Mania

Mania (μανία) is the Greek word for madness — in the classical tradition a condition of the soul that may be disease, divine visitation, or poetic inspiration, and whose proper diagnosis depends on the source from which it comes. Plato‘s [[plato-phaedrus|Phaedrus]] distinguishes four kinds of divine mania: the prophetic (from Apollo), the telestic or ritual (from Dionysos), the poetic (from the Muses), and the erotic (from Aphrodite and Eros) — all of which are forms of mania that open the soul to a reality it could not reach in its ordinary condition, and each of which is therefore more valuable than the composed sanity that excludes the divine.

The tradition of classical philology — Dodds in [[dodds-greeks-and-irrational|The Greeks and the Irrational]], Padel in [[whom-gods-destroy|Whom Gods Destroy]] and [[padel-out-mind-greek|In and Out of the Mind]] — has recovered the ancient phenomenology of mania as a phenomenon that the Greeks understood with a seriousness the modern psychiatric category of mania has largely lost. For the Seba lineage the classical mania is the canonical ground of the archetypal reading of possession and of pathologizing as psyche’s own work. See divine-madness and dionysos.

Relationships

• divine-madness
• plato-phaedrus
• archetypal-possession