d circles, hand in hand, and, appearing to have lost control
over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of all bystanders, for
hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the
ground in a state of exhaustion.... While dancing, they neither saw nor
heard, being insensible to external impressions, but were haunted by
visions, their fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked
out; and some of them afterwards asserted that they felt as if they had
been immersed in a stream of blood, which obliged them to leap so high.
Others, during the paroxysm, saw the heavens open and the Saviour
enthroned with the Virgin Mary."[184]

At Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, and Metz, says the same writer:--

"Peasants left their ploughs, mechanics their workshops, housewives
their domestic duties, to join the wild revels. Secret desires were
excited, and but too often found opportunities for wild enjoyment; and
numerous beggars, stimulated by vice and misery, availed themselves of
this new complaint to gain a temporary livelihood. Girls and boys
quitted their parents, and servants their masters, to amuse themselves
at the dances of those possessed, and greedily imbibed the poison of
mental infection. Above a hundred unmarried women were seen raving about
in consecrated and unconsecrated places, and the consequences were soon
perceived."[185]

Once attacked, the hypnotic character of the complaint was shown by its
annual recurrence. Again to quote Hecker:--

"Most of those affected were only annually visited by attacks; and the
occasion of them was so manifestly referable to the prevailing notions
of that period that, if the unqualified belief in the agency of saints
could have been abolished, they would not have had any return of the
complaint. Throughout the whole of June, prior to the festival of St.
John, patients felt a disquietude and restlessness which they were
unable to overcome. They were dejected, timid, and anxious; wandered
about in an unsettled state, being tormented with twitching pains, which
seized them suddenly in different parts, and eagerly expected the eve of
St. John's Day, in the confident hope that by dancing at the altars of
this saint they would be freed from all their sufferings. This hope was
not disappointed; and they remained, for the rest of the year, exempt
from any further attack."[186]

In addition to John the Baptist, the dancing disease was also connected
with another saint-