wild, enthusiastic, visionary persons, who pretend to revelation and inspiration.

The ancients called these fanatici who passed their time in temples (fanum), and being often seized, with a kind of enthusiasm, as if inspired by the divinity, shewed wild and antic gestures. Prudentius represents them as cutting and slashing their arms with knives. Shaking the head was also common among the fanatici; for Lampridius informs us, that the emperor Heliodorus was arrived to that pitch of madness, as to shake his head with the gashed fanatics. Hence the word was applied among us to the Anabaptists, Quakers, &c., at their first rise, and is now an epithet given to the modern prophets, muggletonians, &c.

Fancy, or imagination. See Imagination.