From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, men and women in Europe accused of witchcraft told how they were taken to the Sabbath—the nocturnal gathering before the devil at which they took part in orgies and obscene parodies of Christian rites, eating corpses and casting spells. These accounts, usually extracted by torture, are regarded by most historians today as the products of the inquisitors' own obsessions.

Ecstasies is the culmination of Carlo Ginsburg's longstanding fascination with popular myths that are shared across different cultures and eras. An expert in the field of microhistory—the archaeology of the marginalized and forgotten elements of human history—Ginsburg here compares and follows the stories and their forms, and gradually they begin to weave together into new and startling patterns. Why, for example, in 1321 were Jews and lepers the object of frenzied persecution, accused of conspiring to take over the French kingdom? What do Oedipus, Achilles, and Cinderella have in common? The answers to these questions and more lead to compelling evidence of a hidden shamanistic culture that flourished across the European continent for thousands of years.