ABSTRACT
Ecstatic experiences often involve attentive vision, primarily visual or other sensory contact, often protracted and intense, together with revelatory or epiphanic objects. These can be images, sequences of images or other types of powerful artifacts believed to exist in a dimension that exceeds the mundane reality surrounding the person in trance. In this paper, I investigate the role of figurative media functioning as hardware programmed to be experienced during rapture, the transcendent passage of a subject’s mind to an altered state of consciousness. I argue that visual and material culture can offer itself as a portal to a transcendental beyond, or exert a consciousness-altering effect to viewing subjects. An important dimension of this function is its embeddedness in a web of sensory stimuli, especially percussive sound and smell. In certain ritual contexts, the concerted action of attentive vision, repetitive sound and olfactory effects facilitated induction to altered states of consciousness. As my study case, I focus on ritual practice at the Idaean Cave on Crete, a sanctuary that witnessed strong connections with the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East during the Early Iron Age. I argue that the well-known bronze tympanon from the cave was used as a percussive instrument during initiatory proceedings featuring repetitive sound from the tympanon itself. This argument is strengthened by the imagery on the tympanon and comparanda from a rich experimental and ethnographic record.
