Why “hagiomania” is a great word
An excessive, pathological obsession with saints and sainthood. From the combining form hagio- (from Ancient Greek ἅγιος (hágios), meaning "holy" or "saint") + -mania (from Ancient Greek μανία (manía), meaning "madness, frenzy, enthusiasm"). First attested in English in 1807. Unlike "hagiolatry," which denotes the sanctioned veneration of saints, or "hagiography," the literary craft of saintly biography, hagiomania is the private, consuming fixation that distills devotion into monomania. It is the feverish collection of bone fragments in velvet-lined boxes, the compulsive tracing of martyrological calendars on the skin, the frantic search for a personal stigmata in the random bruises of daily life—a hunger for holiness that forgets the saint in its worship of sainthood.