ABSTRACT
Historically, sociological scholars of collective behavior addressed crowd and mass phenomena that were dominated by one or another of three kinds of intense emotional arousal: fear, hostility, and joy. Joy as a general term refers to "the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires." Joy is a variable, and one prime task is the identification of an ordered and orderly set of dominant "levels of arousal." Some societies and other social organizations have apparently harnessed ecstatic crowd energy into regularized and multiday occasions of crowd ecstasy. The dominant level of arousal is quite high, but it is planned, and it is defined as profound but less than reason to throw over the existing social order. The highest level of collective arousal among "noncosmic" crowds seems best labeled "revelous," a term denoting a "wild party or celebration" and connoting abandon.
