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

The ancients called those fanatici who passed their time in temples (fana), and being often seized with a kind of enthusiasm, as if inspired by the divinity, showed 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 Helioabalus was arrived at 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.