Losing Your Self-Control

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In The Deepest Sense, on page 59, the author mentions dancing mania – a disease that made people dance in the streets for hours. She talks about the different remedies people used to believe in before telling us what the actual cause of the illness was – diseased fungus in bread, which created burning sensations, hallucinations, and convulsions. 

Even though we know what the actual cause of this was, if you didn’t you would try to come up with some sort of answer for it. Most of the time, if something bad happened people would have blamed God and thought God was punishing them. If they found out that the disease was coming from their food, it would be considered worse because eating is one of the closest actions you can do to be close to God. 

However, this disease (or word of God) made people lose control of themselves, which is the opposite of what religion wants you to do. Multiple aspects of a variety of religions is practicing self-control: abstinence until marriage, saying a prayer before eating, not being gluttonous, etc. So why would God make people lose that self-control? Other ways He punished people were bad harvest seasons or by spreading the flu. Neither of these cause people to lose control of themselves. 

Of course we know now how the disease was started and why the people were “dancing” in the streets. But I’m curious of what the citizens thought was God’s reason for doing this, was it just another punishment? Or was it worse/different because they lost their self-control?

Comments

  1. Jonathan Brumberg-KrausMay 11, 2018 at 8:07 AM

    Actually many religions in fact encourage ecstatic experiences that may include dancing, trances, prophesying and speaking in tongues. Early Christianity in particular encouraged and describes this. The Shakers got their name from their ecstatic dancing. And you have religious dance traditions in Hinduism and in most indigenous religions. And we saw joyful dancing as part of Indonesian Muslims'Qur'an celebrations. So asceticism is but one of many "strategies" of expression religious fervor and awareness of God.

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