Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘ecstatic ritual’ names that contested category of structured religious practice in which ordinary ego-boundaries dissolve under the pressure of collective, divinely-attributed affect. The term gathers several distinct theoretical lineages that do not fully converge. Rohde locates the phenomenon’s origin in Thracian Dionysism and reads it as the eruption of a universal psycho-physiological impulse into the Greek religious order—an impulse, he insists, rooted in ‘the physical and psychical constitution of man.’ Otto disputes Rohde’s universalist reduction, arguing that Dionysiac ecstasy is not the expression of a generalized human need for self-dissolution but the precise mythic-cultic response to an ontologically real divine presence whose duality of ecstasy and horror cannot be collapsed into psychology. Eliade, approaching the same territory through shamanism, shifts the frame entirely: ecstatic ritual becomes a controlled technique—a discipline of trance, ascent, and cosmological navigation that distinguishes the specialist shaman from the passive devotee. Burkert, working through Greek sacrificial anthropology, registers ecstatic behavior as the return of archaic biological energies suppressed by rational social order, noting that when ritual tradition breaks down, ‘ecstatic behavior, love of violence and death spring up all the more wildly.’ Turner’s structural-liminal model frames the ecstatic moment as communitas—the ritual dissolution of hierarchy that purges and reanimates social structure. The central tension across these positions concerns whether ecstasy is datum or technique, revelation or regression.