Aix-la-Chapelle who, impelled by a common delusion, would form
circles, hand in hand, and dance in wild delirium until they fell to
the ground exhausted, somewhat after the manner of the Ghost-Dance or
Messiah-Dance of our North American Indians. In their Bacchantic leaps
they were apparently haunted by visions and hallucinations, the fancy
conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked out. Some of them
afterward stated that they appeared to be immersed in a stream of blood
which obliged them to leap so high. Others saw the heavens open and
disclose the Saviour enthroned with the Virgin Mary. The participants
seemed to suffer greatly from tympanites which was generally relieved
by compression or thumping on the abdomen. A few months after this
dancing malady had made its appearance at Aix-la-Chapelle it broke out
at Cologne, and about the same time at Metz, the streets of which were
said to have been filled with 1100 dancers. This rich city became the
scene of the most ruinous disorder. Peasants left their plows,
mechanics their shops, servants their masters, children their homes;
and beggars and idle vagabonds, who understood how to imitate the
convulsions, roved from place to place, inducing all sorts of crime and
vice among the afflicted. Strasburg was visited by the dancing plague
in 1418, and it was here that the plague assumed the name of St.
Vitus's dance. St. Vitus was a Sicilian youth who, just at the time he
was about to undergo martyrdom by order of Diocletian, in the year 303,
is said to have prayed to God that He might protect all those who would
solemnize the day of his commemoration and fast upon its eve. The
people were taught that a voice from heaven was then heard saying,
"Vitus, thy prayer is accepted."

Paracelsus called this malady (Chorus sancti viti) the lascivious
dance, and says that persons stricken with it were helpless until
relieved by either recovery or death. The malady spread rapidly through
France and Holland, and before the close of the century was introduced
into England. In his "Anatomy of Melancholy" Burton refers to it, and
speaks of the idiosyncrasies of the individuals afflicted. It is said
they could not abide one in red clothes, and that they loved music
above all things, and also that the magistrates in Germany hired
musicians to give them music, and provided them with sturdy companions
to dance with. Their endurance was marvelous. Plater speaks of a woman
in Basle whom he