Anthropology used to distinguish two types of trance:
– Ecstasy, is the characteristic of shamanism, this animist culture widespread throughout the world (Siberia, Russia Asia, North and South Amerindian America). The healer, called shaman, is motionless but travels in spirit in the invisible world in order to meet supernatural entities there and negotiate with them the healing of a sick person. In other words, the spirit of the shaman “goes out” to meet the divine; hence the etymology of “ ecs-stasy” which in Greek means “standing out”.
– Possession, characteristic of African and American-African cults, in which the supernatural entities “descend” to incarnate and dance in the body of humans. In other words, it is the divine who comes to meet man.
This distinction is actually questioned, as we see shamans dancing the entities with which they dialogue and possess whose bodies remain motionless. So we can group together, as the Greeks have done since ancient times, the two forms of trance under the name of ecstasy.
Ecstatic dances are therefore the sacred dances in which the dancers, in a modified state of consciousness, access the divine, this “numinous” register, peopled with invisible beings, this mysterious world which, for lack of being able to explain it, populated with supernatural representations: the gods.
The fact that the dancer in a trance is capable of unusual performances such as dancing barefoot on fire as in the Greek feast of Anastenaria, dedicated to St Constantine and Helena in northern Greece, but also in India, Bali or the Maghreb, seems to confirm the divine presence in the human body during ecstasy.