The Greek root of mania had a wide range of meanings, including ‘madness’, ‘insanity’, ‘enthusiasm’, ‘inspiration’, ‘passion’, and ‘prophecy’, indicating the many different ways in which Divine energies become manifest within humans. That is ‘what is’. None are to be condemned or admired.
So, to say that Panosophers are megalomaniacs—as some do, explicitly or implicitly—is a sign of what Abraham Maslow called ‘counter valuing’, attempting to diminish those who seek to make an enlightening contribution to Society at these troubled times we live in. We must therefore still wait to see if Life intends Panosophers to be treated as the ordinary human beings that they are, no different from any others, albeit knowing that none of us is separate from the Divine for an instant.
1890, ‘delusions of greatness; a form of insanity in which the subjects imagine themselves to be great, exalted, or powerful personages’, from French mégalomanie, from Greek megalo- ‘large, great, exaggerated’, from megas ‘large, great’, from PIE root *meg- ‘great’, and Middle English manye ‘derangement, frenzy’, from Late Latin mania ‘insanity, madness’, from Greek maniā ‘madness; enthusiasm, inspired frenzy; passion’, related to mantis ‘diviner, seer, prophet’ and menos ‘passion, spirit’, perhaps from suffixed form of PIE base *men-¹ ‘to think’.
In The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell said, to the type megalomaniac “belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history”. No doubt, he was also referring to himself, as one of the leading mathematicians, philosophers, and logicians of his time, sometimes talking about his terror of going mad, like his ‘uncle Willy’, son of the first Earl Russell, twice UK Prime Minister.
Regarding mania itself, since the 1700s, it has become common to create nonce words from it, denoting some form of craziness or obsession, such as tulipomania in 1710, bibliomania in 1809, and Beatlemania in the 1960s.
And, of course, mania is related to manic depression, today known as bipolar disorder. This is a characteristic of many creatives, artists, musicians, actors, and comics, for instance, as Life’s bifurcating energies emerge in the psyche in ways that are sometimes difficult to handle in our one-sided society, not recognizing the fundamental law of the Universe.