Translatio

Renegade physician Paracelsus compared St. John’s Day dances to earthquakes, epileptic tremors, and tics. This ecosophical and vitalist concept, according to which all sorts of bodies echo one another’s shaking motions, countered long-held academic prejudice against witchcraft; neither choreomaniacs nor witches were subject to supernatural forces. Rather, the ‘vital spirits’ caused limbs, like branches, to shake. What’s more, dancing was now thought to cure dancing, and municipal authorities keen to keep a Strasbourg dancing mania in check employed guards to help wear dancers out—while exorcism associated religious, municipal, and medical experts. The translatio or passage from collective to individual disorder, epitomized in St. Vitus, now patron saint of all dance maniacs, continued throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as neurologists’ theories of chorea, epilepsy and insanity aligned popular carousing with individual quaking motions. Choreomania came to signal the epidemic proliferation of what Giorgio Agamben has styled purposeless gesture.