Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness

Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness (Ruth Padel, 1995) is the companion volume to In and Out of the Mind and one of the indispensable philological studies of the ancient Greek experience of madness. Where the first volume reconstructed the inner geography of the Greek psyche — its organs, its fluids, its winds — this volume focuses on the phenomenology of madness itself: the invasion of the soul by external divine forces, the figures who embody possession, and the tragic economy of what the poets called mania.

Padel reads the Greek vocabulary of madness — [[mania|mania]], [[ate|atē]], [[lyssa|lyssa]], oistros, phrenoblabeia — as a single interconnected figural system in which the afflicted psyche is not sick in the modern sense but penetrated by divine agency that the tragic poets rendered visible as the Erinyes, as Lyssa, as Dionysian mania. For the Seba lineage, the work is canonical for the reading of possession and complex-inundation — the archetypal possession that the classical tradition named plainly and that modern psychiatry renamed without explaining. See ruth-padel and padel-out-mind-greek.

Relationships

• ruth-padel
• mania
• ate