St Vitus (martyred c. 303) patron saint of dancing
St Vitus's Dance
Vitus is best known as the saint
to invoke for those suffering from epilepsy and nervous diseases.
St
Vitus's Dance - also called Sydenham's chorea (= dance) and Huntington's
chorea - is one of a series of abnormal movement disorders known as diskinesias.
The
saint is also invoked for similar diseases that come from the bites of
mad dogs and snakes. By transference he has also come to be the patron
saint of dancers.
Legend of his martyrdom
The tradition is that
Vitus was the son of a pagan Sicilian senator called Hylas. He was given
to a tutor called Modestus and a nurse called Crescentia, who brought
him up as a Christian.
His father tried to re-convert him to paganism,
but was unsuccessful and then had the three of them arrested and
scourged.
They escaped to Lucania in mainland Italy and reached Rome.
Here Vitus healed the emperor Diocletian's son, who suffered from an
evil spirit.
But the cure was regarded as sorcery and all three became
martyrs. It is not possible to say how true any of this is.
Gelasian Sacramentary and dancing for health
However,
by the sixth or seventh century, Vitus is associated with bodily health
in one of the earliest versions of the Roman Misssal, The Gelasian Sacramentary.
By the 16th century Germans believed they could get a year's good
health by dancing before the statue of Saint Vitus on his feast day.
This dancing developed almost into a mania, and was confused with the
nervous disease with the saint being invoked against it. But that
connection with such manic "dancing" led on to his patronage of dancers,
and later of entertainers in general.
Among the Fourteen Holy Helpers
St Vitus is also
grouped among the Fourteen Holy Helpers - among them, Barbara, Blaise,
Catherine of Alexandria, Christopher, George, and others - that enjoyed a
collective cult in the Rhineland from the 14th century.