words : Ecstasy

THE Texan drugs dealer who, about 10 years ago, coined the name Ecstasy for methylene dioxy methamphetamine (MDMA) was on to a winner; but it was really a misnomer. I don't mean because a tablet of it has just killed a teenager, but because ecstasy, the word, didn't have much to do with Ecstasy the drug. People who have enjoyed MDMA say the optimum dose gives them "a pleasant lightness of spirit", or as Nicholas Saunders (author of E for Ecstasy) has put it: "There was this wonderful light feeling. It didn't take you into a different space like LSD, it just made you feel more like yourself." But the whole point about ecstasy, in its traditional sense, is that those who experience it are not themselves.

The word, from the Greek existanai, "to put out of place", was used from the 14th century onwards of people who were out of their minds, or as we say, beside themselves, whether with joy or despair; its downside seems for some centuries to have been commoner than its upside. Victorian pathologists defined it as a morbid condition in which the patient is insensible of his surroundings. The better class of ecstasy, as sought by mystics, can also make the body impervious to sensation. This is quite the opposite of the heightened awareness of the physical world claimed for MDMA, including, some enthusiasts say, awareness of sexual pleasure, which reminds me that one of John Donne's erotic poems tells how the lovers' souls left their bodies and became entwined. "We see by this, it was not sexe," he says, and calls the poem "The Extasie" to underline his point.

It was because prophets, poets and lovers spoke so seductively of being in a state of ecstasy that the word gradually lost its gloomy aspect and kept its present happy one. But it wasn't the MDMA sort of happiness.

Nicholas Bagnall