Blind Spot: The Oberfohren Memorandum and the Ernst Confession

image via The University of Wisconsin Green Bay Commons

Thank you for reading Historical Blindness. We are now a fortnightly blog, alternating between our full-length installments and shorter bonus posts every two weeks. These Blind Spots serve as companion pieces, telling a separate but similar tale or further exploring the last installment's story by relating an aspect of it we didn’t have time to include. In this Blind Spot, we’ll do the latter, so if you haven’t read the last installment, Firebrand in the Reichstag!, please go back and do so before enjoying this Blind Spot.

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The story of the Reichstag Fire and the legend of a conspiracy behind it is so far reaching and epic that we did not have time in our already oversized post on the topic to include some of the most interesting passages. Therefore, I proudly present here the stories of two men’s untimely deaths and the disturbing documents that cropped up afterward, linking them to the Reichstag Fire and suggesting a conspiracy to murder and silence them. This is an account of the Oberfohren Memorandum and the Ernst Confession.

Dr. Ernst Oberfohren, via Wikipedia

On April 26th, 1933, two months after the burning of the Reichstag and still several months before the publication of the Brown Book and the convening of the farcical London Counter-Trial, the first stirrings of the conspiracy theory that would come to dominate the Reichstag Fire narrative appeared. In a couple articles in an English newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, it was revealed that a manuscript was furtively circulating in Germany, written by a high-ranking official of the Nationalist party, which had until the recent seizure of power been allied with the Nazis, and it purported to tell the true story of the Reichstag arson, suggesting here for the first time in print that the Nazis themselves entered the Reichstag via the underground passage from Göring’s residence, setting the fire to create a Bolshevik scare and thereafter capitalize on the ensuing anarchy to establish a dictatorship. Appearing aghast at such an allegation in the foreign press, the German Legation in London lodged a protest against “so monstrous a vilification,” but soon enough the newspaper’s source surfaced, a memorandum attributed to former parliamentary leader of the German-National People’s Party, Dr. Ernst Oberfohren, recently deceased after an ostensible suicide on May 7th. According to the memorandum’s anonymous introduction, however, Oberfohren’s home had been raided by Brown Shirts, or soldiers of the S.A., the Nazi’s private army, who after finding a copy of the memo, allowed him to commit suicide as the only alternative to a much worse fate.

The Oberfohren Memorandum made a number of accusations, including that, during the raid of the Communist Party headquarters previous to the fire, Brown Shirts had planted guns and documents intended to create the false impression that a workers’ uprising was afoot. When this failed to elicit the uproar they desired, according to the memo, they instead resorted to the arson of the Reichstag. The act was accomplished by Brown Shirts, entering via the tunnel, and leaving behind their “creature,” Marinus van der Lubbe. And in the uproar that ensued, the Nazis planned an armed overthrow of the government in the early days of March that had only just been thwarted by unfavorable circumstances. As can be discerned from the memorandum, Dr. Oberfohren despaired over what the future might hold, and when Hitler’s swastika might usurp the place of the iron cross atop German flagpoles. Thus he had circulated the manuscript, which made its way outside of Germany and presaged the narrative of the Brown Book to come, as well as much historiography for the next three decades.

1934 British cartoon satirizing the Night of the Long Knives, via Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

Oberfohren was not alone in having the circumstances surrounding his death questioned and having attributed to him a document that incriminated the Nazis in the Reichstag Fire affair. Around a year after the release of the Oberfohren Memorandum, and half a year after Marinus van der Lubbe had been decapitated for his crime, came the dark and bloody Night of the Long Knives. The popular name for this event hearkens back to the medieval legends of King Arthur, and specifically the murder of unarmed britons by Saxon mercenaries at a banquet in what was called the Treachery of the Long Knives, and indeed the name’s conjuring of violent betrayal is apt, for the Night of the Long Knives, or the Röhm Putsch as Germans know it, was a bloody purge of Hitler’s own private army, the S.A. You see, when Hitler rose to power, he gave a lot of lip service to socialist ideology—hence the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—but having seized power and now aiming for further military domination beyond Germany’s borders, he would need to focus on industry and feared that elements of his Brown Shirt army who had believed his talk of workers’ rights would turn on him and prove to be an impediment. Furthermore, some leaders of the Brown Shirts, including founder Ernst Röhm, his deputy Edmund Heines and Berlin chief Karl Ernst, were known homosexuals—remember that van der Lubbe was depicted in the Brown Book as a homosexual prostitute in service to Röhm—so some among the Nazi leadership, including Göring, found their lifestyle as well as their politics distasteful. These were all reasons enough to turn on some of their staunchest supporters; therefore, on the 30th of June, they launched operation Hummingbird with the force of the other wing of their private army, the S.S. or Black Shirts. That day they arrested and executed numerous Brown Shirt leaders—including Röhm, Heines and Ernst—along with various political figures they deemed problematic, all under the guise of removing immoral elements from their ranks.

Imagine that: a demagogue rouses the downtrodden and resentful to gain power and then promptly betrays their interests. What a surprise…

After the purge, another document surfaced, this one purporting to be a confession penned by recently executed Karl Ernst, in which he admits to conspiring with Nazi and S.A. leaders in firing the Reichstag. Foreseeing the betrayal of Göring and Goebbels, Ernst had written the confession as a safeguard, to keep himself from being assassinated lest it be released upon his death (a gambit that apparently had not succeeded). The Ernst Confession described the entire affair, even from its earliest planning stages, when Göring and Goebbels had felt compelled to scrap a different plan involving a supposedly Communist assassination attempt on Hitler in Breslau. After considering other targets, they settled on the Reichstag, since then they could appear as “champions of parliamentarianism.”  Thinking at first they would hide within until it was empty, they feared being seen and recognized by Communists. According to the confession, it was Ernst himself who came up with the idea of using the underground tunnel, and while inspecting it and hiding their incendiary material, they had almost been caught by the watchman. In this version of events, one of the conspirators had met Marinus van der Lubbe, and thinking him a likely fellow of whom they “should be able to make good use,” convinced him that setting fire to the Reichstag was a grand idea. Thus, as Ernst and the real arsonists were escaping back through the tunnel, having set numerous fires in the Session Chamber, van der Lubbe’s handler was to see him to the Reichstag and ensure he broke into the restaurant to “blunder about conspicuously,” thinking himself the sole arsonist. This is the picture the Ernst Confession paints: calculated manipulation of the political situation, perfect execution of a false flag incident, and utter vindication of the allegations in the Oberfohren Memorandum and the Brown Book.

Karl Ernst, via Wikimedia Commons

Needless to say, this document did not look good for Hitler and his party, but at this point, the Nazis were beyond redemption in the eyes of the foreign press, and their power in Germany was quickly becoming impossible to challenge. By the end of the summer, President Hindenburg died and Hitler took for himself the position of Führer of Germany, the title meaning vaguely a guide but the role essentially that of a supreme despot. And thenceforth, history marched on in goosestep.

Not until the publication of Fritz Tobias’s groundbreaking work in Der Spiegel did anyone bother to examine the credibility of these documents, the Oberfohren Memorandum and the Ernst Confession. Rather than take them at face value, Tobias attempted to determine the true authors of the documents and to either corroborate or refute their contents. He began by examining the last days of Dr. Oberfohren and his suicide.

As Tobias shows, Oberfohren, a former professor of political science who had taken a position as chairman of the Nationalist deputies in the parliament under party leader Alfred Hugenberg, was increasingly disillusioned with his party, having openly opposed the Nationalists’ decision to give Hitler the chancellorship in an effort to forge a joint majority with the Nazis. Indeed, he had composed some pamphlets attacking Hugenberg and had been found out as the author, resulting in his resignation. Tobias demonstrates that because of his opposition to the Nationalist alliance with the Nazis, he would not have been privy to any secret operations at the time of the fire. Indeed, his suicide appears not to have been compelled by Nazi Storm Troopers but rather precipitated by a combination of emotions: guilt over betraying his party and depression over the direction his country’s government was taking. Visitors during his final days later testified to his hopelessness and, as his own wife put it, his “black despair” over the inevitable rise of a Nazi dictatorship and his powerlessness to oppose it. In fact, his suicide letter is actually addressed to Hugenberg as an apology, describing the “superhuman agonies” he was suffering and bemoaning the damage he had done to the Nationalists.

Thereafter, Tobias addresses the major theses of the memorandum, offering evidence that firearms and revolutionary literature were indeed seized at the Communist headquarters, rather than planted, and that the Nazi coup planned for March was wholly an invention of the real author of the memorandum, Wilhelm Münzenberg, the head of the Communist Agitation and Propaganda department, Agitprop, pointing out reports that forged orders had been circulated days after the fire in an effort to create a scare over a Nazi putsch. These were dismissed as fraudulent and commonly attributed to Münzenberg. Moreover, comparing the writing style of the memorandum to a pamphlet published by the Central Committee of the German Communist Party, Tobias comes to the conclusion that the Oberfohren Memorandum was also written by Münzenberg and later simply repurposed as a forgery thereafter attributed to Oberfohren following his suicide.

Propagandist Willi Münzenberg, via Wikimedia Commons

Likewise, Fritz Tobias casts doubt on the idea that Karl Ernst and others were executed on the Night of the Long Knives in order to eliminate loose ends and further cover up Nazi responsibility for the fire. Rather, he presents the more likely scenario that Ernst and his fellow Brown Shirt Storm Troopers were executed for all the obvious reasons: their political differences and the threat they posed to the National Socialist agenda. Then, as before, Willi Münzenberg seized on the opportunity to attribute a forgery to the fresh corpses that the Nazis had left in their wake. He points out that the two men named in the confession as accomplices in setting the fire had, embarrassingly, actually survived the S.A. purge and, with no reason to remain loyal to the Nazis, called the confession a fraud. And later, some of Münzenberg’s own fellow Communists named the “so-called Ernst testament” as an outright concoction edited by none other than Marinus van der Lubbe’s co-defendant, Georgi Dimitrov, the Communist leader lately acquitted of having had any part in the burning of the Reichstag.

In a world of political narratives handled so craftily by masters of public perception, our understanding of the past is not a matter of flat fact and hard documentation easily recalled. History was unreliable enough when it was written by the victors, but as can be seen in this story, now it can also be written by spin doctors, and the spotlight of truth can be purposely obscured by forgers and propagandists, leaving instead only blind spots.

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Until next time... keep your eyes wide....

Firebrand in the Reichstag!

In this installment of Historical Blindness, we will delve into a topic that, although largely settled among respected historians, remains a living legend in the public mind, with most lay persons still believing long disproven lies to be true. This is a subject, it must be said, that still, some eighty years on, inspires passion and heated argument. As such, I feel I must make my intentions clear in a preemptive apology of sorts, offering assurances regarding my motives in undertaking to tell this story. In presenting the various narratives of this event, several of which have been propagated since it transpired, I do not intend to exonerate any one party, nor do I have any desire to present the Nazis, who feature prominently in the story, as anything other than the great villains of their era. Many before me have investigated this topic, and in making certain observations regarding culpability for this specific event, have been accused of trying to exonerate Hitler’s fascist regime and whitewash their crimes. Indeed, current day neo-nazis and white nationalists frequently tout some of the admirable historiography I will rely on here in their repugnant apologism of Nazi racism and their denial of the genocide that Hitler perpetrated. I must, therefore, make it absolutely clear at the outset that Hitler and his fascist National Socialist German Workers’ Party, aka the Nazis, can never be acquitted for the many monstrous crimes they committed against humanity and the ideals of freedom and equality. A search for truth among purposeful fabrications in the historical record may find that one specific crime traditionally laid at their feet may not have been perpetrated by them, but nevertheless, their reaction to said crime and the many subsequent offences committed by them, which cannot be denied, remain to damn Hitler and his Nazis forever.

But I get ahead of myself… To make a beginning, we must look further back, to the rise of Hitler and his Nazis, and to the volatile conditions of the Weimar Republic, crippled by the Great Depression and by insurmountable political division, which created a tinderbox awaiting a spark. This was the Weimar Republic in its death throes: a society gripped by an unemployment rate of almost 40%, a government that could not rule except by emergency decree and continual dissolution of a deadlocked legislature, and a very dangerous fascist newly installed as chancellor seeking to eliminate the political obstacle represented by the opposition Communist Party. The Nazi conflict with Berlin Communists had just culminated in the Communist Party headquarters, the Karl Liebknecht House, being raided, their firearm stockpiles seized, by the Berlin Police, the chief of which also happened to be a leader of the S.A., or Brownshirts, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. It was in this combustible atmosphere that, just after 9pm on February 27, 1933, the conflagration began.

The night was remarkably cold, 22 degrees Fahrenheit with an icy wind that blasted through the streets of Berlin, cutting through one’s overcoat to chill the bones. This wintry gale blew hard on the façade of the Reichstag, the grand edifice of German republicanism that had housed various legislative bodies and stood, with its ornate Neo-Baroque columns and impressive glass and steel cupola, for nearly forty years. The Reichstag was empty at this time of night: the last government official departed for the evening, the postman come and gone, the night watchman done with his rounds. Nevertheless, the streets around the Reichstag were not deserted completely; various passersby were still about, hurrying home through the cold or enjoying a bracing winter’s walk arm in arm with a spouse. One of these, a student come from the library and passing near the front of the Reichstag, heard breaking glass and, turning, saw a figure on a first-floor balcony with what appeared to be a flaming object in hand. The student immediately sought out a policeman who was walking his beat on the opposite side of the Reichstag; he pointed the officer in the direction of the figure he’d seen, slapping his back and insisting he investigate.

The Reichstag before the fire, from The Reichstag Fire by Fritz Tobias.

Upon reaching the spot the student had indicated, the officer, a sergeant, saw a broken window and observed a reddish glow within the building. Another passerby joined him to gawp silently, and then a third, a typesetter who had heard the glass breaking, thought he’d seen two men entering the building and tried to raise the alarm on the southern side of the Reichstag with a blind cry into the night that may not have even been heard. Having returned to find the sergeant and the other passerby, he joined them in staring at what was the restaurant on the first floor, seeing a figure inside passing before several windows, torch blazing in hand. They followed his progress. The sergeant drew his gun. The typesetter bellowed, “…why don’t you fire?” and the sergeant did, discharging his gun toward a window where the intruder could be seen and only succeeding in driving the firebug farther into the Reichstag’s interior. Only then did the police sergeant think to send passersby to raise the police and the fire brigade.

What ensued was a comedy of errors, with people running in all different directions: to a police precinct, shouting for help; to an engineering institute, pleading for the caretaker to telephone the fire brigade; and to the lodge of the doorkeeper of the Reichstag, demanding he activate the fire alarm. In response, the 32nd precinct scrambled a squad car but brought no reinforcements, the caretaker of the engineering institute fumbled with a phone book but failed to find the fire brigade’s number, and the Reichstag doorkeeper scoffed, refusing to believe the building was on fire until he went to see for himself. And when police finally tried to enter and do something about the matter, they found door after door barred. The doorkeeper, finally convinced of the emergency, was able to admit them by the north entrance, but they had to wait ineffectually for the House-Inspector to arrive with keys to the inner doors. The doorkeeper, in his panic, had not phoned the House-Inspector but rather the Chief Reichstag Messenger, who had activated the phone tree with the news. Luckily, the House-Inspector had heard fire engines while tucking into his supper, had called the doorkeeper himself, and was on his way, angry at not being called directly. Eventually, some 15 minutes after the arsonist’s entrance into the building, the police were able to gain entry as well.

The House-Inspector, a Lieutenant of the 32nd Precinct, and a few constables climbed the stairs, crossed the lobby and were met with the eerie sight of red light emanating from behind a monument to Kaiser Wilhelm. The curtains framing a door to the main Session Chamber were blazing, and through the glass door, more fire could be glimpsed.  Upon entering the Session Chamber, they witnessed a sheet of fire rising behind the tribune and the Speaker’s Chair at the back of the chamber, as well as below, in the stenographer’s well. It looked to them like a brightly glowing church organ.

The House-Inspector also claimed to have seen numerous small, sputtering fires among the deputies’ benches on either side of the tribune. Firemen had meanwhile arrived, fighting a number of small fires in other lobbies, so the House-Inspector shut the doors and left with a constable to search out the arsonist. One of the firemen thereafter opened the door again and, struck by smoke and heat upon entering the Session Chamber and marking a great draft through the doors, thought it best to close the room off. But of course, the chamber was not truly shut off, for the great glass dome above had been breached by the fire, acting as a chimney and making of the chamber a furnace. Before long, the Reichstag’s Session Chamber would be absolutely cored out of the building.

The burnt-out Sessions Chamber, from The Reichstag Fire by Fritz Tobias.

The House-Inspector and the constable did not search long before, as they passed beneath a grand chandelier in the southern corridor of Bismarck Hall, a tall and bare-chested young man darted in front of them, coming from the direction of the rear of the Session Chamber. Upon seeing them, he froze a moment before trying to flee back from whence he had come. When the constable trained his pistol on the figure and called for him to raise his hands, the young man stopped and complied, heaving for breath. Searching his trousers, the constable found a passport with his name: Marinus van der Lubbe.

“Why did you do it?” the House-Inspector demanded, trembling in a fury.

“As a protest,” van der Lubbe said mildly, and the House-Inspector struck him.

Marinus van der Lubbe was taken away to endure an arduous interrogation, and by 11pm, the fire he had apparently set was extinguished, leaving only a charred black cavity at the heart of the Reichstag, where the Session Chamber had been. No one else was arrested on the scene, and indeed, no other suspects had been witnessed. Although the typesetter who witnessed someone breaking in thought at first he had seen two figures, it eventually seemed more likely to investigators that the second figure had been a reflection. And though there was subsequent report of a shadowy figure seen leaving the southern entrance of the Reichstag at about the same time as the window was being broken, receiving some sort of gestural signal from two women across the street and then fleeing, though not without a suspicious backward glance at the building, later this shadowy agent was determined to have been an innocent passerby taking shelter from the wind and then running off to catch a bus. And with Marinus van der Lubbe’s confession, which he gave gladly, in addition to his subsequent walkthrough of the Reichstag to show authorities how he had set the fire quite by himself, it appeared that the case was closed and the state had their man.

Marinus van der Lubbe, from The Reichstag Fire by Fritz Tobias.

But of course, if you have ever heard of the Reichstag Fire, you know it was not that simple. The event has become a pivotal moment in modern history, and in public perception, it has come to serve as a symbol for conspiracy and manipulation. It is looked at and referred to as the prototypical example of a “false flag” operation, or a covert operation executing some incident with the intention to deceive the world into believing said incident was perpetrated by some nation or group that in fact bears no responsibility for it. The Reichstag Fire has become the quintessential false flag operation, and has been used ever since in American political discourse to draw parallels and cast aspersions, fueling conspiracy theories from one extreme of the political spectrum to the other. After the attacks of September 11th, 2001, when the Bush administration declared a nebulous and unilateral War on Terror and whittled down civil rights with the Patriot Act, critics cried that 9/11 was his Reichstag Fire. When the tragic mass shootings of 2012 prompted an urgent national discussion of mental illness and gun violence, some conspiracy theorists callously suggested these events were staged by the Obama administration as part of a plan to declare martial law and disarm the populace, the idea being that they would be his Reichstag Fire, justifying the taking of our guns. Even leading up to the recent election of Donald Trump, some feared an imminent Reichstag Fire event that would allow Obama to extend his time in power or somehow rig the election against the Trumpites. And now, in the Age of Trump, fueled by genuine fearmongering from an administration that tells us any checks on its power, any obstruction of its agenda will result directly in terror attacks, anxiety over a looming Reichstag Fire runs high. Even as I prepared this episode, a recent and horrifying chemical attack in Syria is suspected to be a false flag intended to trigger—or justify—American military action against the current Syrian regime, which Trump promptly and literally launched.

With so much meaning imbued in this event, it behooves us to examine it more closely as a “false flag.” Accusations that a conspiracy was afoot began almost immediately, as the Speaker of the Reichstag, Hermann Göring, whose residence stood across the street, straightaway formulated the opinion that the fire was the work of the embattled Communists and specifically the leader of the Communist Party in the Reichstag, Ernst Torgler. And even as the building burned, then-chancellor Adolph Hitler arrived at the scene, and on a balcony overlooking the conflagration inside the Session Chamber, lit by the glow of the fire and red-faced from the heat and from fury, is said to have remarked that it was the beginning of a Communist uprising. “Now we’ll show them!” he is said to have shouted. “Anyone who stands in our way will be mown down. The German people have been soft too long. Every Communist official must be shot. All Communist deputies must be hanged this very night. All friends of the Communists must be locked up.” And indeed, the night of the fire, the Berlin police and the Brownshirts were quite busy, kicking down the doors of thousands of Communists to drag them out of their beds and incarcerate them. Before long, the Nazis had charged four others for the firing of the Reichstag: Communist leader Ernst Torgler, who had been in the Reichstag late that night, and three little-known Bulgarian Communists, Georgi Dimitrov, Blagoi Popov and Vassili Tanev.

The Nazi leaders at the scene of the fire. Hitler talking to Prince August Wilhelm, Göring (second from left) and Goebbels (second from right), from The Reichstag Fire by Fritz Tobias.

Almost simultaneously, the Communists of Berlin and beyond, as well as much of the foreign press, deemed it more believable to lay the blame for the fire at the feet of the Nazis themselves, a true false flag operation intended to make all of Germany fear a Communist uprising and provide pretext for the Nazis to declare martial law and bolster their governmental power. And indeed, the passage of the ominously named Enabling Laws, and most importantly the “Decree for the Protection of the People and the State,” soon gave credence to this suspicion.

On one item, at least, both sides of this argument could agree: Marinus van der Lubbe could not possibly have managed to set the Reichstag ablaze all by himself. Just based on common sense, almost everyone decided that he was either a madman or an imbecile, and details of the investigation that thereafter emerged only encouraged this assumption: an early communique relating the results of the police report indicated “that the incendiary material could not have been carried in by less than seven persons, and that the distribution and simultaneous lighting of the several fires in the gigantic building required the presence of at least ten persons.” The question, then, was who were the others, and which side had masterminded the act?

Communists abroad had no intention of waiting for the ruling of the German Supreme Court, which anyway they were certain they could guess. In solidarity with the defendants, then, who aside from van der Lubbe were widely regarded as innocent scapegoats, a book entitled The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag was published and a symbolic counter-trial was organized in London, with a variety of well-respected lawyers involved and various noteworthy intellectuals in attendance, including H. G. Wells.

The Brown Book and witnesses at the counter-trial took the low estimation of van der Lubbe’s character and ran with it, relying on a variety of never before cited sources to implicate the firebug as a homosexual prostitute and familiar of Brownshirt leader Ernst Röhm. The book also uncovered the fact that a tunnel existed beneath the home of Speaker Hermann Göring, crossing beneath the street and offering the likeliest means by which Nazi arsonists could have entered and exited the Reichstag undetected. Thus, the true incendiaries had escaped unseen and left behind their patsy, Marinus van der Lubbe, erstwhile Communist, perhaps, but in truth a Nazi stooge. This Brown Book, which was written anonymously but popularly attributed to none other than Albert Einstein, who always denied authoring it, presented a narrative of the fire that persisted for many years to come, such that many history textbooks reported as fact that Hitler certainly arranged the burning of the Reichstag himself, and even today many will repeat this story as accepted fact.

British Newsreel describing London Counter-Trial and German Supreme Court trial in Leipzig, via YouTube

After the counter-trial, the whole world, having witnessed the consolidation of Nazi power and the ruthless grinding out of Communist resistance in the wake of the fire, waited with bated breath for the outcome of the trial. But to the surprise of most, reports from the Supreme Court in Berlin indicated that the defendants were receiving a rather earnest defense and fair trial. Unusually, the proceedings found themselves bogged down in somewhat extraneous matters, as the prosecution, rather than just focusing on proving the defendants’ guilt, endeavored instead to defend the Nazis from the accusations of the Brown Book. When the trial did focus on the charges at hand, the issue under examination was whether van der Lubbe had any concrete association with the Communist Party leadership and fellow defendant Torgler in particular, which according to the court’s opinion the prosecutors failed to prove. The prosecution then had more than they bargained for when the Bulgarian defendant Dimitrov, who unbeknownst to them happened to be a high-ranking representative of the Communist International, took the stand. With sharp wit and clever logic, he turned every accusation back at the Nazis, holding up a figurative mirror so that every implied wrongdoing, every allegation of conspiracy and furtive crime became a fresh charge they had to defend against themselves. And while they succeeded with their parade of experts, who were in fact chemistry professors and criminologists with no practical expertise in fire assessment, to convince the court that van der Lubbe could not have acted alone, they failed to offer enough evidence to convict German Communist Party leader Torgler, international Communist leader Dimitrov or the other two Bulgarian defendants. Marinus van der Lubbe, however, who had stringently denied having accomplices throughout the proceedings and seemed to sink into black despair as the consequences of his actions unfolded, was convicted, and under a newly passed law that called for capital punishment in cases of high treason and arson, purposely made retroactive to apply to the Reichstag Fire case, he was beheaded within the year.

With the Supreme Court ruling that van der Lubbe did indeed have accomplices, the Nazis were at least able to maintain their insistence that their rule had been necessitated by the Red Peril. Meanwhile, the rest of the world—and, for the most part, historians—would side with the Communists and remain convinced that the Nazis themselves were the shadowy accomplices, and, ironically, their own tribunal, called on to condemn their enemies, had only served to prove the suspicions against themselves.

Marinus van der Lubbe at his trial, from The Reichstag Fire by Fritz Tobias.

Indeed, the ironies abound in this story, for not quite thirty years after the fire, an outsider to the world of academic history named Fritz Tobias, giving a sober and balanced look at all surviving documents, would prove to the world that Marinus van der Lubbe was indeed the sole arsonist, and his reckless act of political indignation, meant to wake up the common people to fight against the Nazi “mercenaries of capitalism,” had indeed ushered in the horrors of the Third Reich. Tobias’s work, which appeared in the German publication Der Spiegel in 1959 and which later he published under the title The Reichstag Fire: Legend and Reality, is a seminal work that changed history even if it failed to completely alter the public imagination when it comes to the fire, and I have relied on its remarkable details heavily in this account. Unfortunately, just as Tobias was attacked at the time as a whitewasher of Nazi history, in modern times his work has been embraced by Nazi apologists and holocaust deniers as proof the Nazis weren’t so bad. Because of that, while his work is available in its entirety in the form of a PDF online, the file appears to only be hosted by white nationalist websites spreading despicably racist ideology. Therefore, I have decided to host the file on my own website in an effort to make it available while also divorcing it from such associations.

In his work, Tobias systematically dismantles the prevailing narratives of not only the Nazi theory of Communist culpability but, more importantly considering its widespread acceptance, the Communist theory of Nazi culpability. He goes into minute detail describing the night of the fire, showing how the night watchman and others, like the Reichstag postman, had walked through the building minutes before witnesses saw van der Lubbe breaking in and had seen no one, smelled no petroleum or smoke. He demonstrates the fundamental unlikelihood that anyone entered the Reichstag via the underground passage because it was a labyrinth of locked doors and steam pipes with a floor of loose metal plates that made such a clamor when someone walked on them that the night watchman surely would have heard anyone passing through it. He examines van der Lubbe’s life, relying on the testimony of those who actually knew him and dissecting the testimony of those who didn’t to show he was no homosexual, no madman, no imbecile, but rather an intelligent young man, disgruntled due to unemployment, who not only was capable of setting the fire exactly how he said he had done it but who also had set fire, all by himself, to a number of other public buildings in the preceding days: a welfare office, the Town Hall and the old Imperial Palace. Moreover, he provides evidence that the early communique’s estimation of seven to ten arsonists was not based on any evidence but rather made on Göring’s insistence, for political reasons, and he debunks the testimony of the so-called experts at the official trial to establish that van der Lubbe not only could have started the fire himself but that he absolutely did. Furthermore, he reveals the true mind behind the Brown Book and the London counter-trial to be none other than Wilhelm Münzenberg, the head of Agitprop, or the Communist Agitation and Propaganda Department, in Paris. Indeed, Tobias goes through every charge in the Brown Book, showing it to be an outrageous tissue of lies and forgeries invented not only to indict Nazis for starting the fire but also to further the Communist cause. And he reveals the counter-trial to be a farce, with comical language barriers, Communist agitators pretending at unbiased judgment, bored officials checking out girls and even one witness who actually wore a mask on the stand in order to pretend to be a Storm Trooper with inside knowledge of the arson, when in fact he was a Jewish journalist.

Fritz Tobias, via the blog of an acquaintance and fellow Reichstag Fire researcher.

Predictably, Tobias was condemned for defending the Nazis, but with time and considered reflection on his work, the historical community at large realized that his was the most measured, realistic and convincing account of the Reichstag fire. Other historians, both professional and amateur, have since tried to resuscitate the theory of Nazi culpability for the fire, including most recently a book by Benjamin Carter Hett in 2014, but none of their attempts have succeeded in supplanting Tobias’s version of events in academic circles as they appear to rely solely on rehashing old speculation and second-guessing the credibility of Tobias and his sources rather than offering actual evidence.

In 2008, Marinus van der Lubbe was posthumously exonerated, but this was a purely symbolic gesture not reflective of his actual guilt in the crime. It was meant more to represent the modern sentiment that any criminal convictions made under the auspices of National Socialism must not have been an expression of justice, as Nazism itself represented the antithesis of justice. And still there are many who believe that we should not dare suggest the Nazis were innocent of any particular offense among their litany of crimes. In truth, acquitting the Nazis of this specific crime in no way excuses their manipulation of the event as an opportunity to seize power. Indeed, one can certainly imagine them perpetrating such a crime. Take for example their attack on the radio station at Gleiwitz in 1939, which many consider a false flag as it was meant to be blamed on Polish troops, and to ensure this, they are said to have taken concentration camp prisoners, murdered them with injections, dressed them in Polish uniforms and left them on the scene (although this too is disputed). The fact that they failed to plant such brazen evidence at the Reichstag, that they appeared by all reports shocked and angry upon learning of the fire and that they then put their supposed suspects on trial rather than summarily executing them to control the narrative of their hoax all tends to show that they weren’t responsible for the arson. But the fact that Hitler seized on the opportunity with such gleeful alacrity, calling it a signal from heaven,” should serve as an even darker lesson to which we should never turn a blind eye. Whether or not events have been orchestrated in conspiracy, how a government reacts to them, how they use them to their own advantage to promulgate doctrines or advance agendas, must always be closely scrutinized. We cannot afford to wear blinders when it comes to our leaders’ machinations. We might not survive such a bout of historical blindness.

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Thanks for reading Historical Blindness blog. Be sure listen to this episode of the Odd Past Podcast. Download numbers really help. If you enjoy the show and are fascinated by historical mysteries, check out my novel, Manuscript Found!. Just visit the Books page of the website for links to the book on Amazon, where it’s available in paperback and on the Kindle for a meager sum. The first of a trilogy that is mostly complete, this volume is a gripping yarn about a Masonic murder mystery and one of the grandest hoaxes ever perpetrated: the beginning of the Mormon Church. As always, you can support us by subscribing if you haven’t already, liking us on Facebook and following us on Twitter (where my username is @historicalblind), by telling friends and family about the show and by donating if you feel generous. On the Donate page of the website, you can give a one-time donation or find a link to our Patreon page where you can pledge a monthly amount. Either way you’ll get a shout out on the podcast! Thanks again for reading the Historical Blindness blog.       

Blind Spot: The Codex of Rohonc

A facsimile edition of the Rohonc Codex, via Wikimedia Commons

Thank you for reading Historical Blindness. This is the debut of a new interstitial series: Blind Spots. The principal installments of Historical Blindness require quite a bit of work on my part, including research, composition, and formatting each blog post as well as recording, editing and mixing the podcast, all of which I have to find time to do myself. As such, the project has settled into an already somewhat hectic monthly release schedule. I understand, however, that readers like to see new installments show up in their feeds far more frequently than this. Therefore, in an effort to please existing fans and perhaps find a wider audience, I am now endeavoring to fill the barren time span between the primary posts with these shorter Blind Spots, in which I intend to further explore the most recent story I covered or briefly relate a somewhat peripheral story.

With this purpose in mind, recall our last installment, which opened the mysterious Voynich Manuscript for your perusal. Wilfrid Voynich’s manuscript is not, however, alone in its inscrutability and mystique. Consider another mysterious antiquarian manuscript, unreadable and resistant to all attempts at translation or decipherment since it turned up nearly two hundred years ago. This mysterious tome: the Codex of Rohonc.

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All his life, Gusztáv Batthyány had lived in England as a count, breeding racehorses and enjoying a life of wealth and leisure. Nevertheless, his heritage as a Hungarian nobleman was an important part of his identity, and when his homeland erupted in revolution, one of many across Europe during the tumultuous year of 1848, sometimes called the Spring of Nations or the Springtime of the Peoples, Batthyány proved his devotion to Hungary more than mere lip service, acting on behalf of Magyar nationalists on a constitutional ministry during a time when his family member, Lajos Batthyány, became the first Hungarian Prime Minister. While Lajos was executed by firing squad a year later, Gusztáv survived his involvement in the political upheaval and lived out his years in comfort in his English home, enjoying fine food, drink and horse races until the day his heart gave out in 1883.

An 1883 portrait of Batthyány, via Wikimedia Commons

Today, what Batthyány is more often remembered for is his part in bringing the so-called Rohonc Codex to light. In 1838, he donated an extensive library from Rohonc [ˈrohont͡s], a village in Burgenland where his family owned much land, to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Some records seem to indicate that the Codex of Rohonc was at the library as far back as 1743, when it was identified in catalogues as a prayer book despite the fact that it couldn’t have been read to determine such a thing. Agents of the academy very quickly observed that the book was an item of interest. Leather-bound and 448 pages, the manuscript contained a variety of antiquarian-seeming religious illustrations and much writing of an unrecognizable character. Moreover, there appeared to be a watermark of an anchor with a star that led one scholar to eventually conclude the paper originated from 16th century Italy. One of the agents of the Academy of Sciences believed, upon first laying eyes on it, that the script resembled runic Hungarian, and this correlated well with another recent find, the wooden book of Túróc, which was making news in that it seemed to hint at a grander Hungarian history than was contemporaneously known. If the Rohonc Codex also proved to be an important relic of Hungary’s past, it would be a major find. Thus the earnest study of the Rohonc Codex began.

The book was found to contain much Christian iconography, but additionally, some illustrations depicting astronomical symbols, such as stars, suns and crescent moons, have hinted at pagan or even Islamic iconography, which some have theorized indicates the book comes from an unusually cosmopolitan society or originates from a syncretistic religious tradition. And the system of writing turned out to be no less mystifying than the illustrations. While some characters appear rune-like, as first surmised, others seem rounded and not runic at all. Various linguists have thought the script to be Greek, Cyrillic, or even an alphabet originating from an obscure ancient region of the Roman era called Dacia. One subsequently criticized theorist claimed to recognize the writing as Indian Brahmic and hazarded a subsequently discredited translation. Moreover, the number of distinct characters alone made translation impossible, as there appear to be at least 200 individual graphemes, suggesting that rather than a code or language, it may be written using a syllabary, which provides characters not for letters but for combinations of letters into sounds and syllables.

Page 41 of the Rohonc Codex, via Wikimedia Commons

Scholars continued their studies of the codex for years, certain that if they could decipher the text, the manuscript would offer some historical insights heretofore undiscovered, or at least that it would prove to be an artifact of some worth. Then, in 1866, it was revealed that the wooden book of Túróc, with which the Rohonc Codex had been so favorably compared, was in fact a forgery perpetrated by one Sámuel Literáti Nemes. A Hungarian antiquarian of some renown, universally respected as the discoverer of the Massman Tablets, which at the time were the sole surviving Roman writing tablets known to be in existence, Nemes sold rare old books, coins and artwork to Hungarian aristocrats out of his “Old Curiosity Shop” beneath the towering skeleton of a mammoth. The revelation that Nemes, a Hungarian nationalist, had forged the wooden book of Túróc and other items in an effort to provide some impressive monuments of Hungarian history, shocked many. And this scandal stained the reputation of the Rohonc Codex, as many scholars then studying the manuscript dismissed it as another forgery by the Hungarian hoaxer.

Since that time, however, academic interest in the Codex has again resurged. One scholar working on translating the codex, Benedek Láng, is convinced that it is no forgery. He argues that it is not mentioned in any of Nemes’s papers, as his other forgeries are; it doesn’t conform to the format and presentation of his other forgeries, which were all clearly intended to be taken as old Hungarian; and it is far longer than his other forgeries—indeed, longer even than might have been necessary to fool Nemes’s patrons. Láng also takes issue with the idea that the Rohonc Codex is a Nemes forgery based on the fact that the usual motivation isn’t there. Forgeries, he says, are usually perpetrated to make money, to manipulate the historical view of the past, or to play a practical joke, but the Rohonc Codex, its content indecipherable and therefore not useful in rewriting history or otherwise pranking readers or swindling buyers, seems to have been written for intellectual purposes, which doesn’t correspond with Nemes’s modus operandi. In his own studies, Benedek Láng has come to the conclusion that there is some authentic meaning in the text, but rather than an unrecognized ancient language, he theorizes that it must be “…a cipher, …a shorthand system, or …an artificial language.”

Page 44 of the Rohonc Codex, via Wikimedia Commons

Yet still, the Rohonc Codex remains, at least for now, a mystery. Moreover, researching the scholarship on the manuscript is made extraordinarily difficult for anyone who doesn’t speak Hungarian or have access to a library of works written in that language. Aside from a couple of sources I’ve linked, most of the information available online is published on websiteslike Historic Mysteries and blogs like Passing Strangeness, and The Codex from Rohonc Project, and most of these seem to have taken much of their information from the Wikipedia entry or from obscure books, like Némethi Kálmán’s 1892 Rohonczi Codex Tantétel, which apparently is not available online (at least not in translation!). Thus all we have, at least until some major breakthrough becomes public, are the much repeated details that have long been known, as well as, of course, our speculations. And this is commonplace when browsing through history and peering into the darkness of its blind spots.

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Thanks for reading Historical Blindness, the Odd Past Podcast. We’ll have a full length post for you hopefully within a couple weeks, so subscribe to our RSS feed if you haven’t already, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter, where my username is @historicalblind. If you enjoy the show and are fascinated by historical hoaxes, check out my novel, Manuscript Found! on Amazon, available in paperback and on the Kindle for a meager sum. The first of a trilogy that is mostly complete, this volume is a gripping yarn about one of the grandest hoaxes ever perpetrated: the beginning of the Mormon Church. 

The Found Manuscript of Wilfrid Voynich

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A page of the Voynich Manuscript, via Wikimedia Commons

In this installment, The Found Manuscript of Wilfrid Voynich, we blow the dust off an ancient tome, crack its brittle spine and open it to find… mystery. 

There is something transcendent in discovery. It is a feeling unparalleled in its exhilaration, felt by a detective uncovering a clue or an archaeologist brushing soil off a momentous find. There is, though, some difference to be discerned here between a snoop discovering a telltale receipt in a pile of trash and a scholar lifting an intact and glittering artifact from earth in which it has lain unseen for ages. Discoveries of a historical nature tend to quicken the pulse perhaps more than others, for they have been overlooked or hidden for so long that their discoverer feels an even greater excitement and pride in bringing them to light.

Having experienced this to some degree, I can myself attest to the elation, after interminable hours in a quiet library staring at glowing yellow microfiche as it slides and blurs past, of finally glimpsing something that looks like it might be useful, reversing the spool and discovering just the old newspaper column I was seeking, just the piece of proof I needed. While my experience may pale in comparison to the real thing, I like to believe I can imagine what it is like to make a significant historical or literary discovery, to find a lost manuscript or a previously unknown document of tremendous academic worth. It would be akin to finding buried treasure.

The “found manuscript” has long been a trope in fiction, especially in stories with a Gothic sensibility. Consider Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “Manuscript Found in a Bottle” as a handy example. The idea that the reader holds a true account of some terrible events, penned by the very protagonist of the story, has proven compelling ever since; one must only look to the modern popularity of “found footage” horror films for confirmation. As a result, one might be tempted to dismiss such framing of tales as a flourish of melodrama. Sometimes, though, life imitates art, and tropes such as these find their way into reality. Take, for example, Anne Frank’s diary, found and kept hidden by those who gave Frank’s family refuge.

Recent famous examples of found manuscripts have tended to be lost novels of famed artists rather than personal narratives of unknown individuals like Diary of a Young Girl. In 2004, the daughter of Ukrainian Jew and Parisian novelist Irene Nemirovsky discovered two novels from an unfinished series her mother had called Suite Française. The novels had been written in a miniscule script and had to be read using a magnifying glass. Nemirovsky’s daughter had long ago put the papers containing the novels in a drawer, for reading through her mother’s writings, most of which were personal, had been heartbreaking, as Nemirovsky had been murdered along with her husband at Auschwitz.  Suite Française, upon its posthumous publication, was hailed as a masterpiece.

A young Walt Whitman, via The New York Times

Even just this year, in February, a found manuscript made headlines, this one discovered by a grad student at the University of Texas and originating from the great American poet, Walt Whitman. The discovery of this novel, which apparently Whitman disavowed entirely before shifting into the most prolific and masterful stage of his career as a writer, can be imagined much as I described the lonely scholar in the library. The grad student who found the book, Zachary Turpin, made his discovery only after years of poring over newspaper archives and digitized papers. Turpin describes his discovery as a slow and arduous process that culminated in the opening of a PDF and the uttering of some “unprincipled words.” Whitman’s novel, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Autobiography, has been described as a rollicking city mystery in the tradition of Charles Dickens and has been made available in full for your reading pleasure by Walt Whitman Quarterly Review.

These stories of tragedy captured for the ages and literature snatched out of the jaws of obscurity for induction into the canon are touching and lovely to be sure, but what of the Gothic? What of the dark and mysterious tomes? What of the Necronomicon, bound in leather of dubious origin and clasped with cold, pitted iron? What of the anonymous grimoires found on disused shelves, the apocryphal scrolls hidden at the back of Dead Sea caves?

Of these, there is but one found manuscript that can be rightly considered the most mysterious book ever discovered: the Voynich Manuscript.

Round about 1911 or 1912, a London dealer of antiquarian books named Wilfrid Voynich came into possession of a most unusual manuscript. According to his own accounts of the acquisition, he discovered the manuscript in a southern European castle, in a chest where it had been hidden long ago, unbeknownst to its custodians. It caught his attention as an illuminated manuscript, meaning a handwritten document decorated with marginalia and brightly inked illustrations, which indicated great age and perhaps significant worth. Compared to the other manuscripts in the chests, Voynich called it an “ugly duckling,” small, nondescript… but further analysis showed it to be far more intriguing than the cover let on, for this book’s illustrations and style of script were unlike any other he had seen before. The content of this manuscript, indeed, was enciphered, and its illustrations mystifying.

The plain cover of Voynich's "ugly duckling" manuscript, via Wikimedia Commons

Some conflicting accounts of the manuscript’s discovery have since arisen, suggesting that the manuscript was part of a collection owned by the Roman Catholic Church and kept by the Jesuits at Villa Mondragone in Frascati, Italy, and that the sale was made knowingly to Voynich as someone who knew how to keep a secret, presumably from the Vatican. This, however, does not necessarily change what seems to be the most important part of the story to me: that the keepers of the manuscript did not realize the significance of the document they held. So perhaps Voynich did still “discover” the manuscript in riffling through the contents of a chest and recognizing its unusual character, whether or not he found the chests or was invited to look through them.

One can better understand why the Jesuits considered Voynich to be a book dealer “whose discretion could be trusted” when one considers his checkered past. He was no stranger to adventure and intrigue and resisting authority. Born a Polish noble and educated as a chemist and pharmacist in Moscow, somewhere along the way he became radicalized and began to follow the anarchist Sergius Stepniak. In Warsaw, he conspired in the escape of fellow radicals from the Warsaw Citadel, a plot that was foiled, landing Voynich himself in the Citadel. After escaping himself, although not without contracting consumption and acquiring a perpetual hunch in his posture, he persisted in his anarchist activism and eventually found himself sentenced to labor in a Siberian salt mine. Managing to escape again, he journeyed westward, to Hamburg, where he sold the clothes off his back for passage to England, arriving in 1890 with little else besides a scrap of paper with the address of Sergius Stepniak, who had taken up residence there in exile. Among other political exiles, Voynich was involved in printing and distributing propaganda literature and remained active in politics until Stepniak’s untimely death, when he went into antiquarian book dealing. Yet even as a book dealer, he was known to show his battle scars and point out which had been the work of swords and which of firearms.

Voynich plying his trade, via Voynich.nu

A frequent visitor to monasteries and convents across Europe, Voynich was something of a fast talker and slippery character, talking credulous monks and nuns out of their valuable old collections in exchange for worthless modern texts.

 Even previous to finding his cipher manuscript in Frascanti, Voynich had become known for including “Unknown, Lost or Undescribed books” in his catalogues, and he did a tidy business with the British Museum. Among the documents he sold to the museum, at least one was determined to be a forgery after his death. Despite the fact that as a dealer, the forgery had likely fooled his as well, rather than being perpetrated by him, this has led some to suggest that the cipher manuscript later known as the Voynich Manuscript may have been a hoax cooked up to earn him a tidy profit. However, the fact is that, after discovering the manuscript, Voynich made no attempt to sell it but rather exhibited it. Some years after finding it, in fact, he became obsessed with studying the book and for the rest of his life developed theories regarding its provenance, authorship and purpose. Such was the draw of this unusual manuscript that it became the prized possession of the dyed-in-wool wheeler-dealer Wilfrid Voynich.

So what made the manuscript so interesting? The illustrations were odd, certainly, but not as odd as some other illuminated medieval manuscripts, which depicted anthropomorphized animals committing various atrocities, a variety of cryptids and demons and even some archaic pornography to boot. The most commonly cited of these is the Smithfield Decretals, which the Voynich Manuscript doesn’t come close to in terms of bizarre illustrations. So it must have been the script in which the book was written that first drew Voynich’s interest, for upon closer examination, it was impossible to discern whether it was written in a cipher or in some unrecognizable language.

A mitred fox preacher ministers to flock both literal and figurative, from the Smithfield Decretals, circa 1300-1340, via Wikimedia Commons

The Voynich Manuscript is divided into distinct sections. These have been identified by scholars such as René Zandbergen, whose extensive work on the topic has been an indispensable resource for this episode, as herbal, astronomical/astrological, cosmological, biological and pharmaceutical in content, as well as a section with only text and stars drawn in the margins. These delineations, however, have been discerned based solely on the artwork, as the strange language or code in which the book is written has never been deciphered. The least mystifying are the astronomical and cosmological passages, which depict in circular and spiral diagrams the sun, moon and certain recognizable constellations, illustrations of zodiac degrees similar to those called paranatellonta, and a variety of geometrical diagrams. The biological illustrations prove odder, portraying naked women in baths and waterslides. The figures are sometimes called nymphs, or water spirits, and the sections sometimes alternatively labeled balneological, in reference to the depicted hydrotherapy. Lending more mystery to this sections are the theories that the baths and pipes through which these nymphs frolic actually represent internal human organs or that they might be a demonstration of alchemical processes.

A page from the "biological" section of the Voynich Manuscript, via Wikimedia Commons

The majority of the manuscript is comprised of herbal illustrations showing entire plants in detail, from root to stem. The remarkable thing about these illustrations, though, which has fueled many of the wilder theories regarding the manuscript, is that the plants cannot be recognized as species that exist in nature! This has led, of course, to suggestions of otherworldly provenance and further cemented the Voynich Manuscript’s place in legend. Meanwhile, the more staid assessments of skeptical historians raise the valid points that some other well-known alchemical treatises also carry illustrations of entirely fantastical plants, and that herbal illustrations from antiquity were often hand copied from one manuscript to another, resulting in some abstraction and corruption as depictions became further and further caricatured and unrecognizable.

A page from the "herbal" section of the Voynich Manuscript, via Wikimedia Commons

Nevertheless, it was surely the unusual character of the illustrations and the secrecy implicit in the text’s encipherment that piqued Voynich’s interest and led to his years of scrutiny and theorizing. And he had a stroke of luck in discerning some of the manuscript’s early history in the form of a letter found inside the manuscript from one Johannes Marcus Marci, a scientist of Prague, which establishes that the book was gifted to Jesuits in Rome in 1665. In the letter, Marci indicates that the manuscript once belonged to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II. This letter and the clues contained therein provided the basis for Voynich’s theories regarding its authorship and early history prior to showing up in Prague in the 1600s. Marci indicates that “[t]he former owner of this book…devoted unflagging toil [to its deciphering]…and he relinquished hope only with his life.” The letter further revealed that, when it arrived to the court of Rudolph II, “…he presented the bearer who brought him the book 600 ducats. He believed the author was Roger Bacon, the Englishman.” Thus one of the longest lasting theories of the manuscript’s origins was perpetuated.

Voynich made a presentation of what he called the Roger Bacon manuscript at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 1921, promoting his belief that the manuscript had been authored and encoded in the latter half of the 13th century by one of the fathers of experimental science, Roger Bacon, a theory that has persisted among some fringes even after radiocarbon testing dated it to the 15th century, taking on more and more outlandish character, such as that in the manuscript Bacon describes galaxies he viewed through an anachronistic telescope or that Bacon was preserving secret knowledge of alien technology.

Based on the letter, Voynich appears to have taken it as a given that Roger Bacon was behind the manuscript, and perhaps more interesting is his theory of who owned the manuscript prior to Rudolph II. Voynich came to the conclusion that the “former owner” referred to in Marci’s letter was none other than John Dee. If you are not familiar with Dee, he was a notorious English polymath, an advisor to Queen Elizabeth, and an all-around fascinating individual deserving perhaps of his very own episode—and indeed I may return to him in the future. Suffice to say here that in addition to his knowledge of mathematics and astronomy, his reputation as an occultist and magician was unparalleled. Indeed, he may be responsible for our modern image of wizards as long-bearded, robe-wearing crystal ball wielders with funny hats.

"John Dee performing an experiment before Queen Elizabeth I," Oil painting by Henry Gillard Glindoni, via Wikimedia Commons

The theory of Dee’s ownership of the manuscript maintains traction even today, where on Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s webpage for the manuscript, Dee is still included as part of its history. Actually, there is plenty of support for this theory. John Dee did indeed present himself at the court of Rudolph II. He and his dubious cohort Edward Kelley, on a mission they believed had been assigned to them by an angel of God with whom they had made contact through invocation magic, went to the Holy Roman Emperor to tell him he was possessed by demonic forces and to recruit him in their efforts to establish a unified world religion through direct communication with God and His angels.

Their journey proved fruitless, but regardless of their failure in this endeavor, some surviving accounts from John Dee’s son note that, while in Bohemia, Dee held in his possession “a booke...containing nothing butt Hieroglyphicks, which booke his father bestowed much time upon: but I could not heare that hee could make it out.” It is also shown in Dee’s own journal, in October of 1586, that he had 630 ducats, a sum comparable to the price the Marci letter states was paid for the cipher manuscript.

However, these pieces of evidence have not stood up under scrutiny, for John Dee was known to have had another cipher manuscript in his possession at the time: The Book of Soyga. Indeed, it was this manuscript that so vexed Dee in its impenetrability, such that when Edward Kelley first claimed to have made contact with an angel, one of Dee’s first questions was whether or not the book held anything of value and whether the angel could help him read it. The Book of Soyga remained a legendary grimoire, known only by reputation and from the few allusions made in Dee’s writings, until, in another astounding discovery of a lost manuscript, historian Deborah Harkness stumbled upon the book catalogued under an alternate title in the British Library in 1994. It is now deciphered, translated and available for the public to read online, a treatise on astrology and magic and thus by its very nature mystical, to be sure, though now no longer a complete mystery.

A cipher table from the Book of Soyga, via Mariano Tomatis's Blog of Wonders

The existence of the Book of Soyga certainly casts doubt on Voynich’s assertion that his cipher manuscript was the one in Dee’s possession in Bohemia, but perhaps more suspect is the fact that Voynich appears to have based his theory of Dee’s having owned the manuscript entirely on a 1904 work of embellished historical fiction by Henry Carrington Bolton masquerading as a scholarly work entitled The Follies of Science at the Court of Rudolph II.

Even today, the theories of the Voynich Manuscript’s origins and contents remain contested. Among them persists the idea that it is a hoax. Certainly the dating of the manuscript to the 1400s did much to assuage the notion that Voynich himself forged the book, but nevertheless doubt remained, mostly suggesting that the indecipherable language must not really be a language or code at all, but rather a kind of artful gibberish, for surely a real language would have been translated, a real cipher decrypted after so much time and analysis. One theory in this vein that I find entertaining is the idea that it is not a real book at all but rather a prop created by Francis Bacon for a stage production, thus making the “code” in which it’s written a simple mock language meant only to fool audiences from afar, with illustrations that needed only be convincing at a distance.

This idea of the manuscript as a work of art puts one in mind of another mysterious book with bizarre artwork and indecipherable text. In 1981, artist Luigi Serafini published his Codex Serafinianus, which also featured illustrations of imaginary plants and captions in an unreadable script. The difference here, however, is that the artist forthrightly admits the language to be wholly invented and meaningless, and the artwork goes far beyond depictions of herbs, with strange machinery and creatures, often showing things fused together in troubling and fantastical ways, like the famous image of a couple that transforms into a crocodile while performing coitus. Serafini admits to having worked on the Codex while under the influence of the hallucinogen mescaline, and he says his intention was to instill the feeling of bemusement that children experience when looking at books they cannot comprehend.

A page from the Codex Serafinianus, via Wired

While the notion that the Voynich manuscript is nothing more than a work of art intended to mystify is certainly pleasing, especially since, if that were its purpose, it has accomplished it remarkably, the fact is that recent scholarship suggests the book may be decipherable after all. In 2013, a study approached the problem of deciphering the text using information theory and concluded that the text indeed contains linguistic patterns, indicating there is some meaning to be found in its pages. And the following year, University of Bedfordshire linguistics professor Stephen Bax claimed to have finally deciphered words in the text, including names of plants in the herbal sections—juniper and coriander—and the name of a constellation in the astronomical section: Taurus.

If these advancements in the study of the manuscript are to be taken as signs of progress to come, then we may eventually know the content of the book. Nevertheless, even then, its origins may remain forever shrouded in mystery, lost among competing theories, such as that it was written by the heretical gnostic Cathars of Southern Europe, that it was an Aztec medical text, or that it was penned by Leonardo Da Vinci using his non-dominant hand.

Indeed, one has the impression that mystery will surround Wilfrid Voynich’s found manuscript no matter what we learn about it. And perhaps some books are destined to remain unread, some chapters of the past meant to remain blank. Still, one does hope that, with enough time and study, our historical blindness might be cured, at least in this regard, enough to bring the manuscript’s words into focus.

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Thank you for reading Historical Blindness. If you enjoy these explorations into the blind spots of history, you may be interested in an exciting new project I'm launching. 

Tying in with this installment’s theme of found manuscripts, I am publishing one of my own. After long years of research and composition and revision, I am finally publishing my debut historical novel. The book makes use of the found manuscript trope I discussed earlier, and at its center is a very famous story of a supposedly found manuscript, for the novel explores the beginning of Mormonism from a skeptical perspective. In fact, the novel’s title is Manuscript Found!, the first in a trilogy. The following is the dust jacket synopsis:

In early nineteenth-century Western New York, a world of mobs and secret societies where belief in visions and magic is still commonplace, two men compose manuscripts that will leave indelible marks on society, and one woman finds among the religious and political turmoil a pretext to exert an influence outside her appointed sphere. In this debut novel exploring the beginnings of Mormonism and the rise of America's first third-party political movement in opposition to Freemasonry, Nathaniel Lloyd delineates the intersections of religion and politics and the power of secrets and falsehoods. The first volume of a trilogy, Manuscript Found! establishes compelling characters and follows as they become embroiled in the political and religious affairs of their age, unaware that fate will eventually bring them together on the western frontier.

You can find links to the book here on the website; go check it out if you’re a reader!

The Dancing Plague

Die Wallfahrt der Fallsuechtigen nach Meulebeeck, an engraving by Hendrick Hondius based on a drawing by Pieter Brueghel depicting the dancing plague, via Wikimedia Commons

While in our previous entries we have delved into a passage of history to which many have turned a blind eye and another which remains a blind spot in our knowledge of the past, in this installment, we’ll examine one of the most puzzling medical mysteries of the ages, one which is often dismissed by those whom science has blinded: The Dancing Plague.

To be certain, the Middle Ages were a high time for mysterious illnesses. The most commonly known illness of the era, the Black Plague, certainly seemed mysterious during its horrific reign across Europe. How were the physicians of that time to ascertain that the buboes—the hot and tender egg-like protuberances swelling on the necks, groins and armpits of the infected, from which the term bubonic is derived—were rising from the bites of fleas carrying the disease from rats to humans? Thinking the disease to be spread through corrupted air, they prescribed relocation, and of course this was effective since distance from the rats and their fleas meant less chance of being bitten. However, this diaspora also resulted in the spread of the disease. Still, the treatment appeared successful, and often the reason why a cure proved effective was just as mysterious as the illness itself.

Like the bubonic plague, many of the most mysterious illnesses of the medieval period were characterized by horrible boils and sores, such that it almost seemed like a succession of biblical plagues. In Paris, in 945 C.E., an epidemic of such pustules, later called St. Anthony’s Fire, spread and could only be cured by Hugh the Great, Duke of the Franks and Count of Paris, who held a stockpile of palliative holy grains at St. Mary’s church. It has since become clear that St. Anthony’s Fire was spread by the ingestion of grains corrupted by ergot fungus, so the grains of Hugh the Great were holy and restorative only insofar as they were not poisonous.

Other mysterious diseases presenting suppurating sores likewise elicited some odd treatments. Water Elf Disease, which may have been something similar to endocarditis, was thought to be caused by the stab of a witch, and sufferers sought relief through song. Then there was the King’s Evil, a scrofulous infection of the lymph nodes that presented with swollen masses on the neck similar to buboes that was believed to be curable by the mere touch of a monarch. However, a king was not about to go around laying bare hands on the afflicted, so instead kings were known to touch coins, which were then given to the infected as so-called “touch pieces” to rub on their sores.

One such mysterious illness that spread festering boils across Europe was known as the French Disease as it appeared to have been transmitted by the French to the Italians during the 1493 siege of Naples. This medieval illness, however, persisted into the Early Modern Era and beyond, eventually coming to be known as the sexually transmitted infection syphilis. And syphilis was not alone in surviving the Middle Ages. There was another holdover plague with a much longer history that reappeared in the 16th century. This one, however, caused no boils, no sores. Instead it caused an ecstasy, though not in the euphoric sense. Rather, this was the ecstasy of a frenzied trance that eventually broke the body and killed the sufferer.

Strasbourg circa 1572, via ResearchGate

In the Alsatian city of Strasbourg, on the Rhine River, a city renowned as the home of Johannes Gutenberg’s revolutionary moveable type printing press and of the tallest building in the world, Strasbourg Cathedral, a strange occurrence transpired in the summer of 1518. Among narrow streets choked with pedestrian traffic and mongers of every stripe, a hausfrau by the name of Troffea began to dance. No strains of music were heard to prompt her rhythmic motions. Indeed, by one subsequent report, her husband had just instructed her to perform a task she did not desire to do, and he stood in exasperation, demanding, to no avail, that she cease her antics. Thus, as Frau Troffea continued her silent and solitary dance, it was at first dismissed by onlookers as a domestic squabble.

One can imagine the dance itself as commencing slowly, almost lazily, with some swaying motions and fluid movements of the limbs. Soon, though, the motions became more energetic, her tempo increasing, and despite her husband’s pleas, she remained impassive, as if entranced. As minutes then turned to hours and her dance continued, onlookers gathered. It is not recorded whether her husband remained in concern or left in anger at her behavior. What is known is that while some among her audience still believed her to be acting out in defiance of her husband, others began to think something more sinister was at work. As fatigue set in, her dancing grew more violent and fitful, almost like contortions, and some began to suggest she was possessed by a demon. She had not eaten or taken water and was drenched in sweat. Eventually, she collapsed, but her strange episode was not over. When she awoke, she stood slowly and began again her danse macabre. This continued, depending on the source, for four to six days. Before growing crowds of spectators, she danced herself bruised and bloody, fainting occasionally in exhaustion only to resume her stuporous cavorting upon waking. By the time authorities stepped in and took Frau Troffea away, the consensus seemed to be that her ecstasy was inspired or perhaps inflicted by God rather than by the devil. Thus she was carted off to a nearby shrine, where indulging in such holy paroxysms was deemed more seemly. However, that was not the last that Strasbourg would see of the dancing disorder that afflicted Frau Troffea.

Mere days after Troffea’s initial dance, some thirty-four other sufferers appeared, compelled to dance nonstop, unto exhaustion, injury, and in some cases, death. That’s right. It is recorded that many danced themselves into the grave that hot summer in Alsace. And as the number of manic dancers grew, the populace began to fear it was a plague, perhaps inflicted by God Himself as a punishment for their sins. With fear and paranoia growing, and every day more dancers filling the streets, the governing body of Strasbourg, a combined privy council called the XXI composed mostly of guild leaders, was obliged to do something.

At first, there was a strong debate in council meetings. Men of the cloth and physicians squared off, the former suggesting such explanations as possession or divine punishment and the latter dismissing such possibilities in favor of far more rational explanations, such as that the afflicted suffered from blood that had grown too hot. As they squandered time on debate, however, the outbreak spread. When there were more than a hundred dancers, the council finally took action, opening two guildhalls, those of the dyers and the carpenters, for the shelter of the afflicted. Acting on the advice of physicians first, who suggested the dancing was actually providing a natural relief for some physiological disorder, the council paid unaffected citizens to stay and dance with them and even contracted musicians to fill the guildhalls with the rousing music of drums and fifes to better facilitate their dancing. In effect, they threw them a big party. But this did not achieve their desired results, for none of the afflicted were cured of the urge to dance. In fact, it appeared to exacerbate the trouble, as many in the guildhalls died from dance and others, presumably the paid chaperones or perhaps even passersby, enamored of the music and dancing in the halls, became infected themselves, and thus the plague spread.

Dance Macabre,, attributed to Michael Wolgemut, published 1493 in Hartman Schedel's Chronicle of the World, via Wikimedia Commons

In response to this clear failure to address the problem, the Council of Twenty-One took a different approach, issuing statutes that today sound like something out of the classic ‘80s film Footloose. There shall be no music in their city, they decreed, on penalty of a 30 shilling fine. While exception was made for good, upstanding folk celebrating weddings or observing mass, even then music would have to be limited to stringed instruments, without the accompaniment of such tempting rhythms as tambourines and drums offered. And to complete their moral legislation, the council even banished “loose persons,” but, thankfully, only temporarily.

When the enforced absence of song still didn’t settle the swinging hips and limbs of all the poor dancing maniacs on the floor, the council resorted to more religious remedies. In a final recourse, they ordered all uninfected guild members to take up the dancers in their halls, lay them bodily onto several large wagons and tie them down, for the stricken were to make a forced pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Vitus at Saverne. With these wagons overladen with bound and writhing forms, they did just that, creaking along some 25 miles of road—slowly, one might imagine—and up a narrow path to the  cave on a promontory where the shrine was kept. There the dancers jigged their way inside and fell prostrate before the image of St. Vitus. A mass was then said over them, and to calm their tapping toes, each was given a pair of red shoes that had been blessed with the sign of the cross and anointed with oil. And this, oddly enough, appeared to do the trick. As many as four hundred were said to have been afflicted with the dancing plague that summer, and the pilgrimage seemed to help many of them recover. This earned the condition the name St. Vitus’s Dance, perhaps because it became widely believed that the saint could help, or because they suspected someone had cursed the afflicted in the saint’s name, or because they supposed the plague had been sent as a punishment by St. Vitus for not venerating him enough.

Religious tradition describes St. Vitus as a 3rd century Sicilian child, who after converting to Christianity against his affluent family’s wishes, performed several miraculous healings through the laying on of hands. Hagiography has him healing paralysis and blindness and other conditions that led to the modern conception of him as the patron saint of neurological disorders. Supposedly boiled in a cauldron while still a child by an emperor’s son whom, according to the legend, he had just healed of demonic possession, after his martyrdom and eventual canonization, his relics came to be most associated with healing illnesses presenting “unsteady step” and “trembling limbs,” among other forms of lameness. Thus the Strasbourgians’ supposition that this particular saint might help their dance-mad citizens, and thus St. Vitus’s reputation as a patron saint of dance.

Martyrdom of Saint Vitus, circa 1450, artist unknown, via Wikimedia Commons

Since the Strasbourg epidemic, St. Vitus’s Dance is known to have had some recurrences elsewhere in Europe during the 16th century, sometimes in a recurring form wherein sufferers fall prey to the dancing urge every summer around the same time and must make their pilgrimage to a shrine of St. Vitus annually, but never again has such a rampant outbreak occurred. In the years afterward, even unto the modern day, there has been much debate as to the causes of this phenomenon, whether it be a supernatural affliction, a true physiological illness or a psychogenic complaint—in other words, was it a curse, a sickness or a madness? In weighing all these possibilities, however, one must consider the long history of dancing sickness throughout the Middle Ages leading up to the Strasbourg outbreak.

Among the oldest accounts of a dancing mania was one, which may be entirely fabular or merely embellished from fact, that took place in eastern Saxony, in a district of Bernburg called Kölbigk. The year has been variously reported as 1013, 1015, 1017, and 1021, but clearly it can be narrowed down to the early 11th century. What is consistent in the story is that, one Christmas Eve, a group gathered in a churchyard and kicked up such a racket with their singing and dancing as to upset the church’s priest, who was at the time trying to proceed with Mass. According to the most detailed account I could find, it was at the church of St. Magnus the Martyr, and those gathered there were carolers, of a sort—in that they sang chorolla, or ballads, one of which reportedly included the lyrics ”Why do we stand? Why do we not move?” And move they did, holding hands and jumping and dancing in a circle that the priest of St. Magnus called a “ring dance of sin.” Like any old fuddy-duddy upset at the noise, the priest came out to complain, and when they would not quiet, he cursed them. Counterintuitively, however, he cursed them to continue dancing unceasingly for an entire year, and legend has it this is just what they did, leaping and spinning in their circle day and night. They took no food or water until the spell was broken on the following Christmas Eve, at which time they fainted dead away and slumbered for days, some expiring in their sleep. Those who survived suffered painful spasms for years and were reduced to alms-begging paupers. Now of course this story is unbelievable in more than one respect, but it can’t be dismissed entirely as it was not to be the last instance of this phenomenon.

Religious fanatics dancing amid graves in a churchyard, vi Wikimedia Commons

For example, in the independent German city of Erfurt in either the year 1237, 1247 or 1257 depending on the source, a great many children (from at least one hundred to over a thousand) gathered in the streets, singing and dancing uncontrollably, and proceeded out the city gates, dancing some twelve miles all the way to the walls of Arnstadt, where, their energy depleted, they fell asleep and were retrieved by their worried families. It has been reported that, similar to other outbreaks of a dancing plague, some of the children died in the grips of this mania, and the survivors afterward suffered enduring symptoms, including lethargy and trembling in the extremities. Some have speculated that this incident inspired the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, although Hamelin is around 130 miles northeast of this vicinity.

Some 20 to 40 years later, in Maastricht, 1278, around 200 people danced uncontrollably on a bridge that suddenly buckled and cast them into the waters of the Meuse to drown. Thereafter, in 1374, a major spate of occurrences erupted in Aachen and spread east to Cologne, west to Ghent and north and south into the Netherlands and France. From this outbreak we have disturbing reports of the afflicted shrieking in pain and screaming out while they danced that they were dying. It was thus assumed to be an epidemic of mass demonic possession, and exorcists kept busy that year, shouting their incantations and throwing the plague’s victims into baths of holy water. Some of the dancers, it is said, even cried out the name of their demonic tormentor: Friskes. It can be surmised that this is where the verb frisk, meaning to frolic playfully, originated, as well as the word frisky, meaning lively and playful. So next time your puppy or your children are jumping about with a surfeit of energy, you might want to cast out the demon Friskes, just to be sure.

Further outbreaks of the dancing plague were few and far between for the next century. Early in the 15th century, a monk danced until he died at the Benedictine Monastery of St. Agnes at Schaffhausen, and an assemblage of ladies went into an extended dance frenzy at the Water Church in Zurich. And in 1463, a great number of manic dancers came in a hopping, gamboling pilgrimage to the shrine of Eberhardsklausen near Trier. These pilgrims, some of whom had been suffering their condition six months, danced so vigorously that they were known to have broken ribs with their strenuous movements, but as in other recorded instances, they felt compelled to dance in order to combat a deep physical pain they felt. They danced until they collapsed in fatigue but leapt back into action if one poured wine on them!

As in the Strasbourg epidemic of the next century, they associated their condition with a particular saint, this time St. John—likely because many claimed to have had a vision of his severed head during their frenzies—and appealed to his image for a cure. Thus the alternative name for St. Vitus’s Dance: St. John’s Dance. And in another curious connection to the Strasbourg contagion, there appeared to be some odd correlation between the condition and the color red. If you recall, 55 years later, red shoes appeared to help cure the Strasbourgians. In Trier in 1463, the dancing pilgrims of St. John reportedly were not able to see the color red! Therefore, by some logic that surely seemed sound at the time, they wore red coral around their necks as amulets and even ingested potions containing powdered red coral.

St. John's Dancers in Molenbeeck by Pieter Brueghel II, via Wikimedia Commons

Considering this long history throughout the Middle Ages prior to the Strasbourg incidents, it should come as no great surprise that the dancing plague may not have entirely disappeared after its brief resurgence in early modern Europe. In the 1730s, at a cemetery in Paris, among followers of a heretical sect called Jansenism who made daily pilgrimages to the grave of a revered ascetic where it was rumored miraculous cures had been performed, a remarkable phenomenon was recorded. These pilgrims began to contort themselves and experience convulsions—thus their strikingly cool name, the Convulsionnaires—and they are often associated with the dancing plague because their convulsions took on the cast of dance. The differences, however, were manifold. Beyond spasms and dancing, the Convulsionnaires were also said to sing, shout prophecies, speak in tongues, and bark like animals. Moreover, they claimed to be able to produce their convulsions on command, and instead of asserting that their movements helped abate some pain they were feeling, they rather declared that their convulsions allowed them to withstand any pain someone might inflict upon them. To prove it, they encouraged onlookers to do violence on them, and according to some accounts they did indeed seem immune to harm while in their ecstatic throes, withstanding strangulation, bludgeoning by various objects and even attacks with blades! And to top off these incredible claims, the Convulsionnaires were supposedly witnessed levitating! Authorities closed the cemetery to restore order, but the Convulsionnaires took to the streets, and their condition seemed contagious, with some reports numbering them in the thousands. While this affair certainly has its dissimilarities from previous dance outbreaks, it is the same in that, eventually, it died away.

Not so another compulsive dance craze, this one in Italy and somehow far more disturbing, at least to me, than any that preceded it. As far back as the 14th century it was recorded, and further study and definition of the condition took place during the 1600s and 1700s. The condition is known as tarantism, and it is thought to proceed from the venomous bite of the dreaded tarantula spider. The preferred treatment? Music! The sufferer, or tarantata, after experiencing some of the obvious symptoms of venomous bites—swelling and difficulty breathing—will leap into dance when music is played. Therefore we have some clear similarities with St. Vitus’s Dance and previous dance plagues: dance as a means of relief from physical pain, music having a clear effect (although here it is seen as ameliorative), and perhaps most unsettling, possession being blamed. You see, the tarantata is said to be possessed by the spirit of the offending spider, and the music and dance are a means of exorcism. Indeed, their dance was a kind of imitation of the tarantula, arching their backs and clambering on all fours up walls and across floors. The musicians became folk healers in these situations, and their skills on violin and tambourine were tested, for they had to play an improvised sort of music that anticipated the bizarre spiderlike movements of their patients in order to successfully banish the spirit of the tarantula. As seen in St. John’s Dance and St. Vitus’s Dance, the symptoms of tarantism did not always disappear for good but rather returned every year around the same time with haunting dreams and hallucinations of spiders, necessitating an annual pilgrimage to a church in Galatina to entreat St. Paul for mercy. Paul, having himself survived a snake bite, is considered, among other things, patron saint of those suffering from venomous bites. Astoundingly, belief in tarantism persisted well into the 20th century. Only recently has it seemed to perish with the last of the pilgrims to Galatina, and what remain are legends and relics of the past, including the peculiar music style said to cure the condition, pizzica-pizzica, and the dance itself, which has evolved from the spiderlike crawling of its origins into the whirling dance known as the tarantella.

Page from Magnes sive de arte magnetica opus tripartitum by Athanasius Kircher, via Wikimedia Commons

What in the past might have been diagnosed as tarantism might today be considered a neurological condition, and this is true of the dancing plague generally. Ask a doctor, and he or she would likely suggest these were episodes of epileptic seizure that were not understood at the time, or those well-versed in history might dismiss it as Sydenham’s chorea, an older diagnosis that, like epilepsy, attempts to define the condition in terms of spasms and unsteady movement. While some neurological explanation might seem likely, especially when considering the strange repetition of details having to do with the perception of the color red, weighing all evidence, such diagnoses seem reductive in that they describe only convulsion rather than actual dance and do not account for the contagion that seems evident in the record. And in fact, it has been noted that as far back as the 1463 outbreak of St. John’s Dance, epilepsy was a known condition, called the “falling sickness,” and the dancing plague was viewed as a clearly different illness.

Another popular theory is that of ergotism. Recall my earlier account of St. Anthony’s Fire as an illness caused by fungus on grain and cured by receiving untainted grain from a church’s stores. Well, it turns out the fungus ergot can also cause convulsive seizures and mania. This explanation, combined with religious fervor and legend, does seem to best explain the phenomenon. Consider, for example, the fact that the only known cure was a pilgrimage to a church or shrine, where perhaps they received untainted grains. However, one of the foremost scholars on this topic, John Waller, has pointed out that ergotism might cause convulsions and hallucinations but that it is not known to have ever caused the sustained rhythmic motions described so consistently in the historical record. Moreover, he points out that people do not react so uniformly to ergot poisoning, and surely if ergotism were the cause, there would have also been reports of the gangrenous form, St. Anthony’s Fire, which there was not. And again, he demonstrates that the people of Alsace knew well the dangers of ergot, citing wooden pipes found in grain mills that were carved with contorted faces as a reminder of the risk of tainted flour. Familiar as they were, they still saw St. Vitus’s dance as a plague altogether distinct from ergotism, and who are we, in the modern day, to gainsay their firsthand knowledge?

Hence Waller’s own theory: that most if not every instance of the dancing plague can be attributed to mass psychogenic illness, perhaps more popularly known under the umbrella term mass hysteria. In other words, it was all in their heads! The spread of the dance would thus be simply attributed to the power of suggestion, and the religious aspects of the condition and its supposed cure can be understood as part of the religious mysticism common in that era. The entire phenomenon, then, is explicable as a sociological trend.

To me, though, this rationalization disappoints. There seems to be no more concrete evidence for this explanation than there is for the idea that it truly was an enigmatic disease that subsequently disappeared. And when prominent mysterious happenings in the past can be so effortlessly disregarded as mass hysteria, it may lead to a serious case of historical blindness.