Plague and Lockdown do strange things to your psyche. If you can’t go out you have to go in, which can be just as dangerous to your health as crossing the doorstep. Sometimes fear and enforced isolation can evoke great things from a person. Shakespeare wrote ‘Hamlet’ in isolation during a bout of plague, though let’s face it, whilst adversity may bring out the best in Shakespeare, the rest of us are less likely to vibrate at the creative end of frustration and constraint.
Our own personal responses to covid may seem absolutely of their time because we have no reference points by which to gauge our experience. So it may come as a comfort to know that in previous ages folk were just as mentally fucked up by plague as we are now, with conspiracy theories that would put Qanon to shame and obscure mass phenomenon that puzzled even Paracelsus.
If we look back to the Black Death, the great plague of 1347, what can learn about human response to plague back then which might help us in our own current situation?
Well, that its a shit show.
Of course everyone left standing was quite a lot better off, though this only seems to have applied to their pockets. Yes, the Renaissance ensued eventually, but from a world whose spirit and morals had become as sulphurous as the ‘pestilent air’ they feared to breathe.
The Black Death evoked three distinct responses from the survivors, all of which you may also find in the individual response to trauma.
The first of these was the explosive popularity of hard core religious extremists called the ‘Brotherhood of the Flagellants’ whose numbers swelled in Europe to the tens of thousands. These folk would travel from town to town beating themselves in an orgy of self punishment, believing the plague had to do with human sin which their suffering intended to expiate, thus mollifying God’s wrath,
‘their heads covered as far as the eyes; their look fixed on the ground, accompanied by every token of the deepest contrition and mourning. They were robed in sombre garments, with red crosses on the breast, back, and cap, and bore triple scourges, tied in three or four knots, in which points of iron were fixed… which they applied to their limbs, amid sighs and tears, with such violence that the blood flowed from the wounds. [The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania, by Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker]
Children behave like this when they blame and punish themselves for their parent’s divorce or the death of a pet rabbit. It works. You have authorship of your fate once more, only problem being you have to think of yourself as the alpha and omega of everything which can quickly lead to tears.
Which it did.. very badly, prompting the second classic response to unmitigated terror which is splitting and projection. The Church took umbrage at the Flagellants popularity and burned their leaders alive. The rest joined forces with them and sought out new scapegoats which they naturally found everywhere.
Under catastrophic circumstances the ruler is normally held responsible and summarily offered to the Gods. The peasants of medieval Europe rarely got so organized as to overthrow their rulers even in times unravaged by plague, let alone whilst every third person lay dead and so they happily found substitutes in the Jewish people, many thousands of whom were burnt alive in wooden structures specially constructed for the event.
‘A few who promised to embrace Christianity were spared, and their children taken from the pile. The youth and beauty of several females also excited some commiseration, and they were snatched from death against their will; many, however, who forcibly made their escape from the flames were murdered in the streets. ibid
Allegedly, this was revenge for the unlikely scenario that European Jewry had somehow conspired to poison every well from the Atlantic to the Black sea. It seems that terrorizing and murdering others releases the fear of Death’s hold on one’s own neck for a spell. Not to mention the appeasement of Dark Gods whose names we may not use but whom we hope will still accept our offerings.
Christian Europe’s response to the Plague was ethnic cleansing, an orgy of mass murder. It seems the church’s governance and powers of moral restraint became as weakened as its flock. Priests were somehow dying as quickly as their parishioners. The containing collective structure of on-going New Testament style religious life was gone, receded into an archaic time where God and Wotan are the same thing. Having been the cause and the repentance, you are now the divine vengeance torching name-your-minority-here.
A third and somewhat less homicidal response to the unrelenting reminder of human frailty which only mounds of the dead can impress upon the imagination, is the curious collective phenomenon of St John’s dance, entirely peculiar to the plague decades. This dance macabre was a sudden, unsolicited fit of exuberant leaping about, particularly at the sight of overwhelming death or at the sound of incessant mourning, a seizure of wild and ecstatic bacchanalian dancing; and it was contagious. Sometimes hundreds of citizens would be seized at once. These dances would often culminate in epileptic fitting, shamanic like trances and visions. They would have to be revived by having their inert bodies wrapped in a cocoon of cloth and then twisted tight with a stick to constrain the abdomen. Others swore they could only be returned to normalcy by the exigencies of a good beating.
‘‘At length the increasing number of the affected excited no less anxiety than the attention that was paid to them.” ibid
In other words, the dancers amused the crowd twice over. Firstly by their performance and secondly because you then got to kick shit out of them.
It was decided that the dancers had become possessed by the Devil and that they should be exorcised. Beatings by the Laity had proven insufficient as a means of therapy and dancers were being killed rather than dispossessed of their demons. Those attending the dance had become as extreme in their exuberance as the dancers themselves resulting in ordinances that no one should make any square-toed shoes which of course created an outpouring of collective grievance among the peasantry demanding their rights to wear shoes of any design they so wished.
They’re coming for your boots…
In Strasburg the mayor kindly arranged for two hundred dancers to be taken to the shrine of St John the Baptist, their patron saint, so as to have their demons cast out by the direct influence of the saint himself. A thousand years of priestly intercession had to be laid aside for the sake of this direct, restorative, experience. The dancers needed [and received] some kind of unmediated encounter with the divine to resolve their affliction.
St John is an interesting figure. There is an aspect of him which is pre-Christian, akin to the Green Man or Cernnunos, the lord of wild things, a mediator of humanity and nature, able to reconcile opposites, ‘to tame predator and prey so they might lie down together’. It’s as though the dancers had spontaneously managed to find a way of healing some of the collective splitting brought on by blind unrelenting fear and found, in John, a figure who could unite the beliefs upon which they were raised with the deeper layers of the psyche upon which they had, like Job on his dung heap, been thrown.
It seems that besides the violent regression of both Church and State, so too was there this spontaneous and mysterious catharsis of the dancers, momentarily orchestrated by powers beyond their control, in whose wild gyrations we might glimpse Shiva’s dance of Creation, in whose madness lies also the shed boundaries of atonement, in whose patron saint we might find a transitional object to connect back to the Great Mother, wherein some peace with mortal terror might be found.
