But if you are alone and undertake what has been said by the god, you speak as one in ecstasy, inspired.

For the solitary practitioner the rite ends in the classic pose of pagan prophecy: you speak hōs en ekstásei, 'as in ecstasy,' apophoibṓmenos. That last word has Apollo hidden inside it — Φοῖβος, Phoebus — and means, exactly, 'being Phoebus-ed,' filled with the god the way the Pythia at Delphi was filled when she gave her answers. The human mouth keeps moving, but the one who speaks is no longer only the man. Ékstasis is the cooler, stranger Greek behind our warmed-over 'ecstasy': a standing-outside oneself, the self displaced from its own place. The whole liturgy has been engineering exactly this crossing — through the elements, the bellowing, the flooded senses, the rebirth — and here names the far side of it plainly. Alone, with no symmýstēs to witness, the initiate becomes both the asker and the oracle: he speaks the god's words in the god's own way, and there is no longer a clean line between reciting a prophecy and being the one who prophesies.