Purified by Prayer and Rite
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Socrates — καταφυγοῦσα πρὸς θεῶν εὐχάς τε καὶ λατρείας, ὅθεν δὴ καθαρμῶν τε καὶ τελετῶν τυχοῦσα ἐξάντη ἐποίησε τὸν ἑαυτῆς ἔχοντα,
The second god-sent madness Socrates names is the ritual, purificatory kind. When old family curses and inherited afflictions struck — the sort of hereditary doom that haunts the tragic houses — a divine madness could arise that drove the sufferers not deeper into ruin but toward the gods: to prayer, to worship, to the cleansing rites and initiations of the mystery cults. And through those rites it healed them, made them exantēs — whole, safe, out of reach of the harm — for the present and for all the time after. Here again the madness is not the disease but the cure. The frenzy that looks like affliction is in fact the god's own way of driving the stricken toward the ritual that will release them.
Socrates describes the second kind of divine madness: the purificatory. When ancient afflictions and inherited curses fell on certain families, a god-sent madness drove the sufferers to take refuge in prayer and worship — and through cleansing rites and initiations, it delivered them, making whole the one it had seized, for the present and all the time to come.
The vocabulary here is the holiest in Greek religion, and Plato chooses it on purpose. The purificatory madness works through katharmoi and teletai — cleansings and initiation-rites, the language of the Mysteries, above all Eleusis, where initiates were promised a transformed relation to death and the divine. A teletē, from telos, 'completion,' is the rite that brings a person through to a finished, consecrated state; to undergo it is to be made teleios, whole. Watch this word, because the whole soaring vision to come is cast in exactly these terms. When Socrates describes the soul's glimpse of the eternal Forms and love's recovery of that lost sight, he will speak of initiation, of vision, of the highest mystery — love itself as a teletē into the sight of true beauty. He is quietly building a ladder: prophetic madness, then purificatory, then poetic, and finally the erotic madness that is the palinode's real subject, each a rung higher. And by naming the second kind in the language of the Mysteries, he prepares us to hear the fourth — love — not as sickness but as the holiest initiation a human soul can undergo. Philosophy, in the Phaedrus, borrows the words of the mystery-cults because it claims to be the true one.
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