Ecstasy

← Encyclopedia

Ecstasy, from the Greek ekstasis — a “standing outside” — names a state in which consciousness is felt to pass beyond the boundary of the ordinary self. The word is older than any of the religious uses now attached to it; in early Greek it could mean simply displacement, a being-put-out-of-place, and only gradually narrowed to the displacement of the mind. What the various traditions add is a destination: the self is said to stand outside itself toward something — a god, the One, the divine ground — so that the loss of the everyday person is also, in the same motion, an arrival.

In Greek religion the experience had two faces. There was the prophetic ecstasy of the Pythia at Delphi and the seers, in which a human voice was held to be displaced by a god’s; and there was the collective frenzy of Dionysian worship, the mania that loosened the worshipper from civic selfhood. Plato treated such states with a careful ambivalence, ranking a “divine madness” above mere sober calculation while refusing to surrender judgment to it. It was the Neoplatonists who made ecstasy a philosophical term of art: for Plotinus the soul’s ascent ends in a union with the One that exceeds thought itself, since the One lies beyond the division of knower and known — a contact reported as rare, brief, and beyond description.

The traditions that inherited these vocabularies each made the state their own. Christian mystical writers spoke of raptus, a being-seized in which the soul is drawn out of itself toward God, described by figures from the Desert Fathers to the medieval contemplatives and, later, the Spanish mystics. Sufi authors mapped a graded vocabulary of wajd and fanāʾ, the “passing-away” of the self in the divine. Comparable states are reported in bhakti devotion, in Hasidic prayer, and in the trance of the shaman, whom one influential study cast as a specialist in ecstasy. The resemblances are real and have invited centuries of comparison; they are not interchangeable, since each tradition specifies what the self stands outside itself toward, and judges the experience by that standard.

Scholarship has long debated how to handle such reports. The states are attested with great consistency across cultures and periods — that much is a matter of record — but what they are of is exactly what cannot be settled from outside the experience. Early psychology of religion treated ecstasy as a genuine and recurring human capacity while bracketing its object; later study has stressed how thoroughly the form an ecstasy takes is shaped by the tradition the ecstatic already inhabits. Practitioners, for their part, have rarely regarded the state as an end in itself. The displacement was held to matter for where it led: the union, the message, the changed life that followed the return. What the texts describe is the leaving; what they value is the coming back altered.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna, 1926)

→ Related: Gnosis · Neoplatonism · The One · Divination · Esotericism