Southern Italian folklore says the best way to survive the bite of the Lycosa tarantula is to fall into a mad, wild, often drunken, circular dance. This dance is called the tarantella.
According to Sicilian and Napoletana culture the bite of the tarantula causes tarantism (named after Taranto a town in Southern Italy which had a lot of these spiders). This strange condition, folklore says, makes victims extremely restless and excited. The only way to survive death is to allow the restlessness to take control and dance wildly, thereby sweating the spider's venom off the body ....Or so the story goes.
The truth is that this poor unfortunate spider, although rather large, creepy, hairy and well...rather ugly, has a bite that is only as painful as a bee sting.
So what is the reason for this mad tarantella dance?
The history of the tarantella has quite a lot to do with the southern Italians occasional fondness for getting rather drunk and then carrying on in a fairly wild, wasted manner. Such sloppy behaviour needed an excuse. And the large hairy tarantula was given that job. Though not at the beginning.
The dance parties go back thousands of years to when the Greek god Dionysus was introduced to southern Italy. In Italy this god was called Bacchus.
Worship of Bacchus was thought to help people escape from all their worries and inhibitions. Not surprisingly, this was achieved through drinking large amounts of wine and getting drunk.
Initially these parties, described as fertility ceremonies, were attended only by women. However it didn't take too long before men decided they would also like to come along to the parties. This made these ceremonies a fertile ground for conversations and other activities. Bacchus became a very popular God.
At about the same time the Roman senate became worried about Sicilian loyalty to Rome. There was too much talking going on at these events. The Senate suspected Sicilian political unrest was being encouraged by these wild parties. So in 186BC the Senate banned Bacchanalia parties. The dancing was to stop.
About a hundred years later, in the first century AD the Christian apostle St Paul was travelling through Malta when a snake fell onto his hand. He brushed this away, was admired by many and continued over to southern Italy. There he stayed at a house in Galatina.
The story of the snake travelled with him. Legend says St Paul repaid the kindness of his host at Galatina by giving him the power to heal poisonous bites. This miracle cure included the Sign of the Cross and a drink of special water.
So the treatment of poisonous bites wove itself into religion and mystery. Travelling healers offered all sorts of treatments for bites, including miraculous mud from the Galatina house where St Paul had stayed.
But it wasn't until the 1300s that dancing once again became frenzied. That was because a small plague of tarantula's began to run around the streets of Taranto, which is close to Galatina.
Mass hysteria took hold of Taranto. Evil had landed on their streets. The residents sort the protection of St Paul and danced in front of pictures and statues of the saint.
The dance brought on sweating, shaking, screaming, leaping, delirium and exhaustion. Finally the collapse of the dancer meant the bite had been cured. Over the centuries tarantella came to resemble the old merriment of the Bacchus parties; though always with the mythical dangers of the tarantula's bite gripping the dancers.
Tarantella (and therefore the tarantula) has inspired compositions from Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Rossini, Rachmaninoff and Tom Waits.