text:
Eastern Sports and Western Bodies
The “Indian Club” in the United States
By Daniel Elkind
April 1, 2020

Although largely forgotten today, exercise by club swinging was all the rage in the 19th century. Daniel Elkind explores the rise of the phenomenon in the US, and how such efforts to keep trim and build muscle were inextricably entwined with the history of colonialism, immigration, and capitalist culture.

The oldest film included on the National Film Registry of the US Library of Congress features a pale boy calmly swinging a pair of wooden clubs, apparently as part of an exercise routine. Approximately twelve seconds long, Newark Athlete was directed by the Scottish inventor and early associate of Thomas Edison, William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson, in collaboration with cinematographer William Heise at Edison’s laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, sometime in the late spring of 1891.
Though the wooden clubs brandished by the Newark athlete in this jumpy fragment are now a thing of the past, evidence of their influence can still be seen. John Quincy Adams Ward’s celebrated Indian Hunter sculpture, for example — first installed in New York’s Central Park in 1868 — was partly modeled on a bodybuilder and club devotee named Frederick Küner, whose unusually defined physique was meant to imbue the bronze figure with mythic strength.1 The so-called “Indian clubs” credited for this defined physique may now seem like mere novelty items, but in the nineteenth century they were a staple of fitness routines and a familiar sight at athletic clubs across the United States. Unlike dumbbells and medicine balls, they also played a role beyond keeping the body trim. In England, suffragettes such as E. Sylvia Pankhurst carried them, along with long hatpins, in clashes with armed police: they proved particularly effective in getting police horses to abruptly sit down, dismounting the bobbies, and knocking off their helmets.
The clubs swung by the Newark athlete, however, are a short and lightweight version developed primarily to supple the limbs, not to build muscle (or knock policemen off horses). Weighing in at around 1.5 lbs., these wieldy clubs were used mainly in early gymnastics competitions and exhibitions staged by various Turning societies — patriotic fitness groups that had their origins in early nineteenth-century Germany. These societies proudly promoted a collective, firmly Protestant spirit of fitness and graceful coordination (rather than sheer individual strength) through group routines often accompanied by music. Turning was the brainchild of an eccentric German schoolteacher named Friedrich Jahn, a nationalist who crusaded against the French and drew attention to himself by living in a cave and occasionally promenading through town in nothing but a bearskin. Also known as the “Turnvater”, Jahn had in turn been influenced by the pioneers of modern gymnastics, Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths — author of the first gymnastics manual, Gymnastik für die Jugend (1793), which was concerned not only with how to exercise but also with why one should — and Johann Basedow, a philosopher and social reformer from Hamburg who advocated a more egalitarian approach to education, consisting of a practical curriculum conducted in the vernacular. As Jahn had envisioned, the Turner movement was highly influential and spread rapidly throughout Europe and across the pond.
The first Turners arrived in the United States in 1824. Though gymnastics ambassadors like Charles Follen, Francis Lieber, and Charles Beck — who published his translation of Jahn’s Deutsche Turnkunst in 1828 — were eager to demonstrate the basics to American fitness circles, the movement didn’t take off until the failed German Revolution of 1848 brought a critical mass of “forty-eighters” to New England, the Great Plains, and beyond.2 Cincinnati became the first city to build a Turnverein in 1848; Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland quickly followed suit.3 As their constituencies grew, these turning societies evolved into more than fitness clubs; they were veritable centers of German-American social, cultural, and political life.
It comes as no surprise, then, that when club swinging debuted at the 1904 Summer Games in St. Louis, the US men’s team swept the field, winning gold, silver, and bronze in the new artistic gymnastics event. Edward Hennig, winner of the gold medal, belonged to the Turnverein Vorwärts in Cleveland; Emil Voigt, who took silver, was a member of the local Concordia Turnverein in St. Louis. Both performed for five full minutes with a set of 3-lb. clubs. Other German-Americans, like George Brosius of the Milwaukee Turnverein and William Reuter, a “forty-eighter” from the Turngemeinde of Davenport, Iowa, fulfilled Jahn’s vision by convincing school districts across the Midwest and beyond to make exercise a cornerstone of public education.4
In contrast to this so-called light gymnastics, the longer, heavier clubs weighed anywhere from four to twenty pounds each and were used almost exclusively by strongmen and a growing class of male middle managers to build conspicuous brawn. A key figure in the popularisation of this more individualistic and muscle-focused take on club swinging was the British health evangelist Donald Walker — author of the highly popular Victorian health guide British Manly Exercises (1834), its sequel Walker’s Manly Exercises (ca. 1837), and the monumentally titled Exercises for Ladies: Calculated to preserve and improve beauty and to prevent and correct personal defects, inseparable from constrained or careless habits: founded on physiological principles (1835). Like the health exploits of Septimus Crisparkle in Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Walker’s “laborious exertions” in particular were intended to “strengthen the human constitution”, preventing illness and purifying the body without “pouring drugs into the stomach”, allowing one to become, as the title promised, “manly”.5
Another key figure in the popularization of this particular brand of club swinging was a man going by the name of Professor Harrison. At one time considered the strongest man in England, Harrison was a “well-known English Professor of Gymnastics”6 whose enviable physique furnished all the “ocular proof” anyone needed to believe that the clubs were indeed effective. It was the witnessing in 1861 of one of Harrison’s public performances with the “mammoth war-clubs” which inspired an American named Sim Kehoe to go into business and put these muscle-building clubs into the hands of the average American.
Though in many ways opposites, Turning and bodybuilding could both be described as manifestations of the Muscular Christianity movement that in part sprung from rapid urbanization. Throughout the nineteenth century, more and more Americans were moving to crowded cities, abandoning the agrarian rhythms and activities that had defined previous generations, and learning to share diminishing space with strangers. The tensions of this physical proximity gave birth to new forms of social interaction, as gyms and Turnvereins doubled as havens for immigrants and churches for new American city-dwellers. Blending religion and fitness, Thomas Hughes, the novelist whose Tom Brown at Oxford (1859) inspired the term Muscular Christianity, wrote that “the least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief that a man’s body is given to him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak [and] the advancement of all righteous causes”.7 This vision of a project of rigorous self-training translated well to American cities in which entrepreneurialism and individualism went hand in hand — and the righteous cause of making money reigned supreme.
With the high demand for affordable fitness among America’s new urban populations, the time was ripe for entrepreneurs like Kehoe, the dashing young “King of Clubs”, who featured corseted ladies and muscular athletes alongside a caricature of himself in advertisements for his line of clubs with adjustable weights. Kehoe had some experience in making and selling gymnastics equipment, and threw himself headlong into the role of strength-training evangelist. For his philosophy, he borrowed the name “Muscular Christianity” and claimed bankers and businessmen — even generals and statesmen — among his many clients, rather than the usual denizens of sports clubs. At the conclusion of the Civil War, Kehoe sent a set of rosewood clubs and dumbbells to Ulysses S. Grant, as evidenced by a reply from the general, dated April 9, 1866, reprinted, as a matter of course, in Kehoe’s manual.
The 1860s were a time of great enthusiasm for Indian clubs in particular and male strength training in general. “These clubs act like an incantation,” crowed American Educational Monthly in 1864:
You can not touch them, you can not lift them for the simplest exercise, without causing strength to flow into every member of your body as naturally and irresistibly as water into the conduit . . . New systems of muscles seem to shoot out from your shoulder-blades, enabling you to do, almost without effort, what you could not dream of doing before.8
The Olympic Club in San Francisco, founded in 1860, was home to athletes and strongmen like Charles Bennett (the “California Hercules”) and Horace Fletcher, an Indian club enthusiast who is today remembered — if at all — as the man who “chewed his way to greatness”, founding a school of mastication that came to be known as Fletcherism: his patented technique of chewing your food exactly thirty-two times. William James immortalized him in The Varieties of Religious Experience as that quintessentially American character, the self-assured prophet of New Thought or “the religion of healthy-mindedness,”9 and even recommended mindful eating to his brother Henry, who suffered from digestive issues. In Henry James: The Mature Master, Sheldon Novick calls Fletcherism “a twentieth-century American mingling of yogic practice and Protestant optimism.”10
Fletcher had emerged from his own health struggles convinced that people often “think themselves into their graves” instead of taming their minds and bodies through the application of strict discipline.11 As he explained to a journalist:
I was once a person who thought that health and disease, misery and happiness, were all pretty much matters of chance, haphazard-happenings like dice-throwing in the game of life — with the dice loaded at times. Disease and pains, it seemed to me, were afflictions, perhaps punishments for sins (our own or our progenitors), but they were scattered among the children of men in the most casual way imaginable. Then there came my great awakening — my conversion or illumination, shall I say? [. . .] From that time to this, I have known that everything that happened to me was my own fault, or my own reward.12
It may not be altogether surprising that, across the pond, one of Fletcher’s most dedicated disciples was Franz Kafka, a writer obsessed with the idea that everything was his own fault, and who, when he wasn’t at his desk at the insurance institute in Prague, subscribed to just about every popular wellness fad going — including Jørgen Peter Müller’s fifteen-minute system and Eugene Sandow’s body sculpting — attempting to transform himself into one of Max Nordau’s “Muscular Jews” in the privacy of his own room.13
Indeed, many nineteenth-century health and fitness systems eagerly reproduced testimonials from ordinary merchants and bank clerks (such as Josef K.) who’d achieved stunning results. Unlike the Turner movement, which emphasized the collective, these approaches were both more personal, and more atomized. Sim Kehoe’s illustrated manual The Indian Club Exercises (1866), for instance, was specifically addressed to aspiring managers whose enthusiasm for this form of mortification of the flesh was rooted in the fear of a generalized and creeping “deformity” — in short, that the “civilized” now suffered from all the hard-won benefits of civilization, becoming more sedentary and physically attenuated, and therefore less vital than their ancestors, not to mention the “savages”14 to whom they so often compared themselves. “Bodily strength is a concomitant of good health,” wrote Walker, citing dubious anthropological studies,
which is produced and supported by a regular supply of wholesome and nutritious food, and by active occupation. The industrious and well-fed middle classes of a civilized community may, therefore, be reasonably expected to surpass, in this endowment, the miserable savages, who are never well-fed, and too frequently depressed by absolute want and all other privations.15
An impressive masculine physique was seen to demonstrate not only the virtues of a given fitness system but also the moral character of the individual.
It’s not clear when exactly the clubs first arrived in the United States. Nor is it clear where and when the Turnvater Jahn first incorporated them into his system. Whether he adopted the clubs from a British army manual or some other source, it seems certain that all Western club swinging derived from colonial encounters with local wrestling traditions in the East. Though Donald Walker was largely responsible for popularizing them in the English-speaking world, perhaps the first to mention them — and to christen them Indian clubs — was the American-born Swissman Peter Heinrich Clias, in the fourth edition of his Elementary Course of Gymnastic Exercises (1825).16
Though “Indian club” isn’t exactly a misnomer, some of the clubs called by this name are now thought to descend from the large meels used in Persian Pahlevani and zourkhaneh culture, a kind of ritual gymnastics that combines pre-Islamic, Sufi, and Shia spiritual exercises. Likely arriving in the Indian subcontinent with the Mughals during the late sixteenth century, these traditions were possibly “crossbred” with local Indian grappling (Malla-yuddha) to create the hybrid we know as Pehlwani today. The British Museum owns an album known as The Manley Ragamala (1610), illustrated in the provincial Mughal style, depicting athletes with various apparatuses, one of which resembles a gada (a large mallet).17 A later version, in the Rajasthani style, clearly shows an athlete with a pair of mudgars (the heavy clubs still used today). The shorter, lighter clubs called jori in India are believed to have developed independently — from the battle mace described in ancient Sanskrit epics. Peacetime versions of jori, used by wrestlers — and eventually soldiers — for training purposes, are mentioned in print for the first time in the twelfth-century text the Manasollasa and the thirteenth-century Malla-Purana, emphasizing the clubs’ long association with masculinity and a kind of ascetic athleticism.18
Soldiers in the employ of the East India Company may have picked up club exercises from local Indian troops as early as the seventeenth century. But it wasn’t until the following centuries that these exercises became common among British colonial troops. As mortality rates for these foreigners in India soared, the overwhelmed medical staff sought to adopt new forms of bodily discipline for the troops. Seeing their patients suffering from numerous illnesses, they were induced to give local traditions a closer look. According to Conor Heffernan, wrestlers and other conspicuously muscled local specimens provided a pointed contrast to the weak and undisciplined foreigners: “Those wielding Indian clubs effectively were depicted as being in complete control of their desires”.19 Soon club swinging became standard in British army drills and the way was paved for its adoption by the public back home. Even Queen Victoria’s exasperated physician, Dr. Clark, prescribed the “frequent use of Indian Clubs” to strengthen the monarch’s arm muscles.20
For most of the nineteenth century, however, Indian club swinging (at least in its non-Turnverein varieties), like most physical training, was male-dominated. With notable exceptions like Madame Beaujeu-Hawley — who owned gyms and advocated gymnastics training for women from the 1820s on21 — and “middle-class women such as Leonora Geary, Mrs. Thomas and Madame Ferzi”, who “opened independently run Indian sceptre [ultra-light club used by women] and dancing classes for Englishwomen”,22 the fairer sex was generally encouraged to train in moderation, if at all, and to avoid becoming too strong or too muscular. Male authors like Walker, who wrote a separate guide “for Ladies”, considered feminine bodies more delicate and unruly than their own — though Walker was at least liberal enough to encourage club training in the first place. Athletes and performers who pursued physical fitness like Charmion and her “Trapeze Disrobing Act” risked being turned into a sideshow attraction.23 A photo of a lone female gymnast wielding clubs, observed by a sea of expectant male onlookers at the Sutro Baths in San Francisco circa 1915, hints at the struggle women athletes of the time faced.
As Germanophobia rose and fell and rose again with the world wars, Indian clubs (which were, despite their Indian and British provenance, mainly associated with the Turner movement) largely disappeared from the gyms of the United States. Beginning as early as the 1890s, new team sports like volleyball and basketball siphoned off interest, while contact sports like football and hockey drew larger crowds (as well as radio and television audiences), ultimately eclipsing individual competition in popularity. The quaint world of the Newark athlete and his clubs receded further into the dusty background of the nineteenth century.
Yet the ideas of that era would prove far more stubborn and enduring. The relationship between physical cultivation, moral virtue, and social competence — and the breathless entrepreneurialism that packages it all together — is still very much with us. The “muscle display performances” first popularized by Eugen Sandow, and still evident on gym ads the world over, equate muscles and mastery. In this conflation of “power with simple physical strength,” as Michael Anton Budd writes, there has been “a push against the prevailing experience of a machine age in which the body was in some ways less exalted as a productive resource.”24 Thus, exercising and building unreasonable muscle mass (often by the wielding of Indian clubs) might also be seen as a kind of protest among the sedentary classes — clerks and secretaries disenchanted with their abstract, time-consuming work and nostalgic for the ostensibly more meaningful, slower-paced labor of their parents and grandparents.
While we haven’t seen a widespread return of Indian clubs specifically, similar resistance training techniques, such as those using Russian kettlebells, are enjoying a popular resurgence. And it seems that among today’s sedentary classes, exercise that can be practiced alone in the privacy of one’s own home, as club swinging was in the nineteenth century, is more popular than ever.
These lines from an article in the Atlantic Monthly of May 1859, could have been ripped from a modern-day Peloton ad:
“But how shall I find time to follow out even one of these exercises?” objects the victim of American social life. It is true, he cannot. We live so fast that we have no time to live. Nevertheless, gymnastics have one advantage adapted to our hurried habits. They afford the most exercise in the shortest time. In no other way, so easily accessible, can as much powerful motion be used in so brief a space.25
Until this conception of the body is itself superseded by biohacking or cyborgism, resistance training and patented fitness routines will remain “gymnastic pemmican”,26 and no gain will accrue without pain.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Daniel Elkind


text:
“Theire Soe Admirable Herbe”
How the English Found Cannabis
By Benjamin Breen
February 20, 2020

In the 17th century, English travelers, merchants, and physicians were first introduced to cannabis, particularly in the form of bhang, an intoxicating edible which had been getting Indians high for millennia. Benjamin Breen charts the course of the drug from the streets of Machilipatnam to the scientific circles of London.

Not long after he arrived in Machilipatnam, Thomas Bowrey began to wonder what it was that the people of Machilipatnam were smoking.
The bustling port city on India’s Coromandel Coast felt fantastical to the young East India Company merchant. During the first days of his visit in 1673, Bowrey marveled at wonders like “Venomous Serpents [which] danced” to the tune of “a Musicianer, or rather Magician”, and “all Sortes of fine Callicoes . . . curiously flowred”.1 Above all, Bowrey was most fascinated by the effects of an unfamiliar drug. The Muslim merchant community in the city was, as Bowrey put it, “averse [to] . . . any Stronge [alcoholic] drinke”. Yet, he noted, “they find means to besott themselves Enough with Bangha and Gangah”, i.e. cannabis. Gangah, though “more pleasant”, was imported from Sumatra (and as such was “Sold at five times the price”), whereas Bangha, “theire Soe admirable herbe”, was locally grown. The word Bangha came to be more commonly transliterated as bhang, and nowadays generally refers specifically to an edible preparation (usually a drink). It is not clear whether Bowrey uses the word with such a specific meaning in mind but either way it is this liquid form, “the most pleasant way of takeinge it”, which he opts to experiment with, as opposed to smoking it, which he describes (with perhaps some trepidation) as a “a very speedy way to be besotted”.
Bowrey initially compared the effects of the drug to alcohol. Yet it seemed that bhang’s properties were more complex, “Operat[ing] accordinge to the thoughts or fancy” of those who consumed it. On the one hand, those who were “merry at that instant, shall Continue Soe with Exceedinge great laughter”, he wrote, “laughinge heartilie at Every thinge they discerne”. On the other hand, “if it is taken in a fearefull or Melancholy posture”, the consumer could “seem to be in great anguish of Spirit”. The drug seemed to be a kind of psychological mirror that reflected — or amplified — the inner states of consumers. Small wonder, then, that when Bowrey resolved to try it, he did so while hidden in a private home with “all dores and Windows” closed. Bowrey explained that he and his colleagues feared that the people of Machilipatnam would “come in to behold any of our humours thereby to laugh at us”.2
Bowrey’s account of the resulting effects is worth quoting at length:
It Soon tooke its Operation Upon most of us, but merrily, Save upon two of our Number, who I suppose feared it might doe them harme not beinge accustomed thereto. One of them Sat himself downe Upon the floore, and wept bitterly all the Afternoone; the Other terrified with feare did runne his head into a great Mortavan Jarre, and continued in that posture 4 hours or more; 4 or 5 of the number lay upon the Carpets (that were Spread in the roome) highly Complementinge each Other in high terms, each man fancyinge himselfe noe lesse then an Emperour. One was quarralsome and fought with one of the wooden Pillars of the Porch, untill he had left himself little Skin upon the knuckles of his fingers.3
Reckless self-experimentation with drugs is sometimes assumed to be a modern practice. Accounts like Bowrey’s disabuse us of this notion. Bowrey and his merchant friends were plainly interested in bhang as a recreational intoxicant, even if three of Bowrey’s group seem to have found the experience to be less than optimal — to put it mildly.
Bowrey, who would later author the first English dictionary of the Malay language, was what his contemporaries called a “philosophical traveler”.4 His interest in cannabis lay not only in its recreational value but in its “curiosity” as a wondrous substance with hidden properties. He was also keenly interested in discovering substances with the potential to be commodified. However, converting a drug like cannabis into a global commodity was not easy. The drug was embedded in a local spiritual and cultural framework — Bowrey himself seems to have viewed it as a distinctively Muslim substance. The England of Bowrey’s time was shot through with paranoia and prejudice relating to fears of both Catholic conspirators and Muslim (specifically, Ottoman Turkish) invaders. Nevertheless, forging alliances with both Portuguese Catholics and Muslims was essential for British merchants seeking a foothold in the East Indies. Bowrey’s primary contact in Machilipatnam had been “Petro Loveyro, an antient Portuguees”, who Bowrey said he came to “[know] very well.” Petro, along with Bowrey’s Muslim bodyguard, may have played a role in Bowrey’s introduction to cannabis.
Even if these religious biases were overcome, a final challenge was in store for a drug like cannabis. How to prove, conclusively, that it had any value as either a medicine or as a recreational high? Assessing the “occult causes” of a drug’s virtues came to be a signature goal of the Royal Society and of early modern natural philosophy as a whole. It was a goal buoyed by Iberian-mediated links to pharmacological knowledge in the colonies. But it was also one that depended on the erasure of these links. The sorts of witnesses that the Royal Society deemed trustworthy, after all, tended to be elite, Protestant, and British. Too strong a reliance on figures like Petro Loveyro, or Bowrey’s unnamed bodyguard, was epistemologically unacceptable. On both a cultural and a chemical level, British scientists sought to “purify” pharmaceuticals of their Iberian Catholic, indigenous, tropical, or colonial roots.
Medieval Christian and Muslim travelers such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta expected to find marvels along the edges of their mental maps, spinning tales of roc’s eggs, “mellified man”, or elixirs of life. Some medieval commentators even speculated that tropical drugs and spices were fragments from the Garden of Eden, making them items of everyday commerce that were somehow also imbued with an aspect of the sacred.5 In the sixteenth century, however, we encounter a new emphasis on the experimental investigation of Indies drugs, one spearheaded in the Portuguese empire by Garcia da Orta and in the Spanish by the physicians Nicolás Monardes and Francisco Hernández.
As with the simultaneously occurring transformations in cosmology and physics, these investigative works demonstrated a newfound interest in “explaining the appearances” of wondrous tropical phenomena  — not just reporting marvels, but seeking to demystify them. Francisco Hernández, for instance, lavished attention on describing the wonders of the drugs, poisons, and antidotes he encountered in the colony of New Spain. His was a totalizing mission — to document the natural history of Mexico in its entirety and, by seeing the thousands of discrete naturalia involved as part of a larger system, to understand it in a new way.6 Others focused on phenomena that broke down the boundaries of existing European epistemologies. They fixated on fruits that could dissolve the iron in a knife, leaves with “miraculous” powers to poison or heal, and woods and stones that glowed in the dark. Scientists today hunt for particles that disprove their theories of the fundamental laws of nature; early modern natural philosophers searched for drugs that did the same.
The key point of contact for introducing the mysteries of cannabis to England appears to have been not Bowrey but another English East India Company merchant, Robert Knox. In the 1670s, Knox fled from years of captivity in the kingdom of Kandy in the interior of Sri Lanka by piloting a stolen sloop along the Dutch-controlled coast. Parched with thirst and floating through hostile territory, Knox and a fellow escapee were forced to drink “[p]onds of rain water . . . so thick and muddy, that the very filth would hang in our Beards . . . by which means . . . we used often to be Sick of violent Fevers and Agues”.
Remembering his brush with death, Knox concluded that he would have died were it not for the anti-nausea effects of a certain South Asian antidote —cannabis. “At length we learned an Antidote and Counter-Poyson against the filthy venemous water, which so operated by the blessing of God, that after the use thereof we had no more Sickness”, Knox would recall. “It is only a dry leaf: they call it in Portugueze Banga . . . and this we eat Morning and Evening upon an empty Stomach. It intoxicates the Brain, and makes one giddy”.7 After Knox reached London safely in September 1680, he retained a taste for this intoxicating “Counter-Poyson” and found a source able to procure it back home. We know this because, on November 7, 1689, Robert Hooke met with Knox at a London coffee house to obtain a sample of what Hooke called the “intoxicating leaf and seed, by the Moors called Ganges, in Portug[uese] Banga, in Chingales Consa”. Hooke added in his diary that the drug was reported to him as being “wholesome, though for a time it takes away the memory and understanding”.8
On December 18, 1689, Hooke delivered a lecture to the Royal Society, describing his administration of the drug to an unnamed “patient” (perhaps Knox, or even Hooke himself).9 “The Dose of it is about as much as may fill a common Tobacco-Pipe”, Hooke explained, although the route of administration he tested was to grind the leaves and seeds into a fine powder, then chew and swallow them. Before long, Hooke wrote,
the Patient understands not, nor remembereth any Thing that he seeth, heareth or doth, in that Extasie but becomes, as it were, a mere Natural, being unable to speak a Word of Sense; yet is he very merry and laughs and sings and speaks . . . yet he is not giddy or drunk, but walks and dances and sheweth many odd Tricks.10
Despite emphasizing this loss of “Understanding” and “Sense”, Hooke’s assessment was positive. The drug, he explained, “is so well known and experimented by Thousands, and the Person that brought it has so often experimented with it himself”, that “there is no Cause of Fear, ‘tho possibly there may be of Laughter”. Hooke concluded by noting that he was currently attempting to grow the seeds in London, and that “if it can be here produced” the plant could “prove as considerable a Medicine in Drugs, as any that is brought from the Indies”.11
Hooke’s excited remarks about cannabis’ effects reflected the high stakes of uncovering the hidden properties of drugs in the seventeenth century. If powers to heal, cause sleep, alleviate pain, or cure melancholy could be explained, then who was to say that they couldn’t also be amplified? Via the efforts of Hooke and his colleagues, the microscope and telescope had expanded the natural limits of human vision. Might it be possible that the technological modification of psychoactive drugs could allow an expansion of other human senses and faculties?
In the short term, Hooke’s attempt to bring cannabis into the mainstream of British scientific culture was a failure. But with hindsight, we can see that he was not entirely wrong in predicting a great future for the drug.
In the 1840s and ’50s — via a series of vivid reports from another East India Company employee, W. B. O’Shaughnessy — cannabis tinctures, resins, and extracts began to be marketed to consumers throughout the British empire. The drug was lauded by one British physician in 1842 for its “manifest effects . . . in removing languor and anxiety”.12 As with the chain of transmission that carried cannabis from the people of Machilipatnam to the house of Thomas Bowrey, and from there to the networks of a growing British empire, the role of the drug’s non-European and non-elite users had disappeared from these nineteenth-century accounts. And so too, it would appear, had any memory of the reports of Bowrey, Knox, and Hooke. When the British medical journal The Lancet discussed cannabis in 1844, it credited “the exertions of Dr. O’Shaughnessy” who, it was claimed, had “only very recently introduced” Indian cannabis to Britain.13
The history of drugs is filled with many such forgettings. Decades before O’Shaughnessy’s triumphant re-introduction of cannabis to British consumers, Hooke had written that the drug “takes away the memory”. He turned out to be right in more ways than one.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 20, 2020

author: enjamin Breen

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Emma Willard’s Maps of Time

By Susan Schulten
January 22, 2020

In the 21st-century, infographics are everywhere. In the classroom, in the newspaper, in government reports, these concise visual representations of complicated information have changed the way we imagine our world. Susan Schulten explores the pioneering work of Emma Willard (1787–1870), a leading feminist educator whose innovative maps of time laid the groundwork for the charts and graphics of today.

We live in an age of visual information. Infographics flood the web, driven by accessible platforms that instantly translate information into a variety of graphic forms. News outlets routinely harvest large data sets like the census and election returns into maps and graphs that profile everything from consumer preferences to the political landscape. The current proliferation of visual information mirrors a similar moment in the early nineteenth century, when the advent of new printing techniques coincided with the rapid expansion of education. Schoolrooms from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi frontier made room for the children of farmers as well as merchants, girls as well as boys. Together, these shifts created a robust and highly competitive market for school materials, including illustrated textbooks, school atlases, and even the new genre of wall maps.
No individual exploited this publishing opportunity more than Emma Willard, one of the century’s most influential educators. From the 1820s through the Civil War, Willard’s history and geography textbooks exposed an entire generation of students to her deeply patriotic narratives, all of which were studded with innovative and creative pictures of information that sought to translate big data into manageable visual forms.
When Willard began publishing textbooks in the 1820s, she knew the competition was fierce, full of sharp-elbowed authors who routinely accused one another of plagiarizing ideas and text. To build her brand, she designed cutting-edge graphics that would differentiate her work and catch the attention of the young. Take, for instance, her “Perspective Sketch of the Course of Empire” of 1835.
By the nineteenth century, timelines had become relatively common, an innovation of the eighteenth century designed to feed growing public interest in ancient as well as modern history. First developed by Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg in the 1750s, early timelines generally charted the lives of individuals on a chronological grid, reflecting the Enlightenment assumption that history could be measured against an absolute scale of time, moving inexorably onward from zero. In 1765, Joseph Priestley drew from calendars, chronologies, and geographies to plot the lives of two thousand men between 1200 BC and 1750 AD in his popular Chart of Biography.
After Priestley, timelines flourished, but they generally lacked any sense of the dimensionality of time, representing the past as a uniform march from left to right. By contrast, Emma Willard sought to invest chronology with a sense of perspective, presenting the biblical Creation as the apex of a triangle that then flowed forward in time and space toward the viewer. Commenting on her visual framework in 1835, Willard noted that individuals experience the past relative to their own lives, for  “events apparently diminish when viewed through the vista of departed years.”1 In “Perspective Sketch of the Course of Empire”, she found striking ways to represent this dimensionality of time. The birth of Christ, for example, is marked with a bright light, marking the end of the first third of human history. The discovery of America separated the second (middle) from the third (modern) stage. Each “civilization” is situated not according to its geography, as on a traditional map, but according to its connection and relation to other civilizations. Some of these societies are permeable, flowing into others, while others, such as China, are firmly demarcated to denote their isolation. By studying this map, students were encouraged to see human history as a rise and fall of civilizations — an “ancestry of nations”.2
Moreover, as time flows forward the stream widens, demonstrating that history became more relevant as it unfolds and approaches the student’s own life. Historical time is not uniform but dimensional. On the one hand, this reflected her sense that time itself had accelerated through the advent of steam and rail. Traditional timelines, she found, were only partially capable of representing change in an era of rapid technological progress. Time was not absolute, but relative. On the other hand, Willard’s approach reflected her own deep nationalism, for it asked students to recognize the emergence of the United States as the culmination of human history and progress.
Willard aggressively marketed her “Perspective Sketch” to American educators, believing it to be a crucial break with other materials on the market. As she confidently expressed to a friend in 1844, “In history I have invented the map”.3 She also advocated for her “map of time” as a teaching device because she strongly believed the visual preceded the verbal — that information presented to students in graphic terms would facilitate memorization, attaching images to the mind through the eyes.
Willard’s devotion to visual mnemonics shaped much of her work. In the 1840s, she published another elaborate visual device, named the “Temple of Time”. Here, she attempted to integrate chronology with geography: the stream of time she had charted in the previous decade now occupied the floor of the temple, whose architecture she used to magnify perspective through a visual convention. Centuries — represented by pillars printed with the names of the era’s most prominent statesmen, poets, and warriors —diminished in size as they receded in time, turning the viewer’s attention toward recent history, as in the “Course of Empire”. But in the Temple of Time, the one-point perspective also invited students in to inhabit the past, laying out information in a kind of memory palace that would help them form a larger, coherent picture of world history. Readers, in other words, were invited into the palace, so they too could stand at moments in world history.
The Temple of Time is complicated, and more than a little contrived. Yet Willard reminds readers that traditional cartography relies on the same basic conceit:
In a map, great countries made up of plains, mountains, seas, and rivers, are represented by what is altogether unlike them; viz., lines, shades, and letters, on a flat piece of paper; but the divisions of the map enable the mind to comprehend, by proportional space and distance, what is the comparative size of each, and how countries are situated with respect to each other. So this picture made on paper, called a Temple of Time, though unlike duration, represents it by proportional space. It is as scientific and intelligible, to represent time by space, as it is to represent space by space.4
A map, in other words, is an arrangement of symbols into a system of meaning — and we use maps because we understand the language of signs that undergirds them. If the mapping of space was a human invention, she explained, one could also invent a means of mapping time.
Willard’s creative efforts to “map time” stemmed from personal experience. Born just after the Revolution, she was part of the first generation of American women to be educated outside the home, and she chafed at the way “female education” kept more than a few areas of knowledge off limits. One of the few subjects considered suitable for both boys and girls in that era was geography, yet Willard remembered with frustration the degree to which her textbooks lacked maps. It makes sense, then, that as a young teacher in the 1810s Willard became passionate about having her pupils draw maps — not copying them (a common practice in schools for young women at the time) but rather reproducing them in rough terms from memory to demonstrate a grasp of geographical relationships.
Willard’s own artistic creativity as a mapmaker was evident from the start. Her first textbook — a geography written with William Woodbridge and published in 1824 — includes a metaphorical map of the Amazon River and its tributaries which illustrates the evolution of the Roman Empire. (One can see in this early effort the prototype for her elaborate “Perspective Sketch” of the 1830s.)
Willard’s creativity as an educator was equally immense. In 1819 she published a plan to publicly fund the improvement of female education, which met with more than a little resistance. Two years later, she began to implement this vision by founding the Troy Female Seminary in New York—an institution that quickly became a preeminent school for future teachers and one of the most highly regarded schools for women in the country.  At Troy, Willard assumed that females were capable of studying the same subjects as their male counterparts and incorporated “masculine studies”, such as science and history, into the curriculum. Her administration of Troy, and her intensive teaching in the decade prior to and after its foundation, convinced her of the multiple failures of contemporary pedagogy and textbooks.
In 1828, Willard issued the first edition of her History of the United States, or The Republic of America, a textbook so popular it would remain in print until the 1860s. One key element of the book’s success was the atlas that accompanied the text — a series of maps of the eastern US that Willard designed and executed with a former female student. In this series, each map marked particular moments or eras that either led toward or resulted from nationhood, including the landing on Plymouth Rock, the Treaty of Paris, or the late War of 1812 against Britain. Perhaps the most remarkable of these was the “introductory map”, which identified indigenous tribes through a series of geographic migrations, collapsing centuries of movement into a single image. In naming this the “introductory” map, however, Willard situated Native Americans in a prehistorical era antedating the ostensibly more significant events of European settlement. The single image she created was innovative and powerful, but it also rendered the violence of Native displacement as an inevitable prelude that gave way to the real drama of colonialism and the inevitable realization of national independence.
Willard’s commitment to creative cartography, combined with her nationalism, inspired her to create a simplified American Temple of Time in the late 1840s, which revealed a firm belief in Manifest Destiny: the providential progression from the European discovery of North America in the fifteenth century to a continental empire in the present. The concept of the American Temple was interactive, framing the chronological and geographical outlines of American history to aid memorization. Students were to identify the eight geographical entities that made up the continental United States: the original thirteen colonies, New France, the Northwest Territory, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, Oregon, and the area ceded by Mexico in the 1848 treaty that ended the Mexican–American War. Students were then instructed to locate each state and territory in time by shading its existence as it became part of the country (shading the colonies as they were settled, and the states as they joined the union). If the Temple were drawn large enough, there would also be enough space along the “floor” to identify important battles. The design is complex and unwieldy, but the goal is intriguing: an interactive exercise for students to integrate history and geography in order to understand how the past had—quite literally—taken place.
Willard’s final contribution to visual knowledge was perhaps the most straightforward, a “Tree of Time” that presented American history as a coherent, organic whole. There is, of course, a long tradition of presenting time as a tree (family trees being the most enduring), but Willard used the image not to represent ancestors as trunks and descendants as branches, but — rather oddly — to represent time arcing from left to right, like a timeline. She was so fond of the Tree of Time she used it to introduce all subsequent editions of her popular textbook History of the United States and even issued it on a much larger scale to be hung in classrooms.
Like the Temple, the Tree presented an encompassing history of the nation that reached back past 1789 to 1492. All of North America’s colonial history merely formed the backstory to the preordained rise of the United States. The tree also strengthened a sense of coherence, organizing the chaotic past into a series of branches that spelled out the national meaning of the past. Above all, the Tree of Time conveyed to students a sense that history moved in a meaningful direction. Imperialism, dispossession, and violence was translated, in Willard’s representation, into a peaceful and unified picture of American progress.
Ironically, it was the cataclysms of the Civil War that challenged Willard’s harmonious picture of history in the Tree of Time. In the 1844 edition of the Tree, President Harrison’s death marched the last branch of history. Twenty years later, Willard added a new branch marking the end of the US war against Mexico and the subsequent Compromise of 1850, seismic events which both raised and temporarily settled the sectional divisions over slavery. Even though the Civil War was well underway by the time she issued her last edition of tree, she marked the last branch as “1860”, with no mention of the bloody conflict that had engulfed the entire nation. Her accompanying narrative in Republic of America brought American history to the brink of war, but no further. Willard had come up against history itself.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 22, 2020

author: Susan Schulten


text:
Fungi, Folklore, and Fairyland

By Mike Jay
October 7, 2020

From fairy-rings to Lewis Carroll’s Alice, mushrooms have long been entwined with the supernatural in art and literature. What might this say about past knowledge of hallucinogenic fungi? Mike Jay looks at early reports of mushroom-induced trips and how one species in particular became established as a stock motif of Victorian fairyland.

The first recorded mushroom trip in Britain took place in London’s Green Park on October 3, 1799. Like many such experiences before and since, it was accidental. A man identified in the subsequent medical report as “J. S.” was in the habit of gathering small mushrooms from the park on autumn mornings and cooking them up into a breakfast broth for his wife and young family. But this particular morning, an hour after they had finished it, everything began to turn very strange. J. S. noticed black spots and odd flashes of colour interrupting his vision; he became disorientated and had difficulty in standing and moving around. His family were complaining of stomach cramps and cold, numb extremities. The notion of poisonous toadstools leapt to his mind, and he staggered out into the streets to seek help, but within a hundred yards he had forgotten where he was going, or why, and was found wandering in a confused state.
By chance a physician named Everard Brande was passing through this part of town, and he was summoned to treat J. S. and his family. The scene he witnessed was so unusual that he wrote it up at length and published it in The Medical and Physical Journal a few months later.1 The family’s symptoms were rising and falling in giddy waves, their pupils dilated, their pulses fluttering, and their breathing laboured, periodically returning to normal before accelerating into another crisis. All were fixated on the fear that they were dying except for the youngest, the eight-year-old son named as “Edward S.”, whose symptoms were the strangest of all. He had eaten a large portion of the mushrooms and was “attacked with fits of immoderate laughter” which his parents’ threats could not subdue. He seemed to have been transported into another world, from which he would only return under duress to speak nonsense: “when roused and interrogated as to it, he answered indifferently, yes or no, as he did to every other question, evidently without any relation to what was asked”.
Dr Brande diagnosed the family’s condition as the “deleterious effects of a very common species of agaric [mushroom], not hitherto suspected to be poisonous”. Today, we can be more specific: this was intoxication by liberty caps (Psilocybe semilanceata), the “magic mushrooms” that grow plentifully across the hills, moors, commons, golf courses, and playing fields of Britain every autumn. The botanical illustrator James Sowerby, who was working on the third volume of his landmark Coloured Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms (1803), interrupted his schedule to visit J. S. and identify the species in question. Sowerby’s illustration includes a cluster of unmistakable liberty caps, together with a similar-looking species (now recognised as a roundhead of the Stropharia genus). In his accompanying note, Sowerby emphasises that it was the pointy-headed variety (“with the pileus acuminated”) that “nearly proved fatal to a poor family in Piccadilly, London, who were so indiscreet as to stew a quantity” for breakfast.
Brande’s account of the J. S. family’s episode continued to be cited in Victorian drug literature for decades, yet the nineteenth century would come and go without any clear identification of the liberty cap as hallucinogenic. The psychedelic compound that had caused the mysterious derangement remained unknown until the 1950s when Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD, turned his attention to the hallucinogenic mushrooms of Mexico. Psilocybin, LSD’s chemical cousin, was finally isolated from mushrooms in 1958, synthesised in a Swiss laboratory in 1959, and identified in the liberty cap in 1963.2
During the nineteenth century, the liberty cap took on a different set of associations, derived not from its visionary properties but its distinctive appearance. Samuel Taylor Coleridge seems to have been the first to suggest its common name in a short piece published in 1812 in Omniana, a miscellany co-written with Robert Southey. Coleridge was struck by that “common fungus, which so exactly represents the pole and cap of Liberty that it seems offered by Nature herself as the appropriate emblem of Gallic republicanism”.3 The cap of Liberty, or Phrygian cap, a peaked felt bonnet associated with the similar-looking pileus worn by freed slaves in the Roman empire, had become an icon of political freedom through the revolutionary movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. William of Orange included it as a symbol on a coin struck to celebrate his Glorious Revolution in 1688; the anti-monarchist MP John Wilkes holds it, mounted on its pole, in William Hogarth’s devilish caricature of 1763. It appears on a medal designed by Benjamin Franklin to commemorate July 4, 1776, under the banner LIBERTAS AMERICANA, and it was adopted during the French Revolution by the sans-culottes as their signature bonnet rouge. It was these associations — rather than its psychoactive properties, of which he shows no knowledge — that led Coleridge to celebrate it as the “mushroom Cap of Liberty”, a name that percolated through the many reprints of Omniana into nineteenth-century British culture, folklore, and botany.
While the liberty cap’s “magic” properties seemed to go largely unacknowledged, the idea that fungi could provoke hallucinations did begin to percolate more widely in Europe during the nineteenth century — though it became attached to a quite different species of mushroom. In parallel to a growing scientific interest in toxic and hallucinogenic fungi, a vast body of Victorian fairy lore connected mushrooms and toadstools with elves, pixies, hollow hills, and the unwitting transport of subjects to fairyland, a world of shifting perspectives seething with elemental spirits. The similarity of this otherworld to those engendered by plant psychedelics in New World cultures, where psilocybin-containing mushrooms have been used for millennia, is suggestive. Is it possible that the Victorian fairy tradition, beneath its innocent exterior, operated as a conduit for a hidden tradition of psychedelic knowledge? Were the authors of these fantastical narratives — Alice in Wonderland, for example — aware of the powers of certain mushrooms to lead unsuspecting visitors to enchanted lands? Were they, perhaps, even writing from personal experience?
The J. S. family’s trip in 1799 is a useful starting point for such enquiries. It shows liberty caps were growing in Britain at the time, and commonplace even in London’s parks. But also, the trip evidences that the mushroom’s hallucinogenic effects were unfamiliar, perhaps even unheard of: certainly unusual enough for a London physician to draw them to the attention of his learned colleagues. At the same time, however, scholars and naturalists were becoming more aware of the widespread use of plant intoxicants in non-western cultures. In 1762 Carl Linnaeus, the great taxonomist and father of modern botany, compiled the first-ever list of intoxicating plants: a monograph entitled Inebriantia, which assembled a global pharmacopoeia that extended from Europe (opium, henbane) to the Middle East (hashish, datura), South America (coca leaf), Asia (betel nut), and the Pacific (kava). The study of such plants was emerging from the margins of classical studies, ethnography, folklore, and medicine to become a subject in its own right.
The interest in traditional cultures extended to European folklore. A new generation of folklore collectors, such as the Brothers Grimm, realised that the migration of peasant populations to the city was dismantling centuries of folk stories, songs, and oral histories with alarming rapidity. In Britain, Robert Southey was a prominent collector of vanishing folk traditions, soliciting and publishing examples offered by his readers. The Victorian fairy tradition, as it emerged, was imbued with a Romantic sensibility in which rustic traditions were no longer coarse and backward but picturesque and semi-sacred, an escape from industrial modernity into an ancient, often pagan land of enchantment. The subject lent itself to writers and artists who, under the guise of innocence, were able to explore sensual and erotic themes with a boldness off limits in more realistic genres and to reimagine the muddy and impoverished countryside through the prism of classical and Shakespearian scenes of playful nature spirits. The lore of plants and flowers was carefully curated and woven into supernatural tapestries of flower-fairies and enchanted woods, and mushrooms and toadstools popped up everywhere. Fairy rings and toadstool-dwelling elves were recycled through a pictorial culture of motif and decoration until they became emblematic of fairyland itself.
This magical allure marked a shift from previous depictions of Britain’s fungi. In herbals and medical texts from the Renaissance onwards, they had typically been associated with rot, dung-heaps, and poison. The new generation of folklorists, however, followed Coleridge in appreciating them. Thomas Keightley, whose survey The Fairy Mythology (1850) exerted much influence on the fictional fairy tradition, gives Welsh and Gaelic examples of traditional names for fungi which invoke elves and Puck. In Ireland, the Gaelic slang for mushrooms is “pookies”, which Keightley associated with the elemental nature spirit Pooka (hence Puck); it’s a term that persists in Irish drug culture today, although evidence for pre-modern Gaelic magic mushroom use remains elusive. At one point Keightley refers to “those pretty small delicate fungi, with their conical heads, which are named Fairy-mushrooms in Ireland, where they grow so plentifully”.4 This seems to describe the liberty cap, though Keightley, like Coleridge, focuses on the physical appearance of the mushroom and appears unaware of its psychedelic properties.
Despite its ubiquity, and occasional and tentative association with nature spirits, the mushroom that became the distinctive motif of fairyland was not the liberty cap but rather the spectacular red-and-white fly agaric (Amanita muscaria). The fly agaric is psychoactive but unlike the liberty cap, which delivers psilocybin in reliable doses, it contains a mix of alkaloids — muscarine, muscimol, ibotenic acid — which generate an unpredictable and toxic cocktail of effects. These can include wooziness and disorientation, drooling, sweats, numbness in the lips and extremities, nausea, muscle twitches, sleep, and a vague, often retrospective sense of liminal consciousness and waking dreams. At lower doses, none of these may manifest; at higher doses they may lead to coma and, on rare occasions, death.
Unlike the liberty cap, the fly agaric is hard to ignore or misidentify, and its toxicity has been well established for centuries (its name derives from its ability to kill flies). One could argue then that this aura of livid beauty and danger would alone be enough to explain its association with the otherworldly realm of fairies. Yet at the same time its mind-altering effects were becoming more widely known, not from any rustic tradition in Britain but from the discovery that it was used as an intoxicant among the remote peoples of Siberia. Sporadically through the eighteenth century, Swedish and Russian explorers had returned from Siberia with travellers’ tales of shamans, spirit possession, and self-poisoning with brightly-coloured toadstools; but it was a Polish traveller named Joseph Kopék who was the first to write an account of his own first-hand experience with the fly agaric, which appeared in an 1837 publication of his travel diary.
In around 1797, after he had been living in Kamchatka for two years, Kopék was taken ill with a fever and was told by a local of a “miraculous” mushroom that would cure him. He ate half a fly agaric and fell into a vivid fever dream. “As though magnetised”, he was drawn through “the most attractive gardens where only pleasure and beauty seemed to rule”; beautiful women dressed in white fed him with fruits, berries, and flowers. He woke after a long and healing sleep and took a second, stronger dose, which precipitated him back into slumber and the sense of an epic voyage into another world. He relived swathes of his childhood, re-encountered friends from throughout his life, and even predicted the future at length with such confidence that a priest was summoned to witness. He concluded with a challenge to science: “If someone can prove that both the effect and the influence of the mushroom are non-existent, then I shall stop being defender of the miraculous mushroom of Kamchatka”.5
Kopék’s toadstool epiphany was one of several descriptions of fly agaric use by Siberian peoples that were widely reported in various learned journals and popular works throughout Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.6 Such accounts began a fashion for re-examining elements of European folklore and culture and interpolating fly agaric intoxication into odd corners of myth and tradition. This is the source of the notion that the Berserkers, the Viking shock troops of the eighth to tenth centuries, drank a fly agaric potion before going into battle and fighting like men possessed, regularly asserted not only among mushroom and Viking aficionados but also in text-books and encyclopaedias. There is, however, no reference to fly agaric, or indeed to any exotic plant stimulants, in the sagas or Eddas: the theory of mushroom-intoxicated Berserker warriors was first suggested by the Swedish professor Samuel Ödman in his Attempt to Explain the Berserk-Raging of Ancient Nordic Warriors through Natural History (1784), a speculation based on the eighteenth-century reports from Siberia.
By the mid-nineteenth century, then, the fly agaric had become synonymous with fairyland. The mushroom had also, in the guise of the Siberian sources, been claimed as a portal to the land of dreams and written into European folklore. Exactly to what extent and in what manner these two cultural journeys of the fly agaric are intertwined is hard to pin down. Long before the Siberian accounts, in both art and literature, mushrooms of all sorts are depicted as part of fairyland. In Margaret Cavendish’s mid-seventeenth-century poem “The Pastime of the Queen of Fairies”, a mushroom acts as Queen Mab’s dining table, and in late eighteenth-century paintings by Henry Fuseli and Joshua Reynolds, the mushroom acts as a surface upon which fairies, sprites, and similar assemble. Such a presence of mushrooms in supernatural worlds might suggest a concealed or half-forgotten knowledge of hallucinogenic mushrooms in British culture. However, these fungi do not resemble fly agaric (or any other hallucinogenic mushroom) and, of course, for small woodland creatures the large splay of a mushroom would seem like natural furniture. It is only in the Victorian era, post-Siberian tales, that an hallucinogenic mushroom establishes itself so firmly in Britain as the stock mushroom of fairyland.
Let us turn now to the most famous and frequently-debated conjunction of fungi, psychedelia, and fairy-lore: the array of mushrooms and hallucinatory potions, mind-bending and shapeshifting motifs in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Do Alice’s adventures represent first-hand knowledge of hallucinogenic mushrooms?
The scenes in question could hardly be better known. Alice, down the rabbit hole, meets a caterpillar sitting on a mushroom, who tells her in a “languid, sleepy voice” that the mushroom is the key to navigating through her strange journey: “one side will make you grow taller, the other side will make you grow shorter”. Alice takes a chunk from each side of the mushroom and begins a series of vertiginous transformations of size, shooting up into the clouds before learning to maintain her normal size by eating alternate bites. Throughout the rest of the book she continues to take the mushroom: entering the house of the Duchess, approaching the domain of the March Hare, and, climactically, before entering the hidden garden with the golden key.
Since the 1960s this has often been read as an initiatic work of drug literature, an esoteric guide to the other worlds opened up by psychedelics — most memorably, perhaps, in Jefferson Airplane’s psychedelic anthem “White Rabbit” (1967), which conjures Alice’s journey as a path of self-discovery where the stale advice of parents is transcended by the guidance received from within by “feeding your head”. This reading is often dismissed by Lewis Carroll scholars,7 but medication and unusual states of consciousness certainly exercised a profound fascination for Carroll, and he read about them voraciously. His interest was spurred by his own delicate health — insomnia and frequent migraines — which he treated with homoeopathic remedies, including many derived from psychoactive plants such as aconite and belladonna. His library included books on homoeopathy as well as texts that discussed mind-altering drugs, including F. E. Anstie’s thorough compendium, Stimulants and Narcotics (1864). He was greatly intrigued by the epileptic seizure of an Oxford student at which he was present, and in 1857 visited St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London in order to witness chloroform anaesthesia, a novel procedure that had come to public attention four years previously when it was administered to Queen Victoria during childbirth.
Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that Alice’s mind-expanding journeys owed anything to the actual drug experiences of their author. Although Carroll — in daily life the Reverend Charles Dodgson — was a moderate drinker and, to judge by his library, opposed to alcohol prohibition, he had a strong dislike of tobacco smoking and wrote sceptically in his letters about the pervasive presence in syrups and soothing tonics of powerful narcotics like opium — the “medicine so dexterously, but ineffectually, concealed in the jam of our early childhood”.8 Yet Alice’s adventures may have their roots in a psychedelic mushroom experience. The scholar Michael Carmichael has demonstrated that, a few days before he began writing the story, Carroll made his only ever visit to Oxford’s Bodleian library, where a copy of Mordecai Cooke’s recently-published drug survey The Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860) had been deposited.9 The Bodleian copy of this book still has most of its pages uncut, with the exception of the contents page and the chapter on the fly agaric, entitled “The Exile of Siberia”. Carroll was particularly interested in Russia: it was the only country he ever visited outside Britain. And, as Carmichael puts it, Carroll “would have been immediately attracted to Cooke’s Seven Sisters of Sleep for two more obvious reasons: he had seven sisters and he was a lifelong insomniac”.
Cooke’s chapter on fly agaric is, like the rest of his book, a valuable source of the drug lore that was familiar to his generation of Victorians. It refers to Everard Brande’s account of the J. S. family and rounds up various Siberian descriptions of fly agaric experiences, including details that appear in Alice’s adventures. “Erroneous impressions of size and distance are common occurrences”, Cooke records of the fly agaric. “A straw lying in the road becomes a formidable object, to overcome which, a leap is taken sufficient to clear a barrel of ale, or the prostrate trunk of a British oak.”10
The hypothesis is suggestive, though at this distance of time, it’s impossible to know for certain whether or not Carroll read this Bodleian copy, or indeed any other copy of Cooke’s book. It may be that Carroll encountered the Siberian fly agaric reportage elsewhere   — we know, for example, that he owned a copy of James F. Johnston’s The Chemistry of Common Life (1854) which includes mention of fly agaric and size delusions11 — or it may be that he simply drew on the fertile resources of his imagination. But some contact with the widely reported Siberian cases does seem much more likely than the idea that Carroll drew on any hidden British tradition of magic mushroom use, let alone the author’s own. If so, he was neither a secret drug initiate nor a Victorian gentleman entirely innocent of the arcane knowledge of drugs. In this sense, Alice’s otherworld experiences seem to hover, like much of Victorian fairy literature and fantasy, in a borderland between naïve innocence of such drugs and knowing references to them. We read them today from a very different vantage point, one in which magic mushrooms are consumed far more widely than in the Victorian or indeed any previous era. In our thriving psychedelic culture, fly agaric is only to be encountered at the distant margins; by contrast, psilocybin mushrooms are a global phenomenon, grown and consumed in virtually every country on earth and even making inroads into clinical psychotherapy. Today the liberty cap is an emblem of a new political struggle: the right to “cognitive liberty”, the free and legal alteration of one’s own consciousness.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 7, 2020

author: Mike Ja


text:
The Art of Whaling
Illustrations from the Logbooks of Nantucket Whaleships
By Jessica Boyall
January 13, 2021

The 19th-century whale hunt was a brutal business, awash with blubber, blood, and the cruel destruction of life. But between the frantic calls of “there she blows!”, there was plenty of time for creation too. Jessica Boyall explores the rich vein of illustration running through the logbooks and journals of Nantucket whalers.

The first European settlers arrived at Nantucket, an isolated island some thirty miles from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1659. They built homes, Quaker meeting houses, and cattle farms, swiftly and forcibly colonising the island, which was until then inhabited by 2500 Wampanoag Native Americans. The word Nantucket is a Native American one, meaning either “far-away land” or “sandy, sterile soil tempting no one”. And the colonisers soon found it thus — too small and infertile to accommodate the number of agricultural plots necessary to support their growing population. So they looked to the sea, according to legend quite literally, in 1690, when town selectmen climbed a sloping hill overlooking the southern coast. Here, they watched whales breach the Atlantic’s surface and pronounced the ocean “a green pasture where our children’s grandchildren will go for bread”.1
This declaration proved prophetic, as for some two hundred years Nantucket dominated the global whaling market. Such was its success that in 1851 Herman Melville in Moby-Dick marvelled “What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the sea for a livelihood! . . . thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders”.2
In its early days Nantucket whaling looked very different from the hub of activity that Melville, writing from his own experience, described. Initially, whaling took place close to Nantucket’s shores, where viewing platforms from which whales could be spotted were erected. Sightings might take place any time from November to April as during these months hordes of right whales — so called because they were the right whale to catch — returned from a summer of feeding in the far reaches of the North Atlantic. Their migratory route took them within a few miles of Nantucket.
Once a whale was spotted, a crew of up to six men, including indentured Wampanoag and Nauset Native Americans, would board twenty-feet-long cedar boats in pursuit of their prey.3 If a boat drew even with the whale, then it would be harpooned and, following a chase, lanced and brought down. The dead leviathan was then hauled back to the bay, where blubber and baleen were flensed from its carcass and transported to try-houses. The blubber was boiled for oil, which was cooled, poured into casks, and sold alongside scrubbed whalebone at markets in New York, Boston, and further afield.
This method of shore-fishery was gory, lucrative, and unsustainable. By 1730, the waters around Cape Cod and Nantucket had been overfished and the number of whales woefully depleted. But by this point Nantucket’s whaling market was booming. The collapse of the Dutch North Atlantic fisheries, combined with increased demands for oil in Britain and America, had driven oil prices upwards from around eight pounds sterling per barrel in 1725 to ten pounds in 1730.4 And so, incentivised by these convincingly healthy markets, well-off Nantucket merchants outfitted single-masted sailing vessels with dedicated crews and pursued their prey northward into the deeper waters.
Deeper-sea voyages made for longer expeditions, meaning that whalers might spend up to four years at sea, and as a consequence, two sorts of written and illustrated records emerged. The first was the logbook, an official, often tedious account kept by captains and first mates, which held administrative and financial information required by a ship’s owners. The second type of record was the unofficial journal, which might be maintained by anyone on board ship. For although maritime life was arduous and sometimes frantic, a sailor or passenger over the course of months at sea could find time for reflexion and creativity and turn their hand to a variety of artistic pursuits.
One such pursuit was scrimshandering, the craft of using a jack-knife or needle to engrave designs into bone and ivory obtained from whale teeth and walrus tusks. A work in scrimshaw could be decorated with a variety of subjects including whaling scenes and ships, portraits of lovers, and Masonic emblems.
The other strand of artistic practice was on paper, rather than three-dimensional. Although their rationales differed, both logbooks and journals were also frequently illustrated, replete with images of daily ship-board life, of faraway lands, and, most frequently, of whales. Hundreds of these have been preserved and digitized by the Nantucket Historical Association; the selection here, mainly from the 1840s, gives a unique insight into the world of Nantucket whaling.
Ship’s officers used logbooks for a variety of practical reasons: charting different species, sightings, and killings. Some logs, like that of the ship Indian Chief, kept by Thomas R. Bloomfield, contain careful, intricately-patterned drawings of the creatures, accompanied by the co-ordinates of where they were spotted.
Others include imprints made from stamps that, cut in the likeness of whales, were fashioned from pieces of wood, ivory, or bone. Different stamps were made to represent different species and carried different connotations. An image of a whale’s tail fluke denoted a whale sighting, whilst one of an entire whale, its slaughter. This visual lexicon, a semiotic language that even Roland Barthes might have appreciated, was developed as an efficient means of recording expeditions for vessel owners, who, rather than wading through dense logbooks written in cursive, often messy, script, might prefer to ascertain a voyage’s success by tallying the number of stamps its log contained.
Beyond official records, many journals were illustrated in ways that point to the sheer visual pleasure of the adventures, with whale chases a popular subject. The act of killing a whale deep at sea was not substantially different from doing so at shore, though the object of the hunt was no longer the right whale but the sperm whale, prized for its body oil — of higher grade than that of other cetaceans — and its spermaceti, a precious liquid wax found in its head.
Once a whale was sighted, which according to logs was a relatively rare event, the crew would lower whaleboats from the main vessel into the water. Vessels could contain up to five whaleboats: a larboard boat, starboard boat, bow boat, waist boat, and sometimes a starboard bow boat. Each was manned by a boat-header and up to five rowers.
As with shore whaling, the key was to draw close to the great mammal before striking it with a harpoon attached to a long coil of rope. Once the harpoon’s iron was firmly lodged into the creature’s flesh, then it would either promptly die or, more commonly, flee, in which case a “Nantucket sleigh ride” would ensue. During this chase the frenzied whale would bolt with the boats in tow, until eventually, exhausted, the leviathan would collapse and be pierced to a gruesome death.
The cruelty of the hunt is not something that generally comes across in the logbook and journal depictions, where the blood and gore are replaced by anthropomorphised whales complete with unfathomably merry faces. Perhaps the brutality of whaling was difficult to reconcile with the principles of pacifism and non-violence that supposedly underpinned the Nantucketers’ Quaker way of life.
The success of the hunt was more or less dependent on the tractability of the whale. For the most part the creatures were fortunately docile, but some proved formidable adversaries. Such a beast was to be the undoing of the whaleship the Essex, which departed from Nantucket on August 12, 1819. Captained by George Pollard, the eighteen-man crew was scheduled to spend two and a half years at sea, but disaster struck on November 20, 1820.  On this day the crew spotted a pod of sperm whales. Whaleboats were greedily launched and several calves corralled; one smashed into a whaleboat, forcing its retreat, during which the cabin boy spotted an ominous shape looming beneath the Essex’s bow. The shape, it transpired, was a colossal sperm whale, some eighty-five feet in length, weighing approximately eighty tonnes.
The Essex’s first mate, Owen Chase, recounts that “I could distinctly see him smite his jaws together, as if distracted with rage and fury”, and goes on to describe how the monumental creature
appeared with ten-fold fury and vengeance in his aspect. The surf flew in all directions about him and his course towards us was marked by a white foam of a rod in width, which he made with the continual violent thrashing of his tail. His head was about half out of the water, and in that way he came upon us, and again struck the ship.5
The irate whale rammed into the Essex twice, sinking it some two thousand nautical miles west of South America. The crew had just enough time to evacuate the ship into three small boats. Eight crew members survived by cannibalising seven others, drawing lots to decide who should live and who be eaten.
The horrors of the Essex, as described in Owen Chase’s narrative, provided fodder for the climactic scenes of Melville’s great American novel, Moby-Dick, which narrates the story of doomed anti-hero Captains Ahab’s quest for revenge on the great white sperm whale, Moby Dick. The epic culminates in a three-day chase in which the majestic Moby Dick demolishes the fictional Pequod, leaving Ishmael, the ship’s survivor and true protagonist, adrift at sea.
Of course, not all expeditions were so utterly dismal. Indeed, some afforded rare opportunities for working men and occasionally even women to travel the world. Susan C. Austin Veeder was one of the first Nantucket women to accompany their husband to sea. Her decision to do so was perhaps motivated by more than a sense of adventure, given that on his next voyage her husband deferred from his post as captain, took up with a Polynesian woman, and never returned home.
Susan’s journey aboard the Nauticon, which departed from Nantucket in September 1848 and returned in March 1853, took her across the Atlantic around Cape Horn to ports in Chile, Oahu, Tahiti, and as far north as the Fox Islands in the Arctic. Her journal, though written in terse, bleakly efficient language, brims with panoramic watercolours that judiciously delineate the places she visited and make clear that she was alive to her surroundings.
Susan’s voyage, punctuated by acute sea sickness and the fetor of rancid whale flesh, was not an altogether happy one. After a few months aboard the Nauticon she gave birth to a “a fine daughter weighing 9 lbs” who she described as “growing like a pig”.6 Fourteen months later the child was treated for teething issues by a doctor in Tahiti who, according to Susan’s journal, administered a white powder to her gums. The child died, apparently poisoned by the doctor, and though Susan did not immediately return to Nantucket her journey was marred by the loss.
Familial plight weighs heavily in the annals of Nantucket’s whalers, though not all as tragically as in Susan’s account. Richard C. Gibbs Junior’s log of the ship Nantucket, captained by his father, attests to the predictably normal anxieties of an adolescent. Richard was thirteen years old when he accompanied his mother, Almira, and father, Richard C. Gibbs Senior, onto the Nantucket, which set sail in June 1855. In his log he expresses fears of not living up to his father’s expectations, reservations about his own inadequacies as log-keeper, and his hopes for self-improvement. Some of these sentiments are, albeit abstractly, captured on the opening endpapers of his log which, alongside sketches of whales, anchors, and a ship, features the words “HOPE” in emphatic black lettering and, lower down the page, “Blood” in scrawled scarlet script.
Richard complains of his and his family’s inadequacies: their failure to catch enough whales and consequent inability to make their fortunes at sea. But his condemnations of ineptitude may have been unfounded: by 1840 global whaling grounds had been sorely overfished. This fact, combined with a rising demand for petroleum and its derivative kerosene, produced in the oilfields of Pennsylvania, undermined the North American whaling market. By the 1870s a series of events, including the Great Fire of 1846 and the American Civil War, had brought Nantucket to its knees. No local industry could succeed or replace the whale fishery and so between 1840 and 1870 its population plummeted from almost ten thousand to little more than four thousand. Nantucket’s heyday was over.
And so the island’s grizzly whaling trade proved fallible, but not forgettable; it remains vividly in the journals and logs of its practitioners. The illustrations of these accounts constitute a form of folk art which affords remarkable insight into the extraordinary lives and creativity of the Nantucketers, in the era before their “greasy luck” ran out.7
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 13, 2021

author: Jessica Boyall


text:
The Dancing Plague of 1518

By Ned Pennant-Rea
July 10, 2018

Five hundred years ago in July, a strange mania seized the city of Strasbourg. Citizens by the hundred became compelled to dance, seemingly for no reason — jigging trance-like for days, until unconsciousness or, in some cases, death. Ned Pennant-Rea on one of history’s most bizarre events.

On a hastily built stage before the busy horse market of Strasbourg, scores of people dance to pipes, drums, and horns. The July sun beats down upon them as they hop from leg to leg, spin in circles and whoop loudly. From a distance they might be carnival revellers. But closer inspection reveals a more disquieting scene. Their arms are flailing and their bodies are convulsing spasmodically. Ragged clothes and pinched faces are saturated in sweat. Their eyes are glassy, distant. Blood seeps from swollen feet into leather boots and wooden clogs. These are not revellers but “choreomaniacs”, entirely possessed by the mania of the dance.
In full view of the public, this is the apogee of the choreomania that tormented Strasbourg for a midsummer month in 1518. Also known as the “dancing plague”, it was the most fatal and best documented of the more than ten such contagions which had broken out along the Rhine and Moselle rivers since 1374. Numerous accounts of the bizarre events that unfolded that summer can be found scattered across various contemporary documents and chronicles compiled in the subsequent decades and centuries. One seventeenth-century chronicle by the Strasbourg jurist Johann Schilter quotes a now lost manuscript poem:
Many hundreds in Strassburg began To dance and hop, women and men,In the public market, in alleys and streets,Day and night; and many of them ate nothingUntil at last the sickness left them. This affliction was called St Vitus’ dance.1
Another chronicle from 1636 relates a less happy ending:
In the year 1518 AD . . . there occurred among men a remarkable and terrible disease called St Vitus’ dance, in which men in their madness began to dance day and night until finally they fell down unconscious and succumbed to death.2
The physician and alchemist Paracelsus visited Strasbourg eight years after the plague and became fascinated by its causes. According to his Opus Paramirum, and various chronicles agree, it all started with one woman. Frau Troffea had started dancing on July 14th on the narrow cobbled street outside her half-timbered home. As far as we can tell she had no musical accompaniment but simply “began to dance”.3 Ignoring her husband’s pleas to cease, she continued for hours, until the sky turned black and she collapsed in a twitching heap of exhaustion. The next morning she was up again on her swollen feet and dancing before thirst and hunger could register. By the third day, people of a great and growing variety — hawkers, porters, beggars, pilgrims, priests, nuns — were drinking in the ungodly spectacle. The mania possessed Frau Troffea for between four and six days, at which point the frightened authorities intervened by sending her in a wagon thirty miles away to Saverne. There she might be cured at the shrine of Vitus, the saint who it was believed had cursed her. But some of those who had witnessed her strange performance had begun to mimic her, and within days more than thirty choreomaniacs were in motion, some so monomaniacally that only death would have the power to intervene.
The more citizens this unusual plague afflicted, the more desperate the privy council became to control it. The clergy held it to be the work of a vengeful Saint Vitus, but the councillors listened instead to the guild of physicians, declaring the dance to be “a natural disease, which comes from overheated blood.”4 According to humoral theory, the afflicted must therefore be bled. But the physicians instead recommended the treatment given to past victims of this bizarre disease. They must dance themselves free of it. A sixteenth-century chronicle composed by the architect Daniel Specklin records what the council did next.5 Carpenters and tanners were ordered to transform their guild halls into temporary dance floors, and “set up platforms in the horse market and in the grain market“ in full view of the public. To keep the accursed in motion and so expedite their recovery, dozens of musicians were paid to play drums, fiddles, pipes, and horns, with healthy dancers brought in for further encouragement. The authorities hoped to create the optimal conditions for the dance to exhaust itself.
It backfired horribly. Being more inclined to a supernatural than a medical explanation of the dance, most of the onlookers saw in the frenzied movements a demonstration of the magnitude of Saint Vitus’ fury. None being free of sin, many were lured into the mania. The Imlin family chronicle records that within a month the plague had seized four hundred citizens.6
The privy council ordered the stages to be pulled down. If the choreomaniacs must continue their disturbing movements then they now must do so out of sight. The council went further, prohibiting almost all dance and music in the city until September. This was no small thing for a culture in which communal dancing was central — from upright burghers performing their restrained, delicate steps in the so-called bassadanza, to ale-laden peasants leaping with hearty abandon to let off steam.7 Sebastian Brant, a Strasbourg chancellor and author of The Ship of Fools (1494), detailed the exception to the ban: “if honourable persons wish to dance at weddings or celebrations of first Mass in their houses, they may do so using stringed instruments, but they are on their conscience not to use tambourines and drums.”8 Presumably strings were deemed less likely than percussion to bring on the mania.
In addition, the council ordered those worst afflicted to be bundled into wagons and taken the three-day ride to the shrine of Saint Vitus, where Frau Troffea had been cured. Priests placed the choreomaniacs, who were, presumably, still thrashing about like landed fish, underneath a wooden carving of Vitus. They put small crosses in their hands and red shoes on their feet. On the soles and tops of these shoes, they sprinkled holy water and painted crosses of consecrated oil.9 This ritual, carried out in an atmosphere thick with incense and Latin incantations, had the desired effect. Word soon reached Strasbourg and more were sent to Saverne to be forgiven by Vitus. Within a week or so the stream of suffering pilgrims had diminished to a trickle. The dancing plague had lasted for over a month, from mid-July to late August or early September. At its height, as many as fifteen people were dying each day. The final toll is unknown but, if such a daily death rate was true, could have been into the hundreds.
If not an angry saint or overheated blood then what did cause the dancing plague? In the view of Paracelsus, Fra Troffea’s marathon jig was a ploy to embarrass Herr Troffea: “In order to make the deception as perfect as possible, and really give the impression of illness, she hopped and sang, which was all most distasteful to her husband.”10 Upon seeing the success of the trick, other women began dancing to annoy their husbands too, powered on by “free, lewd and impertinent” thoughts. This type of dancing mania was classified by Paracelsus as Chorea lasciva (caused by voluptuous desires, “without fear or respect”), which sat alongside Chorea imaginativa (caused by the imagination, “from rage and swearing”), and Chrorea naturalis (a much milder form, caused by corporal causes) as the three main forms of the condition.11 While the famously iconoclastic Paracelsus does deserve credit for placing the cause of the disease in the minds of the choreomaniacs rather than in heaven, he was also a misogynist whose diagnosis looks somewhat ridiculous now.
Several modern historians have argued that the dancing plagues of mediaeval Europe were caused by ergot, a mind-altering mould found on the stalks of damp rye, which can cause twitching, jerking, and hallucinations — a condition known as St Anthony’s Fire. However, the historian John Waller has debunked the ergot hypothesis in his brilliant book on the dancing plague, A Time to Dance, a Time to Die (2009). Yes, ergot can cause convulsions and hallucinations, but it also restricts blood flow to the extremities. Someone poisoned by it simply could not dance for several days in a row.
Waller’s explanation of the dancing plague emerges from his deep knowledge of the material, cultural, and spiritual environment of sixteenth-century Strasbourg. He opens his book with a quote from H. C. Erik Midelfort’s A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (1999):
Madnesses of the past are not petrified entities that can be plucked unchanged from their niches and placed under our modern microscopes. They appear, perhaps, more like jellyfish that collapse and dry up when they are removed from the ambient sea water.12
According to Waller, the Strasbourg poor were primed for an epidemic of hysterical dancing. First of all, there was precedent. Every European dancing plague between 1374 and 1518 had occurred near Strasbourg, along the western edge of the Holy Roman Empire. Then there were the prevailing conditions. In 1518, a string of bad harvests, political instability, and the arrival of syphilis had induced anguish extreme even by early modern standards. This suffering manifested as hysterical dancing because the citizens believed it could. People can be extraordinarily suggestible and a firm conviction in the vengefulness of Saint Vitus was enough for it to be visited upon them. “The minds of the choreomaniacs were drawn inwards,” writes Waller, “tossed about on the violent seas of their deepest fears.”13
One way to elucidate the dancing plague is to consider the trance states people reach today. In cultures around the world, including in Brazil, Madagascar, and Kenya, people enter trances deliberately during ceremonies or involuntarily during periods of extreme stress. Once entranced, their perception of pain and exhaustion is marginalised. Waller describes the spread of the dancing plague as an example of psychic contagion, and he draws a parallel with the laughing epidemic that engulfed a region of Tanganyika (modern-day Tanzania) in the fraught postcolonial year of 1963. When a couple of girls at a local mission school got the giggles, their friends followed suit until two-thirds of the pupils were laughing and crying uncontrollably and the whole school had to be shut down. Once home, the pupils “infected” their families and soon whole villages were consumed by hysterics. Doctors recorded several hundred cases, lasting a week on average.
Of course, the dancing plagues have another parallel — modern rave culture.  Though usually without the bloody feet and pleas for mercy of our sixteenth-century choreomaniacs, and often with a little chemical help, it is not uncommon for partygoers to dance for days with little break, forgoing sleep and food, sometimes shifting their feet with poise and balance, and sometimes leaping with none. Should one such reveller — perhaps fuelled by a particularly potent dancefloor potion — be transplanted onto the horse market stage of early modern Strasbourg half a millennium ago, they might not feel entirely out of place.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Ned Pennant-Rea