Tra Dioniso e Cristo. Posseduti danzanti nella tarda Antichità

The Christian ideology of possession envisages a voluntary model and an involuntary one. In this contribution, based on late antique sources but open to ethno-anthropological comparisons, marginal and eccentric elements with respect to the dominant ideology are emphasised: the periodicity and recurrence of the crises on the feast of the saint, the characterisation of the possessed as those qui pati consueverant, and the triggering of symptoms induced by the presence of the living saint or his relics, what recalls the possibility, verifiable also in ethno-anthropological contexts and research in contemporary Catholic environments, of the ritual induction of altered states of consciousness and their disciplining in situations of cultural conflict.