MONTANUS

flourished 2nd century founder of Montanism (q.v.), a heretical movement of Christianity in Asia Minor and North Africa from the 2nd to the 9th centuries. The prophetic movement at first expected an imminent transformation of the world but later evolved into heretical sectarianism claiming a new revelation. Little is known about Montanus. Before his conversion to Christianity, he apparently was a priest of the Oriental ecstatic cult of Cybele, the mother goddess of fertility. According to the 4th-century church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, Montanus c. 172173 entered into an ecstatic state and began prophesying in the region of Phrygia, now in central Turkey. Montanus became the leader of a group of illuminati (the enlightened), including the prophetesses Priscilla (or Prisca) and Maximilla. The members exhibited the frenzied nature of their religious experience by enraptured seizures and utterances of strange languages that the disciples regarded as oracles of the Holy Spirit. Convinced that the end of the world was at hand, Montanus laid down a rigoristic morality to purify Christians and detach them from their material desires. Official criticism of Montanus and his movement consequently emphasized the new prophecy's unorthodox ecstatic expression and his neglect of the bishops' divinely appointed rule. Fragments of Montanist prophecies preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea are contained in the series Patrologia Graeca, J.-P. Migne, ed., (vol. 1920, 1866).