The word was first recorded in English by 1548, from German. It appears in a translation of Martin Luther’s writings, in a line mocking the Pope for boasting that all laws were held in the coffer of his heart.
Around 100 AD the Greek biographer Plutarch described the Greek word’s state as that of prophets and prophetesses ravished with divine fury when a god was believed to speak through them. Latin borrowed it in the third century, and by the early sixteenth century it was used for a writer’s inspiration. It reached English through German.
Behind the Latin lay a Greek adjective meaning ‘possessed by a god’, built from a word for ‘in’ and a word for ‘god’. That word for ‘god’ descends from a Proto-Indo-European root, *dhes-, which formed words for religious concepts.
FANATIC and ATHEIST come from that same root. FANATIC entered English in 1533, from a Latin word for a person possessed by the frenzy of a temple’s god, though its link to the root is not certain. ATHEIST reached English in the 1580s, from a Greek word meaning ‘without a god’.
