ABSTRACT
Ancient descriptions of subjects in trance-like states of ecstasy are inadequately addressed by modern accounts that rely on physical reductionism, where the appeal to psychotropic substances or hypnotic stimuli fails to bridge the explanatory gap in depicting the inner experiences and meanings ascribed to the ecstatic condition. Adopted here, instead, is a phenomenological perspective that acknowledges the sense-making role of intersubjectivity, by which third-person authorities, publics and narratives profoundly shape interpretations of the ecstatic event by first-person subjects. A close reading of the Atrahasis myth clarifies Mesopotamian understandings of the mind-body problem, with implications for the ontology of intelligence, the constituted identities of humans—living and dead—and homological relationships in the spiritual makeup of intelligent beings. Ghost possession furnishes a model that elucidates the role of the deity in performances of prophetic ecstasy, wherein the human subject, in a state of compelled empathy, encounters a sense of loss in its agency and in ownership over its behaviors, emotions or thoughts. In the socialized contexts of the god experience, not only the delirium of ecstasy, but also the apparently opposite state of mental perspicacity, could both be characteristic of a proper relationship between human intelligence and the divine.
