ECSTASY AND DIVINATION
Since the sacred, the divine, always appears as out of the ordinary and wholly other, the overwhelming experiences of a changed and extended consciousness are, if not the sole origin, at least one of the most essential supports of religion.
The experience may rest on natural disposition, acquired technique, or the influence of drugs, but at all events, the individual sees, hears, and experiences things which are not present for others; he stands in direct contact with a higher being and communicates with gods and spirits.
For the ancient high civilizations it is nevertheless characteristic that the established cult is to a large extent independent of such abnormal phenomena.
This is also true of Greece where ecstatic, mediumistic, and yoga-like experiences are far from unknown, but are either pushed to the periphery of religious life or else strictly circumscribed; they do not become the foundation of a revelation.
The words which the Greeks use to describe such phenomena are varied and inconsistent.
An ancient name and interpretation for an abnormal psychic state is entheos: ‘within is a god’, who obviously speaks from the person in a strange voice or in an unintelligible way and induces him to perform odd and apparently senseless movements.
At the same time, however, it is said that a god seizes or carries a person, that he holds him in his power, katechei, which gives in translation the term possessio, possession.
But stepping out, ekstasis, is spoken of just as much, not in the sense that the soul leaves the body, but that the person has abandoned his normal ways and his good sense; and yet one can also say that his understanding (nous) is no longer in him.
These various expressions can neither be reconciled systematically nor distinguished in terms of an evolution in the history of ideas; they mirror the confusion in the face of the unknown.
The most common term is therefore mania, frenzy, madness.
Frenzy is described as a pathological outburst provoked by the anger of a god.
As well as the pathological frenzy of the individual, there is also ritual and institutionalized, collective frenzy, especially the frenzy of the women of a city as they break out at the festival of licence.
The aim, nonetheless, in reality and in myth, is to bring madness back to sense, a process which requires purification and the purifying priest.
In particular, the Greeks seem to have discovered ecstatic cults connected with flute music in northern Asia Minor among the Phrygians; accordingly, the possession mentioned most frequently is possession by the Mother of the Gods, whose power also extends over the initiation and purification of the Korybantes.
Nevertheless, Hera, Artemis, Hecate, Pan, and other gods can also send madness.
Epilepsy, as the sacred disease, is interpreted and treated according to this same schema, with the attack of the god being countered with purifications.
That divine presence in transfigured consciousness can also be experienced in a positive way as a blessing, namely in song and dance, is illustrated only by one early but later forgotten passage: the choruses of maidens on Delos know ‘to imitate the dialects and chatterings of all men; each would say that he were speaking himself: in such a way is the beautiful song joined together for them.’
This has justly been compared to the Pentecostal miracle and the speaking in tongues in the New Testament.
The disciplined hymn dissolves into uncontrolled sounds which are nevertheless miraculously filled with meaning for the festival participants.
Perhaps some vestige of the epiphany of the deity in dance, as inferred for the Minoan religion, is preserved here.
In the Dionysos cult ecstasy plays a quite unique role, with the result that Dionysos almost acquires a monopoly over enthusiasm and ecstasy, but this ecstasy is ambivalent.
In mythology the frenzy may appear once again as a catastrophe sent by the implacable Hera, but since the god himself is the Frenzied One, the madness is at the same time divine experience, fulfilment, and an end in itself; the madness is then admittedly almost inseparably fused with alcoholic intoxication.
At the same time, there is the phenomenon of a quite different, sober emotion which overtakes the individual.
There are people who are seized by the nymphs and abandon house and home to hide in caves in the wilderness; there is the case of Aristeas who is seized by Phoibos and miraculously transported to northern lands from which he returns with tales of Apollo’s remote and wondrous people, the Hyperboreans.
In the seventh and sixth centuries, a number of such miracle men seem to have travelled about; they have been called wandering shamans, and influences from the realm of Scythian nomads are probable.
Whether, like shamans, they gave ecstatic demonstrations is something which can only be inferred indirectly from the legends which surround them, especially those concerning their ability to fly.
There is also the report concerning Hermotimos from Klazomenai, whose body lay as if dead while his spirit went journeying and brought back information about distant places and even about the future.
More widespread and doubtless older is the conviction that every seer must stand in a special relationship to the divine since his words presuppose a knowledge which is more than human; and similarly the oral singer is dependent on his goddess, the Muse, who sends him happy inspiration from moment to moment.
Plato distinguishes the prophetic madness of Apollo from the telestic madness of Dionysos, before adding, as other types of madness, the poetic and the erotic or philosophical enthusiasm.
By naming Apollo and Dionysos in this way, the peripheral phenomena of consciousness are consigned within well-defined spheres: divination here, initiation there.
Two brothers, the sons of Zeus rule over the respective spheres, while Zes himself, the highest god, stands as father above them in the clear space of thinking, phronein. ~William Burkert, The Greek Religion, Page 140–142
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
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