ABSTRACT
Plato was the first to define the general concept of divine mania, listing its sub-forms and bringing together their rewards: he transformed the mosaic of discrete cases into a beautiful system. The divine gift of mania is inspiration, epipnoia, which unites all the four kinds of mania that Socrates considers: having briefly mentioned prophetic, telestic, and poetic madness, he discusses in detail the gifts of erotic mania. While the word mania covered a vast semantic sphere, several other terms denoted abnormal mental states explicitly attributed to divine intervention. Any deviation from an ordinary baseline state of consciousness, whether achieved voluntarily or involuntarily, deliberately sought or resulting from a disease, seen as a god-sent blessing or a curse could be dubbed mania. Nonetheless, the boundary between pathological and non-pathological alteration of consciousness is often blurred. There are three main types of alteration of consciousness: physiological, pharmacological, and pathological.
