5 there's a helicopter bizarre and the other

the thing too the lads the lads who would have said, drink this drink, it slits your throat. They were the same ones. They were usually rugby lads and they were the same lads who, like a year previously in school, would have, they used to fucking, before they played a rugby match, they, they used to get rollies, like tobacco rollies, and they'd get paracetamol, and they'd crumble the paracetamol into the rollie, like hash, and smoke paracetamol cigarettes, so that they wouldn't feel pain on the field, and then a year later they're telling everybody to drink gold to slit their own fucking throat. And do you know what they

used to brag about? The next day you'd meet them and they'd be bragging about they'd say that they took a shit and there was gold in their shit the glitter shits it was called which there probably was because there's actual gold in Goldschlager

and if you had enough pints of it you're going to end up with gold in your stomach and you can't digest it so you had young men going around going

I was drinking gold last night man I slipped my throat with some gold I got mouldy walk up there was gold in my shit now I'm going to smoke paracetamol and this was normal that's the trout of of No Crack. But the Trout of No Crack.

The Trout of No Crack is based on those. Gold drinking. Paracetamol smokers. From the nightclubs of my late teens. And that there is the. Intense. Irrational. Ostentatious.

Bizarre. ejaculation of wealth that was the Celtic Tiger. And two years later, there's a fucking recession. And the gold drinkers headed down to Australia. And they're not drinking gold now. They're not smoking paracetamol. They're down in Australia. They're gold now. They're not smoking paracetamol. They're down in Australia. They're

Australians now. They're in their thirties and they're not coming back. And instead of bragging about drinking gold, they're on Facebook bragging about having solar panels on their roof in Sydney and selling the electricity back to the Australian government. My friend Ernest, who was fond of drinking gold in 2006, is in Perth now and what he brags about on Facebook is having solar panels on his roof, using them, using the excess energy to mine Bitcoin in his garage on a Bitcoin server and then using that Bitcoin for online poker. I mean, how about that for a trajectory?

Smoking paracetamol to drinking gold to shitting gold to now playing poker with excess sunlight. Shout out to Ernest in part. But it's just, it's a fascinating thought I had. It fascinated me that, how appropriate is it that the drink of choice during an irrational expression of wealth is gold and it wasn't planned, it just happened that way. I'm unsure how the, I'm unsure how that train of thought is kind of leading me down the rabbit hole of this week's podcast.

Because this week's podcast isn't about Limerick nightclubs in 2006 or Bitcoin or drinking gold. I suppose what fascinates me about it is it's how the conditions of our environment would express themselves in behaviour, in how we behave and how we consume. kind of 12th, 13th century Europe and the strange, the relationship with dancing. Dancing and death in Europe from about 1200 to 1500. I'm noticing this,

when I look through the history, this strange pattern that I want to explore as an expression of it's strange human behaviour and what are the

conditions of society that led to dance and death in that medieval period to the point that That led to. Dance and death. In that medieval period. To the point that. I want to investigate. The phenomenon.

Of entire towns of people. Dancing themselves to death. In medieval Europe. Pandemics of dancing. And I want to explore the artwork that went alongside it now I'm not a historian you know well I'm not a historian

and I've never claimed to be a historian I'm an artist and I'm an artist on an academic level I've done fucking years and years of training in art and when you train to be a professional artist at third level or at master's level

research is a huge part of your artistic process. That can be research in culture, society, sociology, research in history. So when I look at history and speak about history I speak about it from

the lens of the artist so for me when I look at history through the artist's lens I'm not necessarily looking for I won't say truthful I'm not looking for

the real basic exploration of history I'm looking for the really interesting bits I'm looking for the most interesting entertaining

brain tickling interpretation of history which is still rooted in facts but the hot take I'm looking for the hot take. Where's the bit about history. Where I get to creatively.

Intervene. And interpret history. In a way. That. Is creatively exciting. So that's what I want to do this week. So in art history. Depictions of. Death. It's called memento mori.

Which I think that's just, memento I think means like a reminder. And mori is like mort, like death. So it's like a reminder of death. And it's always been present in art. Usually represented by just simply a skeleton skeleton and this is universal with all cultures a skeleton represents death fairly obvious but in the late middle ages

which is it's like 1250 to the 1500s the late middle ages something unique is present in visual art and in stories around death. Death is depicted repeatedly as a dancing skeleton. And not only a dancing skeleton, it's the late middle ages in particular, death is portrayed as a dancing skeleton leading often rich people, not just the peasantry, not the poor,

but it's depicted as a skeleton dancing with a pope or a priest or a noble person. And it's to remind, I suppose, the wealthy of that death is coming and death will dance you to the grave. Now, the thing is, with the late medieval period, and one thing that makes me wonder, you know, why the fuck is death, the skeleton death, dancing with rich people in the depictions. You had the Black Death. The Black Death was the worst pandemic in human history. Like coronavirus, coronavirus is nothing.

Like compared to the Black Death, the Black Death, they reckon it killed around somewhere between 100 and 200 million people in like 20 years I think it was, was it 20 years? but around 20 years it killed that many people

and it was caused by the bubonic plague not a particularly pleasant disease em it caused the person to kind of break out in boils and then eventually for parts of the body to just rot away. So people at the later stages of plague would have resembled zombies or skeletons because their faces were falling off. And people didn't understand germ theory. People didn't know what germs were.

People didn't know what bacteria were. And the rich probably thought. They thought that pestilence and disease and these things were things that happened to poor people. And if you had money you could possibly avoid some of it. But the plague was killing everybody. Including the clergy. Including kings. It's a fucking disease.

It doesn't give a shit if somebody is a pope or a peasant. It doesn't care. It's a disease. So everybody was dying. So I'm guessing, you know, the fact that so many of these depictions of death with noble people was a kind of a humble reminder that

whatever the fuck this is, it doesn't care about who you are, it's taking you and as well of course, look art is created by patrons, patrons have money, alright so art the art that survived was rarely created for the lay

person, for the peasant. It would have been directed at the people who could afford art, which are rich people. So naturally, the depictions of death are going to speak to rich people rather than poor people in the late Middle Ages. The plague was caused by, it was, you know, it's a disease of globalisation. It was a disease of early capitalism. Europe had established the Silk Road, which was a trade route between Europe and the east of China and India. And in China and India, they had black rats and these black rats had fleas and these fleas carried bubonic plague and then the rats via the Silk Road and humans

would find their way to Europe then the fleas would jump off these black rats bite humans then the plague managed to transfer across to human fleas and fleas and rats were what were causing this plague. It's not a virus. It's not like transmitted in the air. It was transmitted via fleas and it was a bacteria.

And it would have been absolutely terrifying to the people at the time because it was ubiquitous and they didn't understand it. And the loss of... One third of the population of Europe died in like 10 or 20 years. It eradicated villages. It would have contributed greatly to a collective sense of stress,

a huge collective sense of stress and fear and uncertainty. Another thing which would have added to the great collective stress of the late medieval period was there was climate change. Now not like human climate change as we have it now, the Anthropocene as we call it. There was natural climate change. There was from about 900 to 1250, there was a thing called the medieval warm period, where the climate was just warmer. The Vikings, for instance, would have thrived during the medieval warm period because they're from a colder climate around Norway.

But the Vikings managed to settle in Greenland and even made it to parts of Canada, if not North America, around the year 1000. They definitely had a settlement in Greenland. Now Greenland is almost entirely fucking ice. And do you ever wonder, like, why the fuck is Greenland called Greenland is almost entirely fucking ice. And do you ever wonder, like, why the fuck is Greenland called Greenland if there's no green there, if it's just ice? Well, there's two theories.

The first theory is that Eric the Red, the Viking who went to Greenland, went back to the Vikings in Norway and lied and said, I found this new plot of land and it's really green or it's full of ground and he was lying to people saying come and settle here and was lying about the fact that it was full of ice or some people say it was during the medieval warm period and Greenland didn't have that much ice but the medieval warm period ended around 1250 and after that the beginnings of a mini ice age started

and that's where you see like the Vikings abandoned Greenland and it's been said it's because it got too fucking cold for them and they died off and they left by about 1400 but this cold period in Europe definitely became a thing around 1250, and it had huge stressful effects. In particular, it caused a famine in the 1300s, from 1315 to 1357.

It caused this massive famine in Europe, where there was crop failure and huge amounts of starvation in 1315 there wasn't much of a summer it rained and rained for the entire summer that caused crops to fail because they weren't getting sun

then any crops that they did harvest they couldn't ripen them because they were getting damp from all the rain and then another thing was like salt salt was a huge part of like okay if the plants aren't grown do you have any animals to eat

salt was a huge part of preserving meat around 1315 but because there was so much rain they couldn't use the sun to evaporate seawater and collect salt. So there was a salt shortage. So it resulted in this huge fucking lack of food and inflation of prices of food throughout Europe, which created chaos and starvation and misery and death.

and death and as we spoke in in last week's podcast where i was speaking about conspiracy theories and how often throughout history conspiracy theories they always tend to go through children disappearing well during this huge european famine the 1300s cannibalism became a thing people were eating each other. And one story that emerged was Hansel and Gretel. Hansel and Gretel is a German folk tale. We know it from the Brothers Grimm stories which are like the 1800s.

But they got all their fucking stories from folk tales. And Hansel and Gretel was a 13th century German folk tale about children starved of the hunger disappearing off to find this house in the woods

made of bread and all these lovely foods that don't exist and then a witch who was like a shape shifting witch eats the children you know and Hansel and Gretel comes from that period comes from the period of that

huge European famine which was brought on by the Ice Age after the warm period, the Black Death happens about 30 or 40 years after that, so you have and with the famine of course as well, diseases go up

you have an incredibly traumatised Europe with a massive collective sense of stress. You had a lot of revolts, peasant uprisings, there were civil wars,

the Catholic Church like split in two, and I don't mean Protestantism, I'm talking late medieval period, the Catholic Church like split in two and I don't mean Protestantism I'm talking late medieval period the Catholic Church like the 1370s onwards there was two popes you know there was two men claiming to be pope

the church was split in two and you can imagine the shit that would have fucking caused at a time when religion meant everything to everybody and all throughout all of this, the visual symbol that's most representative,

that you see so much of with all different artists and depictions all around Europe, is death being depicted as a dancing skeleton. The most famous of these, I suppose, there was a painter and a woodcutter called Hans Holbein the Younger. depicted as a dancing skeleton. The most famous of these, I suppose, there was a painter and a woodcutter called Hans Holbein the Younger, German fella, and he had an entire series of woodcuts

in the 1520s, which basically depicted everyday scenes, either a peasant in the field or a noble person being accompanied by a dancing skeleton and one of the most uh obvious ones not in art but in like again folk tales that associate dancing and death is the story of the pied piper of hamlin which we all know as a fucking story you learned when you were a kid but that story it has its roots in like the 1200s 1300s in germany as a folktale and it's basically

the story is is that this piper the town in germany called hamelin which was overrun by rats which was overrun by rats. And this pied piper came in dressed in colourful clothes, who would play a tin whistle. And then the rats would follow the piper and leave town. But then when the piper came back the next day to ask the townspeople to pay him for getting rid of the rats, the people wouldn't pay him. So then he started playing his whistle

and he let all the children out of town and when you look at a story like that, historians look at that now and they go you know where are the real roots of that there's the obvious one with bubonic plague, the plague and the rats and the

Pied Piper removing the rats from the town there's also a theory that during the and the rats, and the Pied Piper removing the rats from the town. There's also a theory that during the famine, the Great Famine in Europe, that the children basically had to leave Germany, had to try and migrate east toward the likes of Poland or up towards Russia. And Pied Pipers were kind of like, if you think of the refugee crisis now, where you've got these gangs in Libya

transporting migrants from North Africa across the Mediterranean, that a Pied Piper in the 13th century was like a person with brightly coloured clothes who would lead essentially European refugees east away from famine-torn Europe, young people and children who would leave town while the older people died and that's what the Pied Piper meant and that the Pied Piper as well as being colourfully dressed played an instrument

and people would follow this person out of town as refugees and probably pay them towards somewhere that didn't have as bad a famine or there might be food but there's one theory that I find really fucking interesting is that if you look at the understanding of medicine in the late medieval period,

it wasn't like medicine now, as I mentioned earlier, where you understand bacteria, you understand viruses. They had a system of medicine known as the four humours, that basically illnesses were caused by an imbalance of what were called humours in the body. There was blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. And these were the four humours of the body in medieval medicine. So if a person had, we'll say, too much yellow bile,

then this person was, someone who was excessively angry or could fly off the handle, was seen to have had too much yellow bile. Then black bile, if you had too much black bile, then the person was sad or melancholic. Literally, the word melancholic, the word can be traced to Middle English, meaning an excess of black bile right, so sad people

or people who got cancer had an excess of black bile the other humour was phlegm, people who were really like inactive or might have had injuries or couldn't move were seen to have had an excess of phlegm but then blood

blood, people who had an excess of blood were seen to have had an excess of phlegm. But then blood, blood, people who had an excess of blood were seen to be like friendly, outgoing, full of movement, full of movement and healthy, outwardly healthy people. So the understanding of medicine is that there were these four humours. So the symptoms of the plague, you know, it caused fever, it caused you to sweat, it caused pus to come out of your body. Under that interpretation of medicine, the plague was seen as a blood disease. Out of the four humours the plague was a blood disease and blood is associated with being outgoing, being

friendly, being full of movement. So when you see these medieval depictions of death dancing always looking at it today you can kind of think death is kind of

when I look at images of death dancing with a healthy person I look at that as death being this cynical character that dances you to the grave but maybe if you look at it through the lens of the medieval humours that dancing was seen as a way to stave off the plague, that by engaging in something as life-giving as dancing, that what you're doing is you're protecting the blood humour of your body

and protecting yourself from plague. And maybe that's what these depictions meant. That to keep death at bay you have to dance with death. You have to embrace death and dance to keep yourself healthy in the face of this irrational fucking bubonic plague. I'm going to do an ocarina pause now but what I want to speak about and where I'm going with this is dancing itself became a pandemic. All right?

Dancing, unexplainable, uncontrolled dancing had outbreaks and became a pandemic in the late medieval period. And I want to discuss that. But first, we're going to a little a little ocarina pause I don't have the ocarina oh I do, I do we have the return of the ocarina this week

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stream three times a week and you can chat to me and I play video games and I write music live I won't be on this Thursday because I'm doing that podcast festival thing so there you go so back to the late medieval period a strange cultural phenomenon that was happening is certain behaviors used to become infectious like a disease. And I think this is why, like I started off, I started off this podcast talking about being in nightclubs in Limerick with lads drinking gold. You know, in the face of

an excessive economy, you've got people drinking gold because they believe that it slits their throats. Or smoking paracetamol. I suppose that's what got me on this train of thought. But in 14th century France, there was a convent full of nuns, right? And one day, one of them just started to meow like a cat and the cat the cat would be

very closely associated with the devil in 14th century Catholicism but one nun started to meow like a cat

but then the other nuns began to meow as well and they weren't like having crack they were

meowing like cats uncontrollably until the fucking army had to be brought in, the army were brought in to basically assault the nuns to stop them meowing like cats in 15th century Germany

another nunnery one nun, another nunnery. One nun bit another nun. And then all the nuns started to bite all the other nuns until the entire convent of nuns were just biting each other. And then this would be so strange that news of the nuns biting each other would travel outside the convent and then when that news would reach other convents that convent would experience an epidemic of biting and it went from Germany it went to Holland it went to Rome and you had these Rome buildings full of nuns who are biting each other until they exhaust themselves biting to the point that they can't bite anymore

and the idea of biting spreading like a disease but by far the most common kind of of these strange behavioural diseases in the late medieval period were plagues of dancing now these things are called mass psychogenic illnesses

it's like a a stress response it's the rapid spread of illness and symptoms affecting members of a cohesive group originating from a nervous system disturbance involving excitation, loss or alteration of function So that's a quote about what a psychogenic illness is.

But it's when behaviours spread like a disease it's not a disease there's no bacteria, there's no virus but the, people don't have control over this and deadly plagues of dancing

are a huge feature of the late medieval period and ok, here's one example so 1021 dancing are a huge feature of the late medieval period. And, okay, here's one example. So 1021 in Christmas Eve in Germany, 18 people just started dancing outside a church. And dancing like mad bastards. The priest couldn't perform mass.

The priest told them to stop. They ignored him. And they started dancing together in a ring. Clapping, jumping up and down, shouting. Nobody could stop him. Then the priest sentenced them to a year of dancing as punishment. And they kept doing it until they all died a year later. 1247, again in Germany, in a town called Erfurt out and over 200 people started dancing on a bridge right they danced on the bridge until it collapsed and they all drowned now 1374 that's

when it starts to get really interesting because you're talking 20 years now after the black death remember the black death that got rid of a third of Europe's population. That. This is also after that famine. You're talking about a lot of loss. A lot of collective stress. A lot of collective trauma. And in 1374.

Compulsive dancing became. A fucking pandemic. Right. It spread. It started in Germany spread through fucking the Netherlands spread through France

and you had thousands and thousands of people dancing for days and weeks unable to stop right and this

this wasn't pleasant like these people were screaming unable to stop And this wasn't pleasant. These people were screaming, unable to stop until just dying, dying from dancing. Now, the greatest dancing pandemic of all, and the one that we have most kind of representation of and evidence for, 1518 in Strasbourg. It killed a lot of people uncontrollable dancing spread all across Europe right

one report said that 15 people a day were dying from uncontrollable plagues of dancing now there's no fucking disease that's causing this no one's after catching an illness uncontrollable plagues of dancing. Now there's no fucking disease that's causing this. No one's after catching an illness.

It's a behavioural pandemic. And the reason I think that we have information about this one from 1518, around 1518, a type of art became very popular. Known as genre painting. Genre painting was kind of a Dutch-inspired,

pre-Baroque type of painting where the subject matter wasn't religious. It wasn't like painting things from the Bible. Artists started to paint regular, normal people in their everyday activities. So one artist in particular, Peter Bruegel the Elder, he has got sketches and drawings from the time of the dancing plague. You can see people dancing themselves to death with other people propping them up.

And because genre painting was, it was a documentary painting. Painting goes through all these different styles in the middle ages. You're either painting biblical scenes or scenes from classical antiquity imagine things or you have realism where you're painting literally the lives of

the peasants. So because of this lots of paintings and drawings and woodcuts exist of the peasants so because of this lots of paintings and drawings and woodcuts exist of the dancing plague of 1518 in strasbourg now again this wasn't people having crack a dancing plague would happen and as soon as other people found out about it or learned information the dancing plague would then set off in their town or their city and these people they were screaming in pain they were begging for mercy like they were definitely they were dancing against their own will

now people say that like there's a condition called ergotism where there's this it's a mould right so like remember I mentioned that you had this cold period so one of the things that contributed to the famine was this cold period the little ice age which caused excessive amount of rain in the summer some people say that what happened was

there's a mould that grows on rye and on wheat called ergo or ergot and it's slightly hallucinogenic and when people, if the wheat and rye to make their bread was rotting and they were consuming a lot of this ergot it would cause, it would be like a bad trip on acid and that can happen and people have

claimed that this was happening because people were essentially getting bad trips off this mold that grew on wheat but it it didn't it didn't make sense it that doesn't make sense it was the pandemic was spreading by word of mouth not necessarily by people eating mouldy fucking wheat do you know what I mean and the other thing is these dancers they were having

different states of consciousness they were dancing against their will and they were also dancing beyond what their regular physical endurance could do they were they were dancing beyond they were dancing themselves to death so to engage in a physical activity until you actually die truly means that the person doesn't have control over their own behaviour as some type of strange mob hysteria. Now, me, I view it, I think it's a massive trauma response.

That's what I think it is. You view it within the context of Europe's after losing a third of its population. You had people deeply believing in religion and now there's two fucking popes 1518 in particular and this is something I haven't seen other people bring up but if you think of 1518 what happened in

1492 the Portuguese went and quote unquote discovered America I think future shock I think the change Portuguese went and quote unquote discovered America. I think future shock. I think the change. It's like I always ask what would happen if fucking aliens landed tomorrow?

If aliens landed tomorrow and on television are fucking aliens. What would that do to all of us? To how we think? To how we think about each other? What would it do to our sanity collectively? If there's an alien on television, what would that do to our sanity? So in 1518, which is roughly 20 years after the fucking Portuguese coming back and going, the world's actually not flat, lads, because we... Do you know the way you thought the world was flat?

We went around it in a circle and we found this new land and everything you've believed about reality, now we've flipped on its fucking head. You live on a ball. Right? The concept of the new world would have been massively shocking on top of this huge medieval trauma for the loss of one third of the population.

The disappearance of villages. The fucking famines. Maybe it was. Maybe everything was too much. Then. You bring that into humor theory. The theory of the four humors. You.

I'm contextual. I'm definitely contextualising like if you're telling me there were plagues of dancing throughout the late medieval period where people fucking died right

people danced themselves to death and then I'm looking at the artwork the folklore and I'm also seeing representations of the skeleton dancing the dancing with death that that's been represented in art.

And possibly, if you look at it within the theory of humours, that dancing was seen as something you could do to avoid pestilence, to avoid death. That it got people worked up. And that's why this collective behavioural pandemic expressed itself as fucking dancing. In Strasbourg in 1518 the dancing pandemic became so bad. That people became terrified of the idea of what if I catch dancing. What if I catch the disease of dancing.

And they started to flock towards saints. There's a saint called Saint Vitus Saint Vitus is the patron saint of dancing there's also a disease called Saint Vitus Dance you can get it off Robin Redbreasts strangely enough where it's a disease that when people get it

and this is an actual disease now when people get this disease they move an actual disease now when people get this disease they move in ways that look like a dance so the disease was called Saint Vitus Dance now Saint Vitus Dance the disease that's completely different to the 1518 pandemic of dancing that was killing people

so in Strasbourg they couldn't do anything about the people dancing, people were dropping dead in the streets so what the authorities in Strasbourg did is they figured the only way to prevent the dancing was to encourage people to dance more. So they started setting up in the town square like a stage with a band And encouraged everyone to start fucking dancing. So now you had voluntary dancers. And people suffering from a disease of dancing. And so dancing plagues continued to be a thing.

Up until about the 1700s. Where they disappeared. Probably with the fucking enlightenment. Change in medicine and science and knowledge. they disappeared probably with the fucking enlightenment change in medicine and science and knowledge just probably shifted culture to the point where dancing was no longer seen as

a response to environmental stress but what fascinates me about it, those humans, the humans in the 15th, in the 1200s, 1300s, the 1518th,

they're the same humans as me and you. The exact same biologically. So, what is the new dancing pandemic? What is the new behaviour that spreads like a virus? Do you know what I mean? What is the new. Behaviour. That spreads. Like a virus.

Do you know what I mean. And. I don't know how I ended up on this. I'm thinking about. Something about the lads in Limerick in 2006. In a nightclub. Drinking gold. Because the gold slits your throat.

And lets in alcohol alcohol there's a powerful there's a beautiful irrationality to that it makes no fucking sense it's fucking ridiculous it's ridiculous buy this drink there's gold in it

it cuts your throat it gets you erect but we all did it I did it I'm smart I bought shots of this drink because other people were doing it

even though I knew it was stupid and silly, I did it and no one was injuring themselves but that little part of the brain that listens to a piece of information that's utterly ridiculous

that in this time of excess of the Celtic Tiger that people should be drinking gold is that the same little part of the brain that had caused mass deaths through dancing pandemics

in the late medieval period so that's that's this week's podcast that's this week's podcast em I don't know was it coherent or was it a ramble

like I said I don't have a a consistent take for this one I just have a a collection of thoughts that intrigue me. You know, a collection of thoughts that intrigue me and the connection between artistic depictions of dancing skeletons

and then dancing pandemics at the same time. They have to be culturally connected. They have to be culturally connected they have to be culturally connected so I'll talk to you next week don't know what's going to happen next week but mind yourself have fun have compassion

let me know what you want out of a podcast my job right now is to distract you that's what I want to do I want distracting entertainment if you want mental health podcasts let me know. But right now you're in lockdown. You've a lot of time on your hands.

So I'm here to give you an hour away from all that shit where you can think about dancing plagues of the 1500s. Enjoy yourself. Yacht. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game. And you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. Thank you.