Every detail confirms the picture of a condition of wild excitement in which the limitations of ordinary life seemed to be abolished. These extraordinary phenomena transcending all normal experience were explained by saying that the soul of a person thus "possessed"[44\8] was no longer "at home"[45\8] but "abroad", having left its body behind. This was the literal and primitive meaning understood by the Greek when he spoke of the "ekstasis" of the soul in such orgiastic conditions of excitement.[46\8] This ekstasis is "a brief madness", just as madness is a prolonged ekstasis.[47\8] But the ekstasis, the temporary _alienatio mentis_ of the Dionysiac cult was not thought of as a vain purposeless wandering in a region of pure delusion, but as a _hieromania_,[48\8] a sacred madness in which the soul, leaving the body, winged its way to union with the god.[49\8] It is now with and in the god, in the condition of _enthousiasmos_; those who are possessed by this are ~e/ntheoi~; they live and have their being in the god.[50\8] While still retaining {260} the finite Ego, they feel and enjoy to the full the infinite powers of all life. In _ekstasis_ the soul is liberated from the cramping prison of the body; it communes with the god and develops powers of which, in the ordinary life of everyday, thwarted by the body, it knew nothing. Being now a spirit holding communion with spirits it is able to free itself from Time and see what only the spiritual eye beholds--things separated from it in time and space. The enthusiastic worship of the Thracian servants of Dionysos gave birth to the _inspiration mantikê_,[51\8] a form of prophecy which did not (like prophecy as it invariably appears in Homer) have to wait for accidental, ambiguous and external signs of the god's will, but on the contrary entered immediately into communion with the world of gods and spirits and in this heightened spiritual condition beheld and proclaimed the future. This power belonged to men only in _ekstasis_, in religious madness, when "the God enters into men". The _Mainads_ are the official exponents of this _mantikê_ of inspiration.[52\8] It is simple and intelligible enough that the Thracian cult of Dionysos, which was throughout a means of stimulating men to a condition of extreme exaltation that they might enter into direct communion with the spirit-world, also encouraged the prophesying of inspired seers, who in their rapt exaltation and frenzy became clairvoyant. Among the Thracian Satrai there was a tribe called the Bessoi who produced _prophêtai_, and these were in charge of an oracle of Dionysos situated on the top of a high mountain. The prophetess of this temple was a woman who gave prophecies like the Pythia at Delphi, that is to say, in a state of rapt ecstasy. This, at least, is what Herodotos says,[53\8] and we have many other accounts of Thracian _mantikê_ and its close connexion with the orgiastic cult of Dionysos.[54\8] § 3