Excerpt from chapter 7, An Epidemic of Melancholy
from Dancing in the Streets: The History of Collective Joy
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Italian tradition provides another example of the use of public festivity as a cure for depression. In chapter 4, we saw that the tarantula was blamed from dancing manias in Italy. In some accounts, the supposed effect of the spider bite was actually a melancholic syndrome, marked by lassitude to the point of stupefaction, for which the only remedy, according the the nineteenth-century historian J.F.C. Hecker, was dancing, preferably outdoors and for days on end. At the sound of the appropriate musical instruments, he reports, the afflicted "awoke as it were by enchantment, opened their eyes, and moving slowly at first, according to the measure of the music, were, as the time quickened, gradually hurried on to the most passionate dance." These exertions cured them - at least for a while, because a year later whole villages full of sufferers "again grew dejected and misanthropic, until, by music and dancing, they dispelled the melancholy." As mentioned earlier, the therapeutic celebrations were eventually institutionalized as regular, seasonal festivities featuring the kind of tune known generically as the tarantella.
Hecker reports a similar syndrome and cure in the nineteenth-century Abyssinia, or what is now Ethiopia. An individual, usually a woman, would fall into a kind of wasting illness, until her relatives agreed to "hire, for a certain sum of money, a band of trumpeters, drummers, and fifers, and buy a quantity of liquor; then all the young men and women of the place assemble at the patient's house," where they dance and generally party for days, invariably effecting a cure. Similarly, in twentieth-century Somalia, a married woman afflicted by what we could call depression - often precipitated by her husband's stated intention to take a second wife - would call for a female shaman, who might diagnose possession by a sar spirit. Musicians would be hired, other women summoned, and the sufferer cured through a long bout of ecstatic dancing with the all-female group.
First, because such rituals serve to break down the sufferer's sense of isolation, and reconnect him or her with the human community. Second, because they encourage the experience of self-loss, that is, a release, however temporarily, from the prison of the self, or at least from the anxious business of evaluating how one stands in the eyes of a group or in the eyes of an ever-critical God. Friedrich Nietzsche, as lonely and tormented an individual as the nineteenth century produced, understood the therapeutics of ecstasy perhaps better than anyone else. At a time of almost universal celebration of the "self," he alone dared to speak of the "horror of individual existence," and glimpsed relief in the ancient Dionysian rituals that he knew of only from reading the classics - rituals in which, he imagined, "each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one with him - as though the veil of Maya had been torn apart and there remained only shreds floating before the vision of mystical Oneness. . . He feels himself to be godlike and strides with the same elation and ecstasy as the gods he has seen in his dreams."
The immense tragedy for Europeans, I have argued, and most acutely for the northern Protestants among them, was that the same social forces that disposed them to depression also swept away a traditional cure. They could congratulate themselves for brilliant achievements in the areas of science, exploration, and industry, and even convince themselves that they had not, like Faust, had to sell their souls to the devil in exchange for these accomplishments. But with the suppression of festivities that accompanied modern European "progress," they had done something perhaps far more damaging: They had completed the demonization of Dionysus begun by Christians centuries ago, and thereby rejected one of the most ancient sources of help - the mind-preserving, lifesaving techniques of ecstasy."
Or, the Somalian woman could take a second husband.
4:33 p.m. - 2007-12-26