An 1835 illustration shows the lunar animals supposedly discovered by John Herschel from his observatory in South Africa.
Credit: Wikimedia
Before the 20th century, most reports of mass delusions or hysterical outbreaks - known to sociologists and psychologists as 'mass sociogenic illness' - involved people exposed to strict discipline for a long time.
Between the 15th and 19th centuries a popular belief in witches and demons, along with a growing strictness in some European convents, triggered dozens of hysterical outbreaks among nuns.
This is not surprising. Young girls were often coerced into joining isolating religious orders, practicing rigid discipline in confined, all-female living quarters.
Along with vows of chastity and poverty, many endured near-starvation diets, repetitious prayer rituals and lengthy fasts. Flogging and incarceration resulted from even minor transgressions. When hysteria arose, it could last for months; or wax and wane for years.
While European nunneries might have been a perfect breeding ground for mass delusions and hysteria, they are by no means the only places. And while much has been written about individual hysteria, little attention has been directed towards delusional or hysterical outbreaks among groups. Yet evidence of past episodes abound.
MIDDLE AGES
MEOWING NUNS
During the Middle Ages, dozens of outbreaks of hysterical fits were reported among repressed nuns in cloistered European Christian convents. At the time it was widely believed that certain animals, such as wolves, could possess people and in France cats were particularly despised and were considered familiar with the Devil.
In the 1844 book Epidemics of the Middle Ages, J. F. C. Hecker describes how a nun, in a very large convent in France, began to meow like a cat; shortly afterwards other nuns joined her. Eventually all the nuns meowed together daily at certain times, often for hours.
This troubled the surrounding Christian neighbourhood, who finally called a company of soldiers, who were placed at the entrance of the convent. They were provided with rods, and the nuns were told they would whip them until they promised to meow no more.
15TH CENTURY
BITING EPIDEMIC
A nun in a German nunnery fell to biting all her companions. Soon after, all the nuns in the convent began biting each other. The news of this infection among the nuns soon spread, and it now passed from convent to convent throughout a great part of Germany, principally Saxony and Brandenburg. The biting mania then visited the nunneries of Holland, and even travelled as far as Rome.
Speaking of Delusions...
It seems to me that the slavish devotion to the Dogma of the Church of Gore (AGW/ACC) should be considered a mass delusion.
The science is far from settled, and appeals to authority violate one of the most basic principles of science: Truth is not a matter of a vote! How many more of the "predictions" of the Warmists have to fail before we put this nonsense to bed once and for all?
The madness of crowds
what about the hysteria regarding; Mad Cow Desease, Mouth- and Foot Desease, Bird Flu, Swine Flu and Global Warming?
or indeed...
Or indeed the delusion of "weapons of Mass Destruction" that swept the western world at the begining of this century and is still casuing massive loss of life.
Mass Stupidity
Most of these incidents seem to be cases of mass stupidity or ignorance and not delusions. They seem to be perfect examples of what I have noticed over the years; that the collective IQ of any population group is very low indeed. For some reason, much lower than the average IQ of the individuals within the group.
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