The Four Divine Madnesses
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Socrates — τῆς δὲ θείας τεττάρων θεῶν τέτταρα μέρη διελόμενοι, μαντικὴν μὲν ἐπίπνοιαν Ἀπόλλωνος θέντες, Διονύσου δὲ τελεστικήν, Μουσῶν δʼ αὖ ποιητικήν, τετάρτην δὲ Ἀφροδίτης καὶ Ἔρωτος, ἐρωτικὴν μανίαν ἐφήσαμέν τε ἀρίστην εἶναι.
And dividing divine madness into four parts under four gods, we set prophecy down as the inspiration of Apollo, the mystic madness as Dionysus's, the poetic in turn as the Muses', and the fourth — of Aphrodite and Eros — the erotic madness, which we declared the best of all.
Looking back on the palinode to see how it was built, Socrates recalls the taxonomy at its heart: he had divided god-sent madness into four kinds, one for each of four gods — and crowned the fourth.
This is the load-bearing beam of the whole palinode, laid bare when Socrates looks back to see how his great speech was constructed. The argument that madness can be divine, not merely diseased, was organized as a fourfold division (<em>diairéō</em> — the dialectical cut he has just been praising), one madness per god: <em>prophetic</em> madness is the <em>epípnoia</em>, the 'in-breathing,' of Apollo at Delphi; <em>telestic</em> or mystic madness, the purifying frenzy of ritual, belongs to Dionysus; <em>poetic</em> madness, the possession of the singer, to the Muses. And then the fourth, saved for last because it is the climax: <em>erotic</em> madness, of Aphrodite and Eros, 'the best of all.' The list ascends — foreknowledge, purification, song, and at the summit, love — and the whole daring thesis of the dialogue is that being out of your mind, rightly, is the highest thing that can happen to you.<br><br>The unifying word is <em>epípnoia</em>, inspiration — literally a 'breathing-into.' All four madnesses are the same event: the self set aside so that a god may breathe through it. This is why Plato can rank the four states above sober sanity — the inspired soul is not impaired but <em>occupied</em>, filled from beyond itself. And notice which pairing he chose: Apollo and Dionysus stand side by side at the head of the list, the god of clear prophetic form and the god of ecstatic dissolution — the very pair Nietzsche would seize on, two and a half millennia later, to explain the birth of tragedy. Plato had already set them as adjacent species of one divine genus. That erotic madness caps the four, above even prophecy and poetry, is the claim the entire <em>Phaedrus</em> exists to defend: that to love a beautiful person rightly — to be seized by beauty and ride the seizure toward the Forms — is the supreme form of divine possession, and the same motion as philosophy itself.
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