The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World by Diana L. Stein

Introduction / Diana L. Stein, Sarah Kielt Costello and Karen Polinger Foster -- Contextualizing the study of ecstatic experience in ancient old world societies / Sarah Kielt Costello -- Not only ecstasy: pouring new concepts into old vessels / Etzel Cardeña -- From shamans to sorcerers: empirical models for defining ritual practices and ecstatic experience in ancient, medieval and modern societies / Michael J. Winkelman -- Psychoactive plants in the ancient world: observations of an ethnobotanist / Giorgio Samorini -- Ecstasy meets paleoethnobotany: botanical stimulants in ancient Inner Asia / Alison Betts -- Caucasian cocktails: the early use of alcohol in 'the cradle of wine' / Stephen Batiuk -- Mind-altering plants in Babylonian medical sources / Barbara Böck -- Plant-based potions and ecstatic states in Hittite rituals / Rita Francia -- Forbidden at Philae: proscription of aphrodisiac and psychoactive plants in Ptolemaic Egypt / Riccardo Andreozzi and Claudia Sarkady -- The Ring-Kernos and psychotropic substances / David Ilan -- Beer, beasts and bodies: shedding boundaries in bounded spaces / Anne Porter -- Lament, spectacle and emotion in a ritual for Ishtar / Sam Mirelman -- Writing for the dead, welcoming the solar-eye goddess and ecstatic expression in Egyptian religion / John Coleman Darnell -- Altered states on prepalatial Crete / Emily Miller Bonney -- Bodies in ecstasy: shamanic elements in Minoan religion / Christine Morris and Alan Peatfield -- The Mycenaeans and ecstatic ritual experience / Susan Lupack -- Emotional arousal, sensory deprivation and 'miraculous healing' in the cult of Asclepius / Olympia Panagiotidou -- Ecstasy and initiation in the Eleusinian mysteries / Alice Clinch -- Apolline and Dionysian ecstasy at Delphi / Yulia Ustinova -- Communing with the spirits: funeral processions in ancient Rome / Maik Patzelt -- Ecstatic experience and possession disorders in ancient Mesopotamia / Ulrike Steinert -- Ghosts in and outside the machine: a phenomenology of intelligence, psychic possession and prophetic ecstasy in ancient Mesopotamia / John Z. Wee -- Ecstatic speech in ancient Mesopotamia / Benjamin R. Foster -- Ecstatic experience: the proto-theme of a Near Eastern glyptic language family / Diana L. Stein -- Understanding the language of trees: ecstatic experience and interspecies communication in late Bronze Age Crete / Caroline J. Tully -- Psychedelic art and ecstatic visions in the Aegean / Karen Polinger Foster -- Sight as ecstatic experience in the ancient Mediterranean / Nassos Papalexandrou.