Went on a research spiral about mass-psychosis and Dancing Plagues, and I hadn't realised we had a specific explanation for exactly what caused the outbreaks in Germany in the 16th and 17th Centuries. It's still debated but, well, it was probably a saint. St Vitus, to be exact.

(Or, heh, one assumes "local deity syncretised into Catholicism", given the strength, depth, and regional nature of the outbreaks (they're very good at that, having learned it from the Romans). But "saint" is more succinct.)

The Dancing Plague of Strasbourg in 1518 started with one woman, who was then joined by others after a couple of days. Then it spread and spread. They couldn't stop dancing, not for food, nor drink, nor even when people tried restraining them. They danced themselves to death.

400-plus people died. Horribly. They begged for help as they danced, begged others to get them to stop, but their bodies wouldn't until they physically couldn't anymore. And this wasn't an isolated incident, just by far the worst. Dancing like this wasn't unheard of in the area.

No one could explain it, and it's still debated today. Everything from disease to lysergic food contamination has been suggested. The one that seems to fit best, to me, is mass-psychosis, and it's the generally accepted one nowadays. But "psychosis" doesn't really cover it.

What happened to those poor people in Strasbourg was not that they had a break with reality, per se. They were aware and cognisant enough to ask for help. They knew they were dying. They just couldn't stop dancing. Something in their heads that wasn't them animated their limbs.

That something was St Vitus. Or the local deity that'd had the name of the Catholic saint attached to it, anyway, a strong belief in which was prevalent in the area during the Medieval and Early-Modern period. It was said, back then, that he made the wicked dance their sins away.

The 16th Century suuuucked in Europe. It sucked in the Americas too (because of Europeans) but the point is that people in Germany in 1518 were under incredible strain, and constantly terrified. They were stressed, to put it mildly. I think we can all relate to that in 2020.

People, generally, are not 100% "good" all the time. And a lot of things Catholicism considers/considered sins are also very common (e.g. most sex). Thus they had a lot of shit to feel bad about, and confession doesn't necessarily cut it wrt dealing with all that guilt.

And they'd the idea of this saint who made you dance your sins away living inside their heads. So when they came to a breaking point, they danced until they dropped. Because humans are highly social creatures, seeing other people breaking can break us in turn. Hence Strasbourg.

One person broke under general duress and the weight of their perceived sins, started dancing, and it set that off for every other susceptible person in her community. They all had this brainworm living inside their heads, moving their limbs for them. And it killed them.

According to chronicles, the only thing they eventually found to help the afflicted was to lead them round a statue of St Vitus, wearing red shoes. Because it wasn't a physical plague. However they parsed it, they realised had to work with the thing in people's heads.

(And it is probably accurate to describe this St Vitus meme as a thing separate from the people carrying it. If we're using the Dawkins framework for what a meme is, this definitely qualifies. Telling that, when it and the ideology it used to spread died off, so did the dancing.)

Mass-psychosis plagues are just a thing stressed humans seem susceptible to, in general. There are plenty of examples of "[insert thing here] plague" all the way up to the modern day, including a "smiling plague" in Tanzania in the '60s. But the dancing was specific to Germany.

Draw your own conclusions from all this, of course, but to me the fact that not only did this meme literally take over people's bodies and dance them to death but the solution was to placate it using its own rituals says something profound about how ideas function and spread.

We aren't always aware of it, but we all have structures inside our heads, and things living in them that aren't quite us. Ours are not the same as those of a resident of 16th century Strasbourg. But they're there nonetheless, as we can see every day in politics.

It's why when my mum says something that makes my blood run cold, which she picked up on some conservative podcast, it doesn't /sound like her/. Because it, to a certain extent, isn't. Same goes for all the crap Fox jams into their viewers' minds on the daily.

I'm not saying the strategy should be to take them to their version of a St Vitus statue, or that we have to work with the ones we see today to help the afflicted. Different brainworms require different solutions, and "working with", say, Q-style brainworms would be...hazardous.

But recognising that St Vitus might as well have been real for those people in Strasbourg in 1518 helps put the modern-day equivalents into context. It allows us to see these things for what they are: hostile memetic viruses — not physical, but as dangerous as COVID all the same.

(For clarity: I am in this thread using "Germany" as a stand-in for "The Holy Roman Empire, the Roughly German Bit Thereof" as opposed to "France", where I know Strasbourg currently resides. Oh /god/ I do not want to step on that landmine; it's been the cause of so many wars >.>)