"I think what the enemy intended for evil, the Lord will use for good. We will see what the Lord does through it."

Said Jeff Schwarzentraub of the BRAVE Church in Denver, quoted in "Kirk’s Christian Supporters Mourn Him as a Martyr/'Charlie died for what he believed in,' said Jackson Lahmeyer, a pastor in Oklahoma" (NYT).

I'm interested in the concept of Charlie Kirk as a "martyr."  I wrote post yesterday inviting people to contemplate Kirk as a "saint." If you're inclined to think that Kirk was too political to fit this religious conception, here he is in his own defense:

"Charlie is already in paradise with the angels"/"We take comfort in the knowledge that he is now at peace with God in heaven."

Said RFK Jr. and Donald Trump. 

Questions I asked ChatGPT:

1. Were they attesting to Charlie Kirk's sainthood?

2. If you had to argue that Charlie Kirk should be canonized what would you say?

3. Outside of the Catholic Church how is sainthood talked about?

Answers here.

ADDED: Those questions were posed to ChatGPT, not Grok, as I'd written before. Here, I've given Grok a chance.

AND: This post was written as a serious invitation to contemplate Kirk as a saint. He presented his efforts as for his faith. Asked how he would want to be remembered, if he were to die, he said: "I want to be remembered for courage for my faith. That would be the most important thing."

"The cool thing is, the more you think about the miracle itself, Father Valera lives in the 19th century. He never came to the U.S. We have no knowledge of him coming here. Never came to Rhode Island."

"And yet, because the doctor called out and called upon his name for help in the situation back in ‘07 on behalf of that little baby, he decided to intervene and ask God for a miracle."

Said Reverend Timothy Reilly of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence, quoted in "Pope Leo XIV declares a miracle at Rhode Island hospital, crediting prayer with saving baby’s life in 2007" (NY Post).

The baby, Tyquan Hall, was delivered in Rhode Island and expected to die, but the doctor, Juan Sanchez, who was from Huercal-Overa, Spain, prayed for intercession from his region’s patron, Father Valera Parra, who lived in Huercal-Overa from 1816 to 1889.

"Five Catholic saints are on the list, including Elizabeth Ann Seton.... However, there is not a single female athlete, unless you count sharpshooter Annie Oakley."

From "Who’ll be in Trump’s hero garden? There are a few surprises. The list of nearly 250 includes the famous, the obscure and, in some cases, the intentionally controversial" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Does this NYT illustration intentionally evoke the classical image of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian?

I wouldn't think, in the aftermath of 2 assassination attempts on Donald Trump, that the NYT would want us to make the association, but here is the image:

And here is the Renaissance painting by Andrea Mantegna:

Like Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Sebastian did not die from this shooting (though he was soon killed):

"Maybe you, too, have an unreasonable fear that is leaching the color from your life."

"Maybe you remedy this through walking, meditation or therapy. I recommend picking a saint to help you. The 'saint' doesn’t have to be a literal, official Catholic one — they can be anyone who rejected a life of maximal self-interest in favor of radical service, someone whose commitment to the rigors and contradictions of doing good in this world can show you how to live in it. My saint is Brother Lawrence, a 17th-century soldier turned Carmelite friar. He had a gift for savoring dull chores, like peeling vegetables and washing pots, which he did for most of his time on Earth...."

Writes Jim O'Grady, in "You Don’t Have to Be Perfect to Live Like a Saint/Set aside the notion of flawless miracle workers. Focus instead on their exuberance and compassion, inner balance and commitment to a meaningful vocation" (NYT)(free-access link).

"The image is saintly."

Announces Washington Post fashion writer Rachel Tashjian, in "Jill Biden is Vogue’s cover star. What timing. The first lady covers Vogue for the third time, positioned by the magazine as a savior of the country’s fate."

Here's the image:

Tashjian proclaims that "a striking, fascinatingly out-of-character image in its storytelling."  What's the usual "character"? More smiley? More of a sidekick? I really don't know. Do you? We're told "the religious undertones are startling": "Her pose and visage, not to mention the color of her dress, recall religious paintings of saints communing with their higher power."

IN THE COMMENTS: Rafe — short for Raphael? — says "Which paintings? What a lazy comparison, to paintings which only exist, apparently, in her mind." 

I went looking for paintings of saints gazing upward. There's this, by Raphael:

Notice that Catherine's hands do not hang limply at her sides. They are expressive of ecstasy and placed in locations that would seem truly odd on a modern-day politico. Unlike Jill, she's got her weight shifted to one side, and also unlike Jill, she's leaning on what we know to be the device used to torture-murder-martyr her. Jill exists in an empty brown-gray void.

But it's the difference in the eyes that is most striking. Jill's eyes are rotated sideways, and only slightly upward, as if she is gazing fondly at her somewhat tall husband. They're not fixed on Heaven. 

Can we find paintings of saints with eyes rotated sideways, which seems mildly coy? Consider the entirely un-Jill-like Saint Lucy:

"The seventeenth-century friar Joseph of Cupertino flew so often, so extravagantly, so publicly, that he forced everyone around him..."

"... to confront the boundary between the inexplicable and the impossible... Crowds of people came to see the spectacle... So many came to see him that the friars had to remove tiles from the roof so the masses could watch him fly during the liturgy. He levitated constantly, understandably annoying his fellow friars—what with the shrieking, the soaring, the streaming crowds. He eventually annoyed the Inquisition, too, and was charged with feigned sanctity. He levitated on the way to his trial. The examiners gave him a stern warning, and the Inquisition would monitor him for the rest of his life.... Joseph understood his body as his medium. He starved it, whipped it, abused it violently for decades. Did he starve himself into lightness, with his diet of beans and rotting vegetables? According to hagiographers, when he was dying he called his body asino, or 'jackass.' During his final illness: 'The jackass has now begun to climb the mountain.' On the brink of death: 'The jackass has reached the top of the mountain. He can no longer move. He will have to leave his hide here.'..."

Writes Erin Maglaque in "Wings of Desire/A gullible new book raises the question of how we should interpret the history of the supernatural in early modernity" (NYRB). The book under review is "They Flew: A History of the Impossible" by Carlos M.N. Eire.

Maglaque continues:

"More alienated Latinos are turning to unofficial saints."

Axios reports. 

La Santa Muerte, a skeleton figure that resembles the Grim Reaper, is the most well-known.... Although originally tied to cartels, devotees now include members of LGBTQ+ communities and the middle class.

"Liz Pickard, an office worker from Denver, was raised Episcopalian, but discovered the story of Brigid on an earlier visit to Ireland."

"She came to Solas Bhride this year for a weeklong stay in its hermitage. 'I was searching for meaning and she gives so much meaning,' Ms. Pickard said. 'Right now, if you go down a certain road with religion, there’s a lot of pain caused by these people, but with Brigid, I think there’s a lot of kindness, and a lot of service and courage.' Two sisters, Georgina O Briain and Caragh Lawlor, sat in the calm of Solas Bhride’s central prayer space on Saint Brigid’s Day, quietly weaving rush crosses... 'Brigid was both Christian and pagan, a mix of the two, and while I’m not very religious, I am very spiritual, and she brings it together for me,' Ms. O Briain said.... Tellingly, Brigid’s Christian nuns maintained a pagan-style fire shrine on the grounds of her abbey, even after the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in the 12th century, in which the English monarchy imposed strict Roman Catholic doctrine on the independent-minded Celtic church of Brigid, Patrick and Columba — Irelands’ trio of patron saints...."

From "As Ireland’s Church Retreats, the Cult of a Female Saint Thrives/The cult of Saint Brigid, with its emphasis on nature and healing, and its shift away from the patriarchal faith of traditional Catholicism in Ireland, is attracting people from around the world" (NYT). 

I didn't know the legend: "Around the year 480... a freed slave named Brigid founded a convent under an oak in the east of Ireland. To feed her followers, she asked the King of Leinster, who ruled the area, for a grant of land. When the pagan king refused, she asked him to give her as much land as her cloak would cover. Thinking she was joking, he agreed. But when Brigid threw her cloak on the ground, it spread across 5,000 acres — creating the Curragh plains...."

Here's the Wikipedia article "Curragh." An excerpt:

There has been a permanent military presence in the curragh since 1856... Records of women, known as Wrens of the Curragh, who were paid for sex work by soldiers at the camp, go back to the 1840s.  They lived in 'nests' half-hollowed out of banks and ditches, which were covered in furze bushes....

Nowadays, the pagan-curious ex-Episcopalians traveling to commune with St. Brigid might gaze longingly at an "offbeat" Airbnb "nest" — a half-hollowed-out bank covered in furze bushes.

"The relics believed to be of St. Nicholas were brought from present-day Turkey by sailors 1,000 years ago, and his bones have been entombed in Bari ever since...."

"The presence of the relics has long made Bari an unusual linchpin in relations between Italy and Russia and between the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches. In 2007, Mr. Putin himself came to Bari and knelt in front of St. Nicholas’s tomb, just as the faithful did during the prayer for peace.... Larisa Dimetruk, 62, from Lutsk in northwestern Ukraine, said she came to beseech St. Nicholas to make the Russians 'stop their president.' 'Only the people can stop him,” she said. 'We didn’t come here to pray together. We came here for a miracle.'... Others simply felt torn and had no interest in talking politics. 'We’ve all run out of tears,' said Olga Sebekina, from St. Petersburg, Russia, who said her grandmother was Ukrainian and that she still had family there. 'Which side of my heart should break more?'"

 From "Italian City Tied to Russia by a Revered Saint Feels the Sting of War in Ukraine/The port of Bari holds relics venerated by Orthodox Christians throughout the former Soviet bloc. Today it is also home to a spillover of tensions from Russia’s invasion" (NYT).

"One night I was at party and was introduced to a woman named Reparata, so..."

"... I mentioned this record and group and she said, 'Yeah; that was me. I'm Reparata.' I thought I'd smoked something funny at the party, but she and I ended up talking about music and it was quite apparent she indeed was Reparata! She was very cool."

From the comments at...

 

Here's the Wikipedia page for Reparata and the Delrons. "Whenever a Teenager Cries" came out in 1965, and I don't know why it's not familiar to me, since I listened to everything on the radio in the actual year 1965 and have spent many hours listening to the 60s satellite radio channel in the last 20 years. 

I stumbled into that song as I was researching the great song from 1960, "Angel Baby," originally by Rosie and the Originals. Looking that up on Spotify, I saw there was a version by Reparata and the Delrons. With a name like that, I thought they were some sort of tribute to or spoof of girl groups, maybe from the 1970s. But no, they were a real 60s group:

That's Mary "Reparata" Aiese on the right.

They asked Mary Aiese to choose a stage name to make the group name more interesting and marketable. She chose Reparata, her confirmation name, which she had taken from one of her favorite teachers at Good Shepherd Catholic grammar school.

Reparata sounded vaguely punk to me, but in fact, it is a saint's name: 

"God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks—his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating."

Said a member of the clergy after in Maria Argyropoulina, in 1004, showed up from Greece for her wedding in Venice with forks (according to a post at Culinaria). 

Argyropoulina died of the plague 2 years later, and — what do you have to do to be a saint?! — Saint Peter Damian said: “Nor did she deign to touch her food with her fingers, but would command her eunuchs to cut it up into small pieces, which she would impale on a certain golden instrument with two prongs and thus carry to her mouth. . . . this woman’s vanity was hateful to Almighty God; and so, unmistakably, did He take his revenge. For He raised over her the sword of His divine justice, so that her whole body did putrefy and all her limbs began to wither.” 

Here's the Wikipedia article on Saint Peter Damian. Highlights: "[H]e introduced a more-severe discipline, including the practice of flagellation... Another innovation was that of the daily siesta... Peter often condemned philosophy. He claimed that the first grammarian was the Devil, who taught Adam to decline deus in the plural. He argued that monks should not have to study philosophy, because Jesus did not choose philosophers as disciples, and so philosophy is not necessary for salvation." 

So with Damian you get to slough off the difficult studies and take naps... but you've got to self-flagellate. Now, that might seem weird, but it's a trade-off of a sort that lots of people would choose to make if given crisply stated options. 

"He saw that many young people, wanting to be different, really end up being like everyone else... As a result, Carlo said, 'everyone is born as an original, but many people end up dying as photocopies.'"

Said Pope Francis, quoted in "Teen one step from becoming first millennial saint" (France 24). The teen is Carlo Acutis, who died of leukemia at the age of 15 and who made a website about miracles and now has been credited with one miracle.

Should Acutis later be credited with the second miracle necessary for sainthood, supporters have suggested he could become the Patron Saint of the internet -- though there already is one, 7th-century scholar Isidore de Seville.

Here's the Wikipedia article on Isidore de Seville. It says: "The Order of St. Isidore of Seville... a chivalric order formed on 1 January 2000. An international organisation... aims to honour Saint Isidore as patron saint of the Internet...." So I wonder if it's true that this man of the 7th century is already the Patron Saint of the Internet. There's a link to this 2002 Wired article: 

A group of Vatican elders is angling to give the Internet a patron saint –­ a holy helper with a dedicated connection to the Divine. The church's leading candidate is a seventh-century Spanish encyclopedist, Saint Isidore of Seville (560-636). A theologian and a scholar, Isidore was best known for his massive, 20-volume Etymologiae, ­an attempt at compiling all the world's knowledge, covering grammar, medicine, law, geography, agriculture, theology, cooking and all points between....

Discordantly enough, Isidore was "the last scholar of the ancient world," according to the Wikipedia article. Most impressive to me is that he invented 3 punctuation marks: the period, the comma, and the colon! Is that really true? I found this — "The mysterious origins of punctuation" (BBC):

Let's look at Ginsburg's language: "I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

That is the form of her dying wish, as told to us by her granddaughter Clara Spera, who is a fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union. It is hearsay, and we don't know for certain that Ruth Bader Ginsburg said those words at all — though of course we assume that the basic idea expressed is something that she did indeed wish. But did she use the verbs "replaced" and "installed"? Is that Spera's paraphrase?

The words sound wrong to me, especially "installed." We normally speak of electing a President. If you look up the words "install" and "president" in the New York Times archive, the relevant hits are about colleges and professional organizations "installing" a president. There, a president is chosen by an elite group, not by the people.

I read through a long page of old NYT headlines and finally arrive at one that looks like it may be a political leader: "Silurians Install President" (April 16, 1963). Who are Silurians?! Is Siluria some country that has escaped my attention all these years?



Click to enlarge and clarify. Key line: "The Silurians is an association of men who have been on New York City newspapers for 25 years or more." Another professional organization, the sort of thing that installs its president.

You see my point. It is a strange and revealing word choice. And if there's one thing you can say about Donald Trump, it's that he was not installed. The 2016 election was a populist expression that gobsmacked the elite. If Hillary had won, it might make some sense to declare that she was "installed."

Ah! And now you see a motivation for Ginsburg's use of "installed." If Biden wins — which is what Ginsburg hoped for (and "a new president" implies) — it really is more of an installation. The Democratic Party elite have been working to install him. It's not his own doing. It was a reaction against the populist expression that had Bernie Sanders winning in the primaries.

When I hear "installed," I think of appliances — dishwashers, refrigerators — that need to be positioned and hooked up by licensed professionals. That resonates with the Biden story... except that no one would install an appliance so superannuated and marginally functional.

And I don't like the use of the word "replaced" either. Ginsburg filled a seat, seat #6, established February 24, 1807. She was the 13th person to sit there. "I will not be replaced until..." suggests a sense that there ought to be a new version of her, someone who will carry on as she would have. But she took over that seat from Byron White. Was there any sense that she was supposed to be like him? She certainly wasn't. The seat belongs to all of us. Just as we control who is elected President, we have a collective interest in that seat, which now needs to be filled.

Justice Ginsburg exercised her own will by holding on to the seat despite grave illness, and there was some ability to choose who would take her place, but the force of nature kept her from completing that task. The Constitution gives the appointment power to the President, and a Supreme Court Justice cannot grab that power from him.

The Constitution has its complicated method for determining who will be President. I won't elaborate on it here, but it does have something to do with what we, the people, want. The last time we cranked through the mysterious process, Trump popped out. It was very weird! But he is the President, and a Supreme Court Justice has vacated a seat.

We can make political arguments that Trump should wait and let us make filling that seat an issue in the election. I'd love to see Trump and Biden debate and give us the question: What kind of Justice we want?

Biden was chair of the Judiciary Committee for so long. Let's grill him about what he did to Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. Let's ask him to show us his list of potential nominees as President Trump has. I think that would be great. But I also think that if the tables were turned and a Democratic President had a Democratic Senate, we'd get the nomination and confirmation quickly and without fussing about inferred principles that have nothing to do with the text of the Constitution.

ADDED: Wikipedia: "The Silurian is a geologic period and system spanning 24.6 million years from the end of the Ordovician Period, at 443.8 million years ago (Mya), to the beginning of the Devonian Period, 419.2 Mya. The Silurian is the shortest period of the Paleozoic Era.... A significant evolutionary milestone during the Silurian was the diversification of jawed fish and bony fish."



But also: "The Silurians are a race of reptilian humanoids in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who.... The first Silurians introduced are depicted as prehistoric and scientifically advanced sentient humanoids who predate the dawn of man; in their backstory, the Silurians went into self-induced hibernation to survive what they predicted to be a large atmospheric upheaval caused by the Earth capturing the Moon."



ALSO: From the OED entry, "install":

1817 S. T. Coleridge Biogr. Lit. I. iii. 60 It is said that St. Nepomuc was installed the guardian of bridges because he had fallen over one, and sunk out of sight....

St. Stephen... "stoned to death... the patron saint of deacons, horses, coffin makers & masons."

Today is the Feast of St Stephen, the 1st Chrisatian martyr, stoned to death in Jerusalem. Stephen is the patron saint of deacons, horses, coffin makers & masons. He is represented carrying a pile of rocks or with rocks on his head. Appropriately he is the Saint of headaches too. pic.twitter.com/9fIOtGME5A

— Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (@LloydLlewJ) December 26, 2019

"I remember mom always telling me that all in all in the end the only one you really have is God. I have come to a place in experience where, in every sense of the word, I have surrendered myself to our creator."

"I DO NOT want the negotiations for my release to be your duty... know you would want me to remain strong. That is exactly what I am doing."

Wrote Kayla Mueller, quoted in "Kayla Mueller was a U.S. hostage killed in ISIS custody. The raid against Baghdadi was named for her" (WaPo).

I was happy to see this article and this kind of strong, true religion in The Washington Post. But the article, which went up yesterday afternoon, is not on the front page at the website now and not on WaPo's most-read list.

And it's dispiriting that the top-rated comment — quoting Kayla's mother ("I still say Kayla should be here, and if [President Barack] Obama had been as decisive as President Trump, maybe she would have been") — is:

Grief only excuses so much. Obama was not responsible for Kayla Mueller's death, either directly or through the sort of passivity her mother implies. Crediting the narcissistic, exploitative Trump with decisiveness is delusional.

There are many other comments in that vein, and I didn't read them all but I didn't see anything expressing awe at Kayla's saintly religious faith.

What American gender politics has done to my mind.

I wanted to read Maureen Dowd's new column, "Sick to Your Stomach? #MeToo" (NYT). It begins:

Somewhere in the dim recesses of my mind, I can recall a time when the sight of that white dome thrilled me. As a teenager, working for a New York congressman, I felt privileged to walk the same marble corridors where some of America’s most revered leaders had walked.

I swear that when I read that, I thought the "white dome" was the bald head of the white man she was working for. I don't know how many more sentences I had to read before I realized the "white dome" was the Capitol building.

I read the sentence out loud to Meade, to see if he got tripped up in the same way. First, he heard "white dome" as "Whitedom" (which I guess is the dominion of white people). I read it again with better enunciation, and even though he did (he admitted later) know it meant the Capitol, he said, because he knows my mind so well, "I think of the heads of 7 bald men." That is, he knew I pictured a bald head, and he was teasing me about my oft-stated remedy for the hiccups. (It works. Try it. Think of the heads of 7 bald men.)

But enough about my mind. How about Maureen Dowd's mind? Meade got stuck on the first phrase, "Somewhere in the dim recesses of my mind..." Soon, he was singing "In the dim recesses of Maureen Dowd's mind..." to the tune of The Grateful Deads' "Attics of My Life":



Here are the lyrics, in case you want to write your own parody:

In the attics of my life
Full of cloudy dreams unreal
Full of tastes no tongue can know
And lights no eye can see
When there was no ear to hear
You sang to me

I have spent my life
Seeking all that's still unsung
Bent my ear to hear the tune
And closed my eyes to see
When there were no strings to play
You played to me...

2 more verses at the link, to Genius, where there's only one annotation, on the line I bold-faced, above:

You fill to the full with most beautiful splendor those souls who close their eyes that they may see

St. Denis’s Prayer: A fourteenth-century poem from Saint Denis’s The Cloud of Unknowing.

IN THE COMMENTS: Angle-Dyne said:

Nobody knows who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't St. Denis.

I said:

Thanks. I was wondering about that. I've read "The Cloud of Unknowing" — one of the greatest books ever — and when I read it it was anonymous. Somehow I was ready to believed that they'd tracked down the author!

The link in the Genius annotation goes to a page that identifies the unknown author of "The Cloud of Unknowing" as having also written "The Mystical Theology of Saint Denis." That seems to be the source of the confusion.

ADDED: I think the problem is that there's one book with "The Cloud of Unknowing" that also has "The Mystical Theology of Saint Denis" and the text of the St. Denis prayer, which is properly quoted above. Did Saint Denis actually write those words? I don't know. But I did look up St. Denis, and I have a better understanding of the illustration:

Denis is the most famous cephalophore in Christian legend, with a popular story claiming that the decapitated bishop picked up his head and walked several miles while preaching a sermon on repentance....

A cephalophore is what it sounds like — someone who carries his own severed head. You never hear about that happening anymore, but people used to say it did:

A cephalophore (from the Greek for "head-carrier") is a saint who is generally depicted carrying his or her own head. In Christian art, this was usually meant to signify that the subject in question had been martyred by beheading....

[T]he folklorist Émile Nourry counted no less than 134 examples of cephalophory in French hagiographic literature alone....

Aristotle is at pains to discredit the stories of talking heads and to establish the physical impossibility, with the windpipe severed from the lung. "Moreover," he adds, "among the barbarians, where heads are chopped off with great rapidity, nothing of the kind has ever occurred."

"I don't have any bad habits, actually" — I said a month ago.

I'm not sure why the subject came up, but someone asked me in the comments if I ever smoked, and I said, "No. I don't have any bad habits, actually."

Does that seem like an arrogant, conceited statement? Someone remembered and brought it up today, deep in the comments to "Does it smell funny in here?," the post about the accusation against Brett Kavanaugh, where I provoked some people by saying — point #4 on a 5-point list — "Why should we Americans accept this man's power over us? He's been portrayed as a super-human paragon, and I don't think that can be the standard for who can be on the Supreme Court. It's dangerous to go looking for paragons. Maybe they've got a hard-to-detect dark side that has driven them to a life of saintly good works."

I don't want the judiciary limited to bizarrely squeakily clean, ultra virtuous people. Too many good candidates won't make the cut. Kavanaugh has seemed wonderfully virtuous, but I don't think all of that is necessary or even desirable in qualifying to be a judge. I want a real person, who can understand real people and make good judgments about human activities, which are full of bad behavior that a goody-2-shoes might assess priggishly. And, as that last sentence — "Maybe they've got a hard-to-detect dark side..." — is meant to say, an overachiever might be overcompensating. I certainly didn't say Brett Kavanaugh looks so virtuous that I assume he's got a dark side. I have no idea about him specifically. I'm just not enthralled by seeming saints. We're all human.

Anyway, this comes from a commenter who calls himself Чикелит (which my translator said is "Chikelit")(scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on "newer" to get to page 2 of the comments and see this):

Ann Althouse said... “Maybe they've got a hard-to-detect dark side that has driven them to a life of saintly good works.”

Althouse recently stated that she has NO bad habits. Perhaps this is a lie. Perhaps she too has a dark side which has driven her to a life of saintly good blogging. For example, I’ve long suspected that there is something terribly racist in her family’s past which drives her acts of white guilt.

I get the joke. Fine. (By the way, the most racist thing in my family that I know is that my paternal grandmother, back in the 1950s, used to say to me, if I wasn't nice about appreciating something, that she "knew a little colored girl" who would like it.)

But the reason I'm blogging this is to delve into the question of habits and how easy it is to say that you have no bad habits.

By definition, a habit it something that you do compulsively/automatically and often, like every day. You don't have to look hard to see your habits. You do them all the time. It's easy to review your typical day and see what your habits are. Then, ask yourself: Are any of these things bad? I look at my day and identify the habits: getting up early, drinking coffee, blogging, eating some food, showing some affection to my husband, and going to bed early. That's about it. None of those things are bad, therefore I have no bad habits. I'm not bragging that I never do anything bad. I'm just talking about habits.

"Five centuries ago, the world’s longest rave took place in Strasbourg – a ‘plague’ of dancing that was fatal for some. What caused it?"

From The Guardian:

According to an account written in the 1530s by the irascible but brilliant physician Paracelsus, the “dancing plague of Strasbourg” began in mid-July 1518, when a lone woman stepped outside her house and jigged for several days on end. Within a week, dozens more had been seized by the same irresistible urge....

The councillors implemented what they felt was the appropriate treatment – more dancing! They ordered the clearing of an open-air grain market, commandeered guild halls, and erected a stage next to the horse fair. To these locations they escorted the crazed dancers in the belief that by maintaining frantic motion they would shake off the sickness....

The chronicles agree that most people were quick to assume that an enraged St Vitus had caused the affliction. So all it took was for a few of the devout and emotionally frail to believe St Vitus had them in his sights for them to enter a trance state in which they felt impelled to dance for days....

Life in Strasbourg in the early 1500s satisfied another basic condition for the outbreak of psychogenic illness... Social and religious conflicts, terrifying new diseases, harvest failures and spiking wheat prices caused widespread misery.... These were ideal conditions for some of the city’s needy to imagine that God was angry with them and that St Vitus stalked their streets....

There's also the ergotism theory, but it seems to be out of favor these days.