This bid is a sponsored reading from frank and honest gourmet coffee, the coffee doesn't grow in Ireland, but Frank and honest are guaranteed Irish. I'm very picky with coffee, a lot of coffee to me. I don't like it. It tastes like. Not petrol, but some coffee tastes like how petrol would describe itself if petrol could describe itself, but not frank and honest coffee that tastes just very smooth, smooth. What would I as I find a slight smokiness, a pleasant smokiness to it, you can get frank and honest coffee in centuries and super values all over the country.

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Fumble in the bus conductors. Custódio Furious Ewan's welcome to The Blind Bye podcast. If you're a brand new listener, go back and listen to some earlier episodes. There's hundreds to choose from and give you a better idea of what this podcast is. There's lots of fun stuff, lots of heartaches 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 lock down for the next six weeks.

Four men were used to it at this stage, were used to it embrace the chaos. Embrace the chaos of what's outside of your control and worry about what's inside your control, and you can control Lockton. And 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 with something I enjoy? So I'm doing one gig at the unmuted podcast festival, part of the 22nd of October, which is tomorrow, if you're listening to this today, Wednesday.

And. I'm interviewing Foreign Brady, who is a comedian from Scotland, and it's a live podcast, but it's streamed it's going to be streamed online live at 9:00 p.m. Thursday, the 22nd of October. So if you want to take it for this, go to unmuted podcast festival dot com, look for blind buy and come along. For instance, 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 fuckin 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 podcast festival and see what the Iraqis and. I reckon it'll be fun, come along if you want, and get a ticket. All right.

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

One thing I'm continually fascinated with is and, you know, from listening to previous podcasts. The impact of society and culture on how we behave in ways that we behave, in ways that we produce art.

And something that popped into my head this week. I remember back in like. 2005, 2006. And I be young fella going to nightclubs in Limerick. And. This was the height of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland. OK. 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 towards.

When Ireland suddenly became wealthy and people could have like when I was in fucking school, there was less than 60 or what cars like teenagers would fuck and 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 the back gardens, bouncy castles, whenever their child had a fucking a communion and fucking helicopters like normal people had bouncy castles and Bokat Janes and Ronan Keating CDs. But then there was like all these millionaires, there was a lot of millionaires in Ireland and it 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 and his helicopter once a week to collect his money. And this was Na'ama Nightclub's like Lemrick nightclubs on a Saturday. Not even a special Saturday, just a Saturday would have giant chocolate fountains, which 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 deja dead mouse on a private fucking jet so he could play Limerick on a Saturday.

No special occasion, just obscene amounts of money and the belief that the money would never, ever, ever disappear. And then this got me thinking about. The insanity of that claim is. Because the thing is, people didn't I didn't know what a fucking recession was, my brothers had told me about, ah, there was a recession in the 80s of people used to emigrate. I didn't 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 dead mouse is plain and then you're going with your friends in college to the fucking to where they live in their apartment and the owner is lending his helicopter on the roof in fucking Limerick, how then does this express itself in something as simple as the drink that you chose in the nightclub?

And I remember in in what we were drinking. Everyone was drinking this fucking drink rice called Goldschlager. Which was. A cinnamon liqueur, rice. 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 floating in it. And. I remember being being younger and asking, like, why the fuck, why are people drinking this?

And then someone would say to me, Oh man, that that's Goldschlager. If you you drink that because it has gold flakes in it. And what happens is the gold flakes in the drink. They 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 into your body quicker and you get really wrecked. So are a Goldschlager. So I'd go up an artery, Goldschlager and everyone else in the pub was or in the nightclub was doing it to.

And just. Everyone in Limerick is essentially drinking these drinks. To slit their own throats with gold. And knowingly doing it, not only knowingly doing it, but wanting to do it, I'm I'm drinking gold to slit my own throat on the inside to get as drunk as possible, and that the naivety of naivety of it was to. It was cinnamon. It was a cinnamon drink, so when you drank it, it burned your throat, but I burned her throat because it's fucking cinnamon cinnamon, it is a Barny substance, but no, no, not for the people of Lemrick.

The people of Lemrick were going my throat is burning. Therefore, it must be slating from gold. And now I'm pissed, really drunk. And. Like the Internet was a thing, but people didn't. It didn't you didn't use Google like that in 2006, it took a while for our brains to start asking the Internet questions, you 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, you know, 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 started engines weren't intelligent. So you might never find the answer. So you just accepted it.

And everyone accepted it. We're splitting our own throats with gold and it's grand, it's the Celtic Tiger, there's dead mouse, there's a helicopter. Bizarre and the thing to the lads. The lads who would have said, drink this, drink it, slit your throat. They were the same ones that were usually rugby lads and they were the same lads who like a year previously in school. What they used to fucking before they played a role would be matched the.

They used to get roles like tobacco, Rollie's, and they'd get paracetamol and they'd crumble the paracetamol into the rollie like ash 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 cold, slit their own fucking throat. And you know what they used to brag about? Dead, 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 sheets, 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 out, drinking car last night, man, I slipped my trust, slipped my chart with some girl, I got moldy work up there, was called in my shit and I'm going to smoke paracetamol. And this was Nana. That's that's the Troughton or crack, but the crowd of more crack, the children of 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 until years later to the fucking recession and the gold, the gold drinker's. Headed down to Australia, and they're not drinking gold now, they're not smoking paracetamol. They're down in Australia and they're Australians don't they're in their 30s and they're not coming back, and instead of bragging about drinking gold, they're on Facebook bragging about having solar panels on the roof in Sydney and selling the electricity back to the Australian government are my friend ironist.

Who was fond of drinking gold in 2006 is in parts 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? Small comparison, too much to drink and gold to shitting gold to now playing poker with excess sunlight. Shout out to Ironist in part, but it's just it's a fascinating thought I had.

It fascinated me that how how appropriate it is 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. He's 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 are Bitcoin are drinking gold, I suppose. What fascinates me about it, it's it's how the conditions of our environment would express themselves in in behavior, in how we behave and how we consume.

What I've been thinking about and what I want to explore this week is. Kind of 12th, 13th century Europe and the strange the relationship with dancing. Dancing and death. In Europe from about. Twelve hundred to 1500. I'm noticing this when I look through the history, this strange pattern that that's that I want to explore. As as an expression of its human, it's strange human behavior. And what are the conditions of society 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, pandemic's of dancing, I don't want to explore. The artwork. That went alongside his. 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 folk in years and years of training in art.

And when you're trained to be a professional artist, third level art master's level. Research is a huge part of your artistic process that can be and. Research, culture, society, sociology, research and history, so when I look at history and speak about history, I speak about it from the lens of the artist, so. Went from for me when I look at history. Through the artist's lens, I'm not necessarily looking for. I try not 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 heartache I'm looking for, the heartache. Where's the bit about history, where I get to creatively intervene and interpret history in a way that's. It creatively exciting. That's what I want to do this week, so in art history, depictions of death. It's called Memento Mori. And which I think that I think that's just momentum, I think means like a reminder and Morrie is like marked 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. And this is universal with all cultures. A skeleton represents death, right? Fairly obvious. But in the late Middle Ages, which is. It's like twelve fifty to the 1400's, the late Middle Ages, something unique is present in visual art and in stories around death that is is is depicted repeatedly as a dancing skeleton. And not only a dancing skeleton, it's the 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 are a noble person. And it's. To remind us about the wealthy of that. Death is coming and death will Danciu to the grave. Now, the thing is with the late medieval period. And one thing that makes me wonder, you know, why 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 not an. Like that 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 killed that many people. And it was caused by the bubonic plague, not a particularly pleasant disease. It caused the person to kind of break out and buyers and then eventually for parts of the body to just right away so people at the later stages of plague, what it would have resembled.

Zombies are skeletons because their faces were far enough. And people didn't understand germ theory, people didn't know what Jarman's what people didn't know what bacteria were, and the rich probably thought because the. They thought that pestilence and disease and these things were things that happened, poor people, and if you had money you could possibly avoid some of us pass the plague was killing everybody, including the clergy, including kings. It's a fucking disease. Doesn't give a shit if somebody is a pope or a peasant doesn't care to 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 they say is, it doesn't care about who you are, it's taken you. And as well, of course, look, art is created by patrons. Patrons have money. All right, so, Art. The artist survived was rarely, rarely created for the lay person, for the Payzant, 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 Middle Ages.

The plague was caused by. It was you know, it's it's it's a disease of globalization, 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 our way to Europe. Then the fleas would jump off these black rats by humans.

Then the plague managed to transfer across to human fleas and fleas and rats were what were causing this plague. It was it's not a virus. It's not like transmitted in the air. It was transmitted via fleas. And it was 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, the late medieval period, was there was climate change. No, not like human climate changes.

We haven't now the Anthropocene, as we call it, there was natural climate change. There was from about 900 to. Twelve fifty, there was a thing called the medieval warm period where the climate was just warmer, like 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 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 it's really green or it's full of ground. And he was lying to people saying Common settled here and was lying about the fact that it was full of ice.

Are 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 twelve fifty. 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 from it that died off and they left by about fourteen hundred. But this cold period in Europe. Definitely became a thing around 12, 50, and it had huge stressful effects, in particular, it caused a famine.

In about 13, in 13, hundreds from 13, 15 to 13, 57, it caused this massive famine in Europe where there was crop failure, a huge amounts of starvation, 13, 15. 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, OK, if the fucking plants aren't grown, do you have any animals to eat? Salt was a huge part of preserving meat around 13, 15. But because there was so much rain, they couldn't use the sun to evaporate seawater and collect salts. There was a salt shortage. That's what 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 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 to children disappearing with jaundice, huge European famine, the tartine, hundreds. Cannibalism became a thing people were eating each year, and one story that emerged was Hansel and Gretel and some Gretel is is a a German folk folktale. We know it from the Brothers Grimm stories, which are like the eighteen hundreds, but they got all their fucking stories from folk tales.

And Hansel and Gretel was a 13th century. German folk tale about children. Starve that hunger, disappear and 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 shapeshifting which eats the children, you know, and Hansel and Gretel comes from that period comes from the period of the 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 traumatized Europe. When a massive collective sense of stress. You had a load of revolt's 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 the tartine 70s onwards. There was two popes. You know, there was two men claiming to be pope, that 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 what all different artists and the depictions are around Europe is death. Being depicted as a dancing skeleton, the most famous cities, I suppose. There was a patent on an award coracle, Hans Holbein, the younger German fella, and he had an entire series of woodcuts in the 1920s which basically depicted.

Everyday scenes, either a peasant in the field or another person being accompanied by a dancing skeleton and one of the most obvious ones, not in art, but in like again, folktales that associate dancing and death is the story that the Pied Piper of Hamelin, 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 twelve hundred thirteen hundreds in Germany, the folk tale. And it's basically the story is, is that this paper, the town in Germany can't Hamlyn.

Which was overrun by rats. And this Pied Piper come in dressed in colorful 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 the railroads are, 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 famine. The great famine in Europe, that's. The children basically had to leave Germany, had to try train migrate east toward the likes of Poland, are up towards Russia and Pied Piper 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's a pied piper in the 13th century was like a person with brightly colored 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 the Pied Piper, as well as being colorfully 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 fuckin 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 humors 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 humors of the body in medieval medicine.

So if a person had, we said too much yellow bile. Then this person was someone who was excessively angry, are could fly off the handle, was seen to have had too much yellow boil, then black bile. If you had too much black bile, then you might, as 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 are people who got cancer and an excess of black bile.

The other humor was phlegm. People who were really like inactive are might have had injuries, are couldn't move or seem 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 humors. So the symptoms of the plague. You know, it caused fever, it caused you to sweat, it caused post to come out of your body.

Under that interpretation of medicine, the plague was seen as a blood disease out of the four humors, 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. Was looking at it today, you can kind of think death is 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 to the grave.

But maybe if you look at it through the lens of the medieval helmer's, that's. Dancing was seen as a way to stave off the plague, that's why engaging in something as.

Life-Giving as dancing that what you're doing is you're protecting the blood humor 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 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 got into a little a little Macarena pause. I don't have the ocarina. I do. I do. We have the return of the ocarina this week after a hiatus of several weeks. So I'm going to play the ocarina. It's a little Spanish flute so that when an adverb comes in, you're not startled by this.

This bit is a sponsored reading from frank and honest gourmet coffee, the coffee doesn't grow in Ireland, but Frank and honest are guaranteed Irish. I'm very picky with coffee, a lot of coffee to me. I don't like it. It tastes like. Not petrol, but some coffee tastes like how petrol would describe itself if petrol could describe itself, but not frank and honest coffee that tastes just very smooth, smooth. What would I as I find a slight smokiness, a pleasant smokiness to it, you can get frank and honest coffee in centuries and super values all over the country.

And you can also get their range of whole beans, ground, coffee and Capsis for you to enjoy it at home. It's gourmet coffee and it's also sustainable. All right. The coffee is Rainforest Alliance certified. And here's the best part. This is my favorite part. The cops are fully compostable and they're made in L.A. I write the coffee cups are made in L.A. That's what I want. I want to drink my coffee are cups that are made in L.A. so frank and honest coffee heading to a central SUPERVALU.

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Nice, Laura, Karina, so you would have heard an advert there for some bullshit. And support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, if you're listening to this podcast and you're getting enjoyment from it, please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing. And Patry on dot com forward, slash the blind by podcast. This podcast is is my sole source of income. I'm an artist. My industry has been ravaged, can't do gigs, can't really even sell books.

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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 excess of economy, you've got people drinking gold because they believe that it's slit their throats are smoke and paracetamol.

I suppose that's what got me on this train of thought, but in 14th century France. There was a convent for nuns, rice. And one day, one of them just started to meow like a cat. And the cat, the cat will be very closely associated with the devil in 14th century Catholicism, but one nun started the 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 fuckin army had to be brought in.

The army were brought in. To basically assault the nuns, to stop the meowing like cats. In 15th century Germany. Another Nunnally. One nonpaid, another non. 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 for Anon's or Biton each other until the 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 behavior, disease diseases in the late medieval period where plagues of dancing. Now, these things are called mass psychogenic illnesses.

It's like. 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, whereby physical complaints that are exhibited unconsciously have no corresponding organic source. So that's a that's that's a quote about what a psychogenic illness is. But. It's when. Behavior spread like a disease, it's not a disease, there's no bacteria, there's no virus, but the.

If 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 10, 21 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 them, then the priest sentenced them to a year of dancing as as punishment, and they kept doing it until they all died a year later, 12 47 again in Germany in a town called Raafat out and over 200 people started dancing on a bridge. Right. They danced on the bridge until it collapsed and they all drowned, not 13, 74. 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 13, 74, compulsive dancing became a fucking pandemic. Right, it spread. It started in Germany, spread through fuckin. The Netherlands spread to France. And you had thousands and thousands of people dancing for days and weeks, unable to stop, right?

And this. These these days wasn't pleasant, like these people were screaming. Unable to stop until just dying, dying from Dinesen, now the greatest dancing pandemic of all and the one that we have most kind of representation of an evidence for 15, 18 and Strausberg. Right. And. It killed a lot of people. Uncontrollable dancing spread out across Europe, right? It was one report said that 15 people a day were dying from uncontrollable plagues of dancing, not there's no fucking disease that's causing this moment after catching an illness.

It's a behavioral pandemic. And the reason I think that we have information about this one from 15, 18 and around 15, 18, a type of a type of art became very popular, not known as genre painting. Genre painting was kind of a Dortch inspired pre baroque type of painting where the subject matter wasn't like 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 stages in the Middle Ages. You're either painting biblical scenes are scenes from classical antiquity. Imagine things are you have realism or you're painting literally the lives of the peasants. So because of this, lots of paintings and drawings and woodcuts exist of the dancing plague of 15 18 in Strausberg. Now, again, this wasn't people having crack.

A dancing plague would happen, and as soon as other people found out about it, our 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 there were dancing against their own will. Now people say that like there's a condition called Ergotism where there's this. It's a mold, right? So, like, remember, I mentioned that you had this cold period, so in 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 mold that grows on rye and unsweet, ergo are gas and it's slightly hallucinogenic. And when people if the wheat and rice to make their bread was rotting and they were consuming a lot of this. Argott, it would cause it'd 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 mall that grew on wheat, but 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 moldy fuckin wheat, 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 there were also dancing beyond what their regular physical endurance could do. They were they were dancing beyond they were dancing themselves to death. Sought to engage in a physical activity until you actually die truly means that the person doesn't have control over their own behavior as some type of strange mob hysteria, not me.

I view it I think it's it's a massive trauma response, that's what I think it is. Your view is 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 fuckin popes, 15, 18 in particular, and this is something I haven't seen other people bring up. But if you think of 15, 18, what happened in 14, Ninetto? The Portuguese went and quote unquote, discovered America.

I think future shock, I think the change. The 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 was an alien on television? What would that do to our sanity? So in 15, 18, which is roughly 20 years after the fucking Portuguese coming back and going, the world's the world is actually not flatheads 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 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. Dane. You bring that into human theory, the theory of the four humors you I'm contactor, I'm definitely contextualising.

Like if you are 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 the theory of humour's 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 behavior of pandemic expressed itself as folk and dancing in Strausberg, invading the dancing pandemic became so bad that like 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 ST's. 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 Red Breast, strangely enough, where it's a disease that. It when people get it and that this is an actual disease now, when people get this disease, they move in ways that look like a dance to the disease was called St.

Fighter's dance. Now said Sandfire is danced the disease that's completely different to the 1918 pandemic of dancing that was killing people. So in Strausberg, they couldn't do anything about the people dance and people were dropping dead in the streets. So what the authorities in Strausberg did is they figured the only way to. The only way to prevent the dancing was to. I encourage people to dance more so they started setting up in the town square. Like a stage with a band.

And encourage encourage everyone to start fuckin dancing. So now you had voluntary dancers and people suffering from a disease of dancing. And so dancing plagues continue to be a thing up until about the seventeen hundreds where they disappeared, probably with the fuckin Enlightenment changing in medicine and science and knowledge. Just probably shifted culture to the point where dancing was no longer seen as. Our response to environmental stress was. What fascinates me about those humans, the humans in the 15th, in the twelve hundred thirteen hundred fifteen eighteen, they're the same humans as me and you, the exact same biologically.

So what is the new dancing pandemic, what is the new. Behavior. 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. Drink and gold, because the gold slit your throat and letting alcohol. There's a powerful there's a beautiful irrationality to this. It makes no fucking sense, it's fucking ridiculous, it's ridiculous by this drink, there's gold in it.

It cut your throat to get your act. But we all did it. I did it. I'm smart. I bought shots of this drink. Because all the 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's. 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 caused mass. That's true dancing pandemic's. In the late medieval period. So that's that's this week's podcast, that's this week's podcast. And. I don't was a coherent or was it a ramble, like I said, I don't have a consistent heartache for this one. I just have a collection of thoughts. That intrigued 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, 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 the 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 have a lot of time in 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 1400's, enjoy yourself, your. This week's podcast is sponsored by Brave New World, which is a Sky original drama based on the book of the same name by Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. It's an adaptation which asks topical questions, and it draws parallels to the current world we live in. Oh, sounds spicy. A central theme of Brave New World is happiness or freedom.

How much of our individuality, freedom of choice and privacy are we willing to sacrifice in exchange for always being happy? Which sounds frighteningly familiar to my actual life and my relationship with my smartphone. But there you go. I write all episodes of Brave New World are available on Sky. Now check it out.