Exercitii, from εκστασις, I am entranced, in antiquity, a kind of diviners who were call into trances or ecstasies, in which they lay like dead men, or asleep, deprived of all sense and motion; but, after some time, returning to themselves, gave strange relations of what they had seen or heard.

ECHTHESES, in church history, a confession of faith, in the form of an edict, published in the year 639, by the emperor Heraclius, with a view to pacify the troubles occasioned by the Eutychian heresy in the eastern church. However, the same prince revoked it, on being informed that Pope Severinus had condemned it, as favouring the Monothelites; declaring at the same time, that Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, was the author of it.