ABSTRACT
The nymphs and Pan and were able to seize people and make them possessed, nympholeptic, or panoleptic. Both states were numinous: like other types of divine possession, they produced temporary elevation above the normal human mental condition. Frightening and weird, nympholepsy and panolepsy conferred mantic abilities and inspired hallucinations that had noetic quality. Possession by the nymphs or Pan might bring about divine mania, bestowing visions of epiphany, vatic abilities, poetic inclinations, or sensations of extreme happiness. The experience can even be transformative, changing or profoundly influencing the person's way of life and perception of himself, as the cases of some nympholepts illustrate. The recurring cases of male nympholepts worshipping the nymphs in caves suggest a hypothetic interpretation of a unique mid-fifth century vessel, which can perhaps be added to the corpus of evidence on nympholepts. Although nymphs were often envisaged as dwelling in caves, they belonged to uncultivated landscapes in general.
