Trance helps the brain to overcome our status quo and to reorganize vital functions of our body. Whether one agrees with such strong claims or not, one can at least assert its therapeutic value. . . . . . In addition to explaining ecstatic ritual as congenial to the oppressed, as a means of creating elementary solidarity, and as producing therapeutic trances, one can also ponder the merits of a fourth theory. People seem to be hungry for religious experience, and ecstatic rituals, like mysticism, promise that experience. The new experience, however, tends to be short-lived.
People lose the ability to get into trances.
As the effervescence ends, ecstatic sects assume church like features and the spirit wanes. Unlike non-Western cultures, traditional Christianity seems to include a strong mechanism that serves to suppress ecstatic disorder. In Christianity, ecstatic worship is more firmly rooted than mainstream Protestantism with its calm, intellectual worship might lead us to expect. If mainstream worship represents the Apollonian side of Christianity, ecstatic cults reveal its Dionysian aspects. Christian ecstatic worship has a long history as well as a noble, biblical pedigree.