CHAPTER III.

HARVEST FESTIVALS.

THE THARGELIA, KALLYNTERIA, PLYNTERIA.

‘λοιδορούμενοι εὐλογοῦμεν, διωκόμενοι ἀνεχόμεθα, βλασφημούμενοι

παρακαλοῦμεν· ὡς περικαθάρματα τοῦ κόσμου ἐγενήθημεν πάντων

περίψημα.’

Spring-time, it has been seen in the last chapter, is the season for

_purification_ by means of the _placation of ghosts_. But spring-time

is not the only anxious time for primitive man. As the year wears on, a

season approaches of even more critical import, when purification was

even more imperatively needed, the season of harvest; in the earliest

days the gathering in of such wild fruits as nature herself provides, in

later times the reaping and garnering of the various kinds of cereals.

In the North with our colder climate we associate harvest with autumn;

our harvest festivals fall at the end of September. September was to the

Greek the month of the grape harvest, the vintage, but his grain harvest

fell in ancient days as now in the month Thargelion, the latter part of

May and the beginning of June. This month is marked to the Greeks by

three festivals, the Thargelia, which gave its name to the month, the

Kallynteria, and the Plynteria. No festival has been more frequently

discussed than the Thargelia, and on no festival has comparative

anthropology thrown more light. The full gist of the ceremony has never,

I think, been clearly set forth, owing to the simple fact that the

Thargelia has usually been considered alone, not in connection with the

two other festivals[186]. In the present chapter I shall consider first

that element in the festival to which it and the month owe their names,

i.e. the first-fruits; second, the ceremony of the Pharmakos, which has

made the festival famous; third the connection with the Kallynteria and

Plynteria and the light thrown on both by the Roman festival of the

Vestalia. Finally from the consideration of the gist of these harvest

festivals it will be possible to add some further elements to our

conception of Greek religious thought, and especially of the Greek notion

of sacrifice.

THARGELION AND THARGELIA.

About the meaning[187] of the word Thargelia there is happily not the

slightest doubt. Athenaeus[188] quotes a statement made by Krates, a

writer of about the middle of the 2nd century A.D., in his book on the

Attic dialect as follows: ‘The _thargelos_ is the first loaf made after

the carrying home of the harvest.’ Now a loaf of bread is _not_ a very

primitive affair, but happily Hesychius[189] records an earlier or at

least more rudimentary form of nourishment: ‘Thargelos,’ he says, ‘is

a pot full of seeds.’ From Athenaeus[190] again we learn that the cake

called _thargelos_ was sometimes also called _thalusios_. The Thalusia,

the festival of the first-fruits of Demeter, is familiar to us from the

lovely picture in the Seventh Idyll of Theocritus[191]. The friends meet

Lycidas the goatherd and say to him:

‘The road on which our feet are set it is a harvest way,

For to fair-robed Demeter our comrades bring to-day

The first-fruits of their harvesting. She on the threshing place

Great store of barley grain outpoured, for guerdon of her grace.’

Homer[192] tells how the plague of the Calydonian boar came to waste the

land of the Aetolians, because Oineus their king forgot to celebrate

the Thalusia, and Eustathius, commenting on the passage, says: ‘The

first-fruits are the _thalusia_.’ He adds that some of the rhetoricians

call the _thalusia_ ‘feasts of the Harvest-Home.’

It is then abundantly clear that the festival of the Thargelia is in

the main a festival of the offering of first-fruits on the occasion of

harvest, and the month Thargelion the month of harvest rites. Of one

of these harvest rites, the carrying of the _Eiresione_[193], we have

unusually full particulars.

In the _Knights_ of Aristophanes[194], Cleon and the Sausage-Seller are

clamouring at the door of Demos. Demos comes out and asks angrily:

‘Who’s bawling there? do let the door alone,

You’ve torn my Eiresione all to bits.’

The scholiast explains. ‘At the Pyanepsia and the Thargelia the Athenians

hold a feast to Helios and the Horae, and the boys carry about branches

twined with wool, from which they get the name of _Eiresiones_, and

they hang them up before the doors.’ It is very probable that the wool

(εἶρος), taken perhaps from a sacred animal, gave its name to the

Eiresione, but there were many other things besides wool hung on the

branch. Our fullest account comes from the rhetorician Pausanias, who is

quoted by Eustathius[195] in his commentary on the _Iliad_. Eustathius is

explaining that the term ἀμφιθαλής means a child with both parents alive,

and he adds by way of illustration that children of this sort were chosen

by the ancients to deck out the Eiresione. He then quotes from the works

of Pausanias the following account of the ceremony: ‘The Eiresione is

a branch of olive twined with wool, and having hanging from it various

fruits of the earth; a boy, both of whose parents are alive, carries it

forth and places it in front of the doors of Apollo’s sanctuary, at the

feast of Pyanepsia.’ He then goes on to an aetiological legend about

Theseus, and finally records the words of the song sung by the children

who carried or attended the Eiresione:

‘Eiresione brings

All good things,

Figs and fat cakes to eat,

Soft oil and honey sweet,

And brimming wine-cup deep

That she may drink and sleep.’

The boy who actually carried the Eiresione must have both parents alive,

because any contact with death even remote was unlucky; the ghost of

either parent might be about. The song is of some interest because of

the half-personification of Eiresione. The Maypole or harvest-sheaf is

halfway to a harvest Maiden; it is thus, as will be seen later, that a

goddess is made. A song is sung, a story told, and the very telling fixes

the outline of personality. It is possible to worship long in spirit,

but as soon as the story-telling, myth-making, instinct awakes you have

anthropomorphism and theology.

What was hung on the Eiresione no doubt depended on the wealth of

particular worshippers; we hear of white wool and purple wool, vessels

of wine, figs, strings of acorns, cakes; nothing in the way of natural

produce came amiss. The Eiresione once fixed over the door remained

there, a charm against pestilence and famine, till the next year; then

it was changed for a new one. The withered branch must have been a

familiar sight at Athens. When in the _Plutus_[196] of Aristophanes the

young rough is insulting the old woman and thrusting his torch into her

withered face, she cries:

‘For pity’s sake don’t bring your torch so near me,’

and Chremylus says:

‘Yes, right she is, for if she caught a spark

She’d burn up like an old Eiresione.’

The Eiresione, Pausanias says, was fastened before the door of the

sanctuary of Apollo. Plutarch[197], in his rather clumsy aetiological

account of the Oschophoria, connects the Eiresione with vows paid to

Apollo by Theseus on his return from Crete to Athens. Harpocration[198]

says ‘The Thargelia was celebrated in the month of Thargelion, which

is sacred to Apollo,’ and the author of the _Etymologicon Magnum_[199]

states ‘The Thargelia, a festival at Athens. The name is given from

the _thargelia_, and thargelia are all the fruits that spring from the

earth. The festival is celebrated in the month Thargelion to Artemis and

Apollo.’ From Suidas[200] we learn that there was a musical contest at

the Thargelia, and that the actors dedicated their prize tripods in the

sanctuary of Apollo known as the Pythion.

All this makes it quite clear that at some time or other the festival of

the Thargelia was connected with the Olympian Apollo, and more vaguely

with his sister Artemis, but the connection is obviously loose and late.

The Eiresione was fastened up not only over the door of the sanctuary

of Apollo, but over the house-door of any and every Athenian. The house

of Demos was no sanctuary of Apollo. Moreover, when the scholiast on

Aristophanes[201] is commenting on the Eiresione, he says, to our

surprise, that it was carried and hung at the Thargelia and Pyanepsia

in honour, not of Apollo and Artemis, but of ‘Helios and the Horae.’

Porphyry[202] does not definitely name the Eiresione, but he is clearly

alluding to it when he speaks of the procession that still took place at

Athens in his own day to Helios and the Horae. It is evidence, he says,

that in early days the gods desired in their service not the sacrifice of

animals, but the offering of vegetable first-fruits. ‘In this procession

they carried wild herbs as well as ground pulse, acorns, barley, wheat, a

cake of dried figs, cakes of wheat and barley flour, and a pot (χύτρος).’

It is abundantly clear that the Eiresione is simply a harvest-home,

an offering of first-fruits that was primarily an end in itself,

but that could easily be affiliated to any dominant god. It will be

remembered[203] that Oineus got into trouble because, when all the other

gods had their feasts of hecatombs, he did not offer first-fruits to

Artemis, great daughter of Zeus. Oineus, we may conjecture, was the

faithful conservative worshipper of earlier gods; the Athenians were

wiser in their generation; their ancient service of the primitive Helios

and the Horae they somehow affiliated to that of the incoming Olympians.

* * * * *

It remains to ask more precisely what was the primitive significance

of the offering of first-fruits. At first sight it may seem as if the

question were superfluous. Surely we have here the simplest possible

instance of the service of ‘tendance’ (θεραπεία), the primitive sacrifice

that embodies the very essence of _do ut des_, a gift given to the god to

‘smooth his face,’ a gift that necessarily presupposes the existence of a

god with a face to be smoothed.

Such seems to have been the view of Aristotle[204]. He says in

characteristically Greek fashion, ‘They hold sacrifices, and meetings in

connexion therewith, paying rites of worship to the gods while providing

rest and recreation for themselves. For the most ancient sacrifices

and meetings seem to be as it were offerings of first-fruits after the

gathering in of the various harvests. For those were the times of year

when the ancients were especially at leisure.’ Aristotle clearly takes

the view of sacrifice already discussed, that sacrifice is mainly an

occasion for enjoyment and the result of leisure, but his remark as to

its early connection with first-fruits goes deeper down than he himself

knows. Regarded as a θυσία, a sacrifice, the offering of first-fruits

presupposes, as we have said, a god or spirit to whom sacrifice is made,

and a god of human passions. But it must not be forgotten that in this

view we are making a very large assumption, i.e. that of the existence

of some such god or spirit. It is instructive to note that among other

primitive races ceremonies have been observed which apparently are not

addressed to any god or spirit, and yet which seem to contain in them a

possible germ of some idea akin to sacrifice.

Such are the ceremonies of the Australian Arunta, observed and described

in detail by Messrs Spencer and Gillen[205]. These ceremonies, consisting

of lengthy and elaborate mummeries, are called _Intichiuma_, and their

object seems to be to secure the increase of the animal or plant

associated with a particular totem. The pantomimes enacted seem to be of

the nature of sympathetic magic, and they are interspersed with chanted

invitations to the particular plant or animal to be fertile. The point

of special interest is that the ceremonies are closely connected with

certain taboos on particular foods. Mr Lang[206] suggests that the

removal of the taboo at the time of the _Intichiuma_ may indicate that

the necessary ‘close time’ is over. The imposition of the taboo is on

this showing not due to any primary moral instinct in man, but simply a

practical necessity if the plant or animal is not to become extinct. The

removal of the taboo after a suitable lapse of time is, if man himself

is not to become extinct, equally practical and necessary. This sort of

taboo is in fact a kind of primitive ‘game law.’ Philochoros[207] gives

an instance: ‘At Athens,’ he says, ‘a prohibition was issued that no

one should eat of unshorn lamb on the occasion of failure in the breed

of sheep.’ If at the end of the close time it was customary to eat a

little of a plant or animal, the eating being accompanied by certain

solemn ceremonials, the food itself would easily come to be regarded as

specially sacred and as having sacramental virtue, and the further step

would soon be taken of regarding it as consecrated to certain spirits or

divinities. This _may_ have been in part the origin of the offering of

first-fruits.

The removal of a taboo is assuredly not the same thing as the worship

of a god, but it is easy to see how the one might slide over into the

other. A taboo is by common consent placed upon the harvest fruits till

all are ripe: such harvest-fruits are _sacred_, forbidden, dangerous.

Why? As soon as primitive man has fashioned for himself any sort of god

in his own image, the answer is ready, ‘The Lord thy God is a jealous

God.’ Primitive man is so instinctively anthropomorphic that it seems to

me rash to assert that the notion of taboo _precedes_ that of sacrifice.

The natives of Central Australia appear to have taboo without the notion

of sacrifice, i.e. of any spirit to whom sacrifice is made; another race

might have a primitive notion of a spirit to be placated without the

notion of taboo; or the two might be inextricably blended and only our

modern habit of pitiless analysis separate them.

Late writers on ritual, and it is only late that there are such writers,

always explain taboo as consecration rather than prohibition. Festus[208]

says ‘they called the juice of the vine _sacrima_ because they sacrificed

(or consecrated) it to Liber with a view to the protection of the

vineyards and the vessels and the wine itself, just as they sacrificed

to Ceres a first harvest from the ears they had first reaped.’ Here the

‘sacramental’ wine is clearly a sacrifice of the Olympian kind; but in

the Pithoigia, already discussed, the more primitive notions of release

from taboo and ‘aversion’ of evil influences clearly emerge. ‘Libation of

the new wine is poured out that the use of the magical thing (φαρμάκου)

may become harmless and a means of safety[209].’ In the Thargelia we

have no definite information as to a solemn _eating_ as well as offering

of first-fruits, but this element will appear when we reach the great

harvest festival commonly known as the Eleusinian Mysteries.

* * * * *

It remains to note some details as to the material of sacrifice. The

general principle is clear and simple. The god fares as his worshipper.

Porphyry[210], in discussing the various kinds of animals sacrificed,

observes with much common sense, ‘No Greek sacrifices a camel or an

elephant to the gods, because Greece does not produce camels and

elephants.’

It might not be necessary to state a fact so obvious but that writers on

the subject of ritual seem haunted by the notion that certain animals

are sacrificed to certain gods because they are in some mystical

sense ‘sacred to them,’ and this notion has introduced much needless

complexity. It is quite true that locally we find certain taboos on the

sacrifice of certain animals, the cause of which is unknown, but these

taboos are local and by no means uniform. Moreover the animal ‘sacred’

to the particular god is by no means always the material of sacrifice;

the owl, for reasons to be later discussed, is ‘sacred’ to Athene, but we

hear of no sacrifice of owls. Broadly then, as noted before, the material

of sacrifice is conditioned, not by the character of the god, but by the

circumstances of the worshipper.

The principle that the god fares as his worshipper is however crossed

by another, _he sometimes fares worse_. This was noticed by writers on

ritual such as Porphyry[211] and Eustathius[212], and they explain it

as a sort of survival of a golden age of simple manners, dear to the

conservatism of the gods. This conservatism of the gods mirrors, of

course, the natural and timid conservatism of their worshippers. They

have begun by offering just what they eat themselves, and, from the

fact that they have once offered it, they attach to this food special

sanctity. They advance in civilization, and their own food becomes more

delicate and complex, but they dare not make any change in the diet of

their gods; they have learnt to bake and eat fermented bread themselves,

but the gods are still nurtured on barley grains and porridge.

Porphyry[213] reduces the successive stages of sacrifice to a regular

system of progressive vegetarianism. First men plucked and offered grass,

which was like the ‘soft wool’ of the earth; then the fruit of trees and

their leaves, the acorn and the nut; then barley appeared first of the

grains, and they offered simple barley-corns; then they broke and bruised

grain and made it into cakes. In like fashion they made libations first

of water, then of honey, the natural liquid prepared for us by bees,

thirdly of oil, and last of all of wine; but after each advance the older

service remained ‘in memory of the ancient manner of life.’ Last, through

diverse influences of ignorance and fear, came ‘the luxury of flesh and

imported forms of diet[214].’

The incoming of the luxury of flesh diet was, it has already been noted,

due not to ignorance and fear but to the inroad of a flesh-eating

Northern race whose splendid physical stature and strength Porphyry

was little likely to appreciate. They were not wholly flesh-eaters;

hence, as has been seen, they offered the sacrifice of the barley grains

(οὐλοχύται), and offered these at a time when they were themselves eating

some form of manufactured bread. The primitive character of the rite is,

I think, marked by the ritual precedence. The οὐλοχύται, the sprinkling

of grains, has usually been explained as the sprinkling of meal on the

heads of the victims, as the equivalent of the _mola salsa_ of the

Romans; but Eustathius is probably right when, in commenting on the

sacrifice of Nestor[215], he says, ‘the sprinkled grains are in memory

of the food of old times which consisted in grains, i.e. barley-corns’.

‘Hence,’ he adds, ‘one of the ancient commentators explains the sprinkled

grains as barley-corns.’ That οὐλοχύται were nothing more nor less than

the actual barley-corns is also shewn by a passage from Strato[216]. A

cook, who apparently from his use of archaic terminology is according to

his master more like a male sphinx than a cook, calls for οὐλοχύται:

‘Οὐλοχύται—why what on earth is that?’

And the answer is

‘Just barley-corns.’

The first act in a Homeric sacrifice was uniformly prayer and the

sprinkling of grain[217], and it is important to observe that

Eustathius[218] expressly notes this as a previous sacrifice (πρόθυμα);

the οὐλοχύται were, he says, a mixture of grain and salt poured on

the altar before the sacrificial ceremony began. By the ‘sacrificial

ceremony’ Eustathius means the slaying of the animal victim. It is

important to note that the grain was poured _on the altar_ and was

therefore in itself a sacrifice, as it is sometimes stated that it was

merely thrown on the head of the victim. The statement of Eustathius

is confirmed by the account in Euripides[219] of the sacrifice made

by Aegisthus to the Nymphs. Here, before the elaborate slaying of the

bull, we have, just as in Homer, the sprinkling of the grain, and _it is

sprinkled on the altar_. The Messenger tells Electra that when all was

ready Aegisthus

‘Took the grains for sprinkling and he cast them

Upon the altar and these words he spake.’

The sprinkling of _salted_ meal (_mola salsa_) was, if we may believe

Athenaeus[220], a later innovation. He tells us distinctly, quoting

Athenion as his authority, that the use of salt for seasoning was

a comparatively late discovery and therefore excluded from certain

sacrifices to the gods.

‘Whence even now, remembering days of old,

The entrails of their victims for the gods

They roast with fire and bring no salt thereto,

Because at first they knew no use for salt.

And even when they knew and loved its savour

They kept their fathers’ sacred written precepts.’

The sacrifice of the animal victim never in Homer takes place without

the ‘previous sacrifice’ of grain-sprinkling and prayer, but prayer and

grain-sprinkling can take place, as in the prayer of Penelope[221],

without the animal sacrifice. This looks as though the animal sacrifice

were rather a supplementary later-added act than a necessary climax.

Later, when animal sacrifice became common and even as a rule imperative,

the real sacrificial intent of the preliminary grain-sprinkling would

naturally become obscured and it would be brought into connection with

animal sacrifice by the practice of sprinkling grain on the heads of the

victims.

By Plutarch’s[222] time the sprinkling of grain was regarded as something

of an archaeological curiosity. He asks in his _Greek Questions_ ‘Who is

he who is called among the Opuntians _krithologos_,’ i.e. the ‘barley

collector’? The answer is ‘Most of the Greeks make use of barley for

their very ancient sacrifices when the citizens offer first-fruits. And

the man who regulates these sacrifices and gets in these first-fruits is

called _krithologos_.’ He adds a curious detail illustrative of the two

strata of worship, ‘and they had two priests, one to supervise divine

things, one for those of things demonic.’ In like archaic fashion, when

Pisthetairos[223] would inaugurate the blessed simplicity of bird-rule,

he revives the ancient ritual of the sprinkling of barley-corns:

‘O better than worship of Zeus Most High

Is the service of Birds that sing and fly.

They ask for no carven temple’s state,

They clamour not for a golden gate.

The shrine they ask of a mortal’s vow

Is leave to perch on an olive bough.

In the little thickets of ash and oak

They dwell anigh us. We humble folk

Never need fare to the far-off lands

Of Ammon or Delphi, but lift our hands

Under our vine and our fig-tree’s shade.

For a slender grace let our prayer be said,

As we cast up our barley in little showers

And a little grace from the Birds is ours.’

The barley grain sprinkled is part of the ritual of the Olympians, but

in the case of the two survivals to be next considered, the _pelanos_

and the _nephalia_, their use was almost wholly confined to, and

characteristic of, the lower stratum of worship, that of ghosts and

sprites and underworld divinities.

After the sacrifice of the natural fruits of the earth, the παγκαρπία,

comes the most primitive form of artificial food, i.e. the _pelanos_, a

sort of porridge.

We speak of Bread and Wine as sacramental _elements_, but both are

far removed from being elemental. Leavened bread, the Greek ἄρτος,

is a product of advanced civilization, and with a true conservative

ritual instinct the Roman Church prescribes to this day the use of the

unleavened wafer. Athenaeus[224], citing the author of a play called the

_Beggars_, tells us that when the Athenians set a meal in the Prytaneum

for the Dioscuri they serve upon the tables cheese and barley-porridge

(φυστήν) and chopped olives and leeks, making remembrance of their

ancient mode of life. And Solon bids them supply to those who had free

meals in the Prytaneum barley cake (μᾶζαν), but at feasts to place in

addition loaves of bread (ἄρτον), and this in imitation of Homer. For

Homer, when he brought the chiefs together to Agamemnon, says ‘they

stirred up meal.’ The words ‘they stirred up meal,’ φύρετο δ’ ἄλφιτα, do

not occur in our text, but the author of the _Beggars_ clearly refers

to the ordinary Homeric meal, and takes us straight back to the real

primitive meaning of _pelanos_. On the shield of Achilles[225] we have

the picture of a harvest feast:

‘The heralds dight the feast apart beneath a spreading oak,

The ox they slew, and much white barley-meal the women folk

Sprinkled, a supper for the thralls.’

The lord and his fellows feast on flesh-meat, the workmen have their

supper of primitive porridge. So the Townley scholiast clearly

understands the passage; he comments: πάλυνον, ἔμασσον ἢ ἔφυρον, ‘they

sprinkle, i.e. they knead or mix together.’ It is noticeable that he

employs the exact word, ἔφυρον, quoted by Athenaeus as in the text of

Homer[226]. To explain the passage as ‘sprinkle on the heads of the

victims or on the roast flesh’ is to miss the whole antithesis between

master and man. Eustathius[227], that close observer of primitive fact,

saw what was being done in Homer and doubtless still by the poor of his

own days. He says ‘to sprinkle barley-meal does not mean bread-making but

a sort of paste in ordinary use among the ancients.’ To any one who has

watched the making of porridge, the shift of meaning from παλύνειν, to

_sprinkle_, to φύρειν and μάσσειν, to stir and to knead, is natural and

necessary. You first sprinkle the meal on the water, you then stir it,

so far you have porridge; if you let it get thicker and thicker you must

knead it and then you have oat-cake. It has of course frequently been

noted that a _pelanos_ may be either fluid or solid, and herein lies the

explanation. When the _pelanos_ is thick and subjected to fire, baked, it

becomes a _pemma_, an ordinary cake. The Latin _libum_[228], a cake, is a

strict parallel; it was primarily a thing out-poured, a _libation_, then

a solid thing cooked and eaten.

A _pelanos_ was then primarily the same as _alphita_, barley-meal. The

food of man was the food of the gods, but the word was early specialized

off to ritual use. There is, I believe, no instance in which a _pelanos_,

under that name, is eaten in daily life or indeed eaten at all save by

Earth and underworld gods, their representative snakes and other Spirits

of Aversion[229]. The comic poet Sannyrion[230] puts it thus:

‘We gods do call it pelanos,

You pompous mortals barley-meal.’

To us the pomposity seems on the side of the gods.

As there was a time when leavened bread was not, and men ate porridge

cooked or uncooked, so before the coming of the vine men drank a honey

drink. And as the conservative gods, long after men ate fermented bread,

were faithful to their porridge, so long after men drank wine they

still offered to the gods who were there before the coming of the vine

‘wineless libations,’ nephalia[231].

The ritual of the underworld gods is in many respects identical with

that of the ghosts out of which they are developed, but with this

difference—ghosts are less conservative than fully developed gods; the

habits and tastes of ghosts are more closely akin to those of the men who

worship them. Quite early, it would appear, man offered to ghosts the

wine he loved so well himself.

Atossa[232] brings for the ghost of Darius a _pelanos_, as was meet. She

brings also all manner of ‘soothing gifts’ (μειλικτήρια), but she pours

wine also:

‘A holy heifer’s milk, white, fair to drink,

Bright honey drops from flowers bee-distilled,

With draughts of water from a virgin fount,

And from the ancient vine its mother wild

An unmixed draught, this gladness; and fair fruit

Of gleaming olive ever blossoming

And woven flowers, children of mother earth.’

The dead fare as the living; wine is added to milk and honey and olive

oil and water, but wine perhaps significantly as an innovation is never

_named_. Atossa seems also consciously to insist over much on its being

wild, primitive, ancient, and therefore permissible. We are reminded of

the religious shifts to which the Romans were put by the introduction of

wine into their daily life and thence into their ritual. Plutarch[233] in

his _Roman Questions_ says that ‘when the women poured libations of wine

to Bona Dea, they called it by the name of milk,’ and Macrobius[234] adds

‘that wine could not be brought in under its own name, but the wine was

called milk and the vessel containing it a honey-jar.’

The ghosts of the dead admit and even welcome the addition of wine, but

actual chthonic divinities are stricter. When Oedipus[235] came to the

precinct of the Semnae, the Chorus bid him make atonement, because,

though unwittingly, he has violated the precinct. He asks the precise

ritual to be observed. The answer, though it is thrice familiar, is so

important for the understanding of chthonic ceremonies that it must be

given in full:

‘_Oed._ And with what rites, O strangers? teach me this.

_Chor._ First, fetch thou from an ever-flowing fount,

Borne in clean hands, an holy drink-offering.

_Oed._ And next, when I have brought the holy draught?

_Chor._ Bowls are there next, a cunning craftsman’s work,

Crown thou their lips and handles at the brim.

_Oed._ With branches, woollen webs, or in what wise?

_Chor._ Of the ewe-lamb take thou the fresh-shorn wool.

_Oed._ So be it, and then to what last rite I pass?

_Chor._ Pour thy drink offerings, facewards to the dawn.

_Oed._ With these same vessels do I pour the draught?

_Chor._ Yes, in three streams, the last pour wholly out.

_Oed._ And filled wherewith this last? teach me this also.

_Chor._ _Water and honey—bring no wine thereto._

_Oed._ When the dark shadowed earth hath drunk of this?

_Chor._ Lay on it thrice nine sprays of olive tree

With both thine hands, and make thy prayer the while.

_Oed._ That prayer? vouchsafe to teach, for mighty is it.

_Chor._ Pray thou that, as they are called the Kindly Ones,

With kindly hearts they may receive and bless.

Be this thy prayer, thine own or his who prays

For thee. Whisper thy prayer nor lift thy voice,

Then go, look not behind, so all is well.’

The Kindly Ones, though their name is only adjectival, have crystallized

into divinities; they are no longer ghosts, and none may tamper with

their archaic ritual.

For the dread counterpart of the Eumenides, the Erinyes, there is the

same wineless service, witness the reproach of Clytaemnestra. The Erinyes

have deserted her, yet she has given them of the ritual they exact[236]:

‘Full oft forsooth from me have ye licked up

Wineless libations, sober balms of wrath.’

To offer wine was the last outrage done by the parvenu Apollo to ancient

ritual, hence the bitter protest[237]:

‘Thou hast bewildered the old walks of life,

With wine the Ancient Goddesses undone.’

The wineless service of the Eumenides in the _Oedipus Coloneus_

is of course no mere invention of the poet. At Titane near Sicyon

Pausanias[238] came to a grove of evergreen oaks and a temple of the

goddesses whom, he says, the Athenians call Semnae, but the Sicyonians

Eumenides, and every year on one day they celebrate a festival in their

honour, ‘sacrificing sheep with young and a _libation of water and

honey_.’

The scholiast in the _Oedipus Coloneus_[239] gives a list of the

divinities to whom at Athens wineless sacrifices were made. He quotes as

his authority Polemon. ‘The Athenians were careful in these matters and

scrupulously pious (ὅσιοι) in the things that pertain to the gods, and

they made wineless sacrifices to Mnemosyne the Muse, to Eos, to Helios,

to Selene, to the Nymphs, to Aphrodite Ourania.’ The list is at first

surprising. We associate _nephalia_ with the Underworld powers, but

here it is quite clear that, in primitive days, side by side with the

Earth-gods were worshipped sky-gods, but in their own simple being as

Dawn and Sun and Moon, not as full-blown human Olympians. Mnemosyne[240],

it will later be seen, had a well of living water herself; she needed no

wine. The Heavenly Aphrodite is more surprising, but her honey libation

is further attested by Empedokles[241]. He tells of the days long ago

when the god Ares was not, nor King Zeus, nor Kronos, nor Poseidon, but

only

‘Kypris the Queen

Here they adored with pious images,

With painted victims and with fragrant scents,

With fume of frankincense and genuine myrrh.

Honey of yellow bees upon the ground

They for libation poured.’

But though here and there a very early ‘Heavenly One’ claimed the honey

service, it was mostly the meed of the dead. Porphyry knew that honey was

used to embalm the body of the dead because it prevented putrefaction,

and this custom of honey burial is echoed in the myth of Glaukos and the

honey-jar. The marvellous sweetness of honey lent itself to the notions

of propitiation and placation—‘sweets to the sweet’ or rather, as it

seemed to the practical primitive mind, ‘sweets to the spirits to be

sweetened,’ the Meilichioi, ghosts and heroes to be appeased[242].

One more element in archaic ritual yet remains to be considered—the

fireless sacrifice.

Fire, it has been seen, was used in the Homeric burnt sacrifice _for

sublimation_. By fire, Eustathius[243] says in speaking of the burning

of the dead among the northern nations, ‘the divine element was borne

on high as though in a chariot and mingled with the heavenly beings.’

In like fashion we may suppose the burnt victim was freed from the

grosser elements and in purified vaporous form ascended to the gods of

the upper air. This is what Porphyry[244] means when he says that in

burnt sacrifice we ‘immortalize the dues of the heavenly gods by means

of fire.’ Fire again in the service of the underworld gods was used, it

has further been seen, for utter destruction, for the holocaust. But in

certain rituals established, it may be, before the discovery of fire, it

was definitely prescribed that the sacrifice should be fireless. Diogenes

Laertius[245] relates that according to tradition there was but one altar

in Delos at which Pythagoras could worship, the ‘Altar of Apollo the

Sire,’ which stood behind the great Altar of the Horns, because on this

altar wheat and barley and cakes are the only offering laid and the

sacrifice is without fire and there is no sacrificial victim—so Aristotle

stated in his _Constitution of the Delians_. This altar was also known as

the Altar of the Pious. The foundation of the great blood-stained Altar

of the Horns may still be seen in Delos; the primitive Altar of the Sire

has left no trace, but in some bygone time a voice, it would seem, had

been heard on Mount Cynthus saying, ‘Thou shalt not hurt nor destroy in

all my Holy Mountain.’

What ancient worship of a ‘Sire’ Apollo had taken to himself in Delos we

do not know, but in remote Arcadia a fireless sacrifice of a specially

simple kind went on right down to the time of Pausanias[246] in honour

of a home-grown goddess, Demeter. At Phigalia Pausanias visited the

cave-sanctuary of the Black Demeter; indeed he says in his pious way

it was chiefly for her sake that he went to Phigalia, and he adds ‘I

sacrificed no victim to the goddess, such being the custom of the people

of the country. They bring instead as offerings the fruit of the vine and

of other trees they cultivate, and honey-combs and wool which is still

unwrought and full of the natural grease; these they lay on the altar

which is set up in front of the cave, and having laid them there they

pour on them olive oil. Such is the rite of sacrifice observed by private

persons and once a year by the Phigalian people collectively.’ Everything

here prescribed is in its most natural form, grapes rather than wine,

honey-comb rather than honey, unwrought wool not artificial fillets, and

the service is fireless. It was a service to content even Pythagoras.

That there was between the early fireless sacrifice and the burnt

sacrifice of the Olympian in some prehistoric time a rivalry and clashing

of interests, is clear from the Rhodian tradition of the Heliadae.

Pindar[247] tells how:

‘Up to the hill they came,

Yet in their hand

No seed of burning flame,

And for the Rhodian land

With fireless rite

The grove upon the citadel they dight.’

And the scholiast commenting on the passage says: ‘The Rhodians going

up to the Acropolis to sacrifice to Athene, forgot to take fire with

them for their offerings (ἐναγίσμασι) and made a fireless sacrifice.

Hence it came about that, as the Athenians were the first to sacrifice

by fire, Athene thought it best to live with them.’ Athene was always

a prudent goddess, ready to swim with the tide; she was ‘all for the

father,’ all for the Olympians, and she had her reward. Philostratos[248]

tells the same story with something more of emphasis. He contrasts

the Acropolis of Athens and the Acropolis of Rhodes; the Rhodians had

only a fireless cheap service, the people of Athens provide the savour

of burnt sacrifice and fragrant smoke; the goddess went to live with

them because ‘they were wiser in their generation (σοφωτέρους) and

good at sacrificing.’ From Diodorus[249] we learn that it was Cecrops

who introduced the fire-sacrifice at Athens. On Cecrops were fathered

many of the innovations of civilized life, among them marriage. He was

halfway between the old and the new, half civilized man, half snake. He,

Pausanias[250] significantly tells us, was the first to give to Zeus the

name of the Highest. He too became all for the Olympian.

These forms of primitive sacrifice—the _pelanos_, the barley grains,

the _nephalia_, the fireless rites—have been considered at some length

because, though in part they went over to the Olympians, they remain

broadly speaking and in their simplest forms characteristic of the

lower stratum and of the worship of underworld spirits. Moreover it is

these primitive rites which were, as will later be seen, taken up and

mysticized by the religion of Orpheus.

It remains to consider the second and by far the most important element

in the harvest festival of the Thargelia, the ceremony of the Pharmakos.

THE PHARMAKOS.

That the leading out of the _pharmakos_ was a part of the festival of

the Thargelia we know from Harpocration[251]. He says in commenting on

the word: ‘At Athens they led out two men to be purifications for the

city; it was at the Thargelia, one was for the men and the other for the

women.’ These men, these pharmakoi, whose function it was to purify the

city, were, it will later be seen, in all probability put to death, but

the expression used by Harpocration is noteworthy—they were led out. The

gist of the ceremony is not death but expulsion; death, if it occurs, is

incidental.

The ceremony of expulsion took place, it is again practically certain,

on the 6th day of Thargelion, a day not lightly to be forgotten, for it

was the birthday of Socrates. Diogenes Laertius[252] says in his life

of Socrates: ‘He was born on the 6th day of Thargelion, the day when

the Athenians purify the city.’ The pharmakos is not expressly named,

but it will be seen in the sequel that the cleansing of the city by the

expulsion of the pharmakos was regarded as _the_ typical purification of

the whole year. The etymology of the word will be best considered when

the nature of the rites has been examined[253].

The ceremony of the pharmakos has been often discussed, but I think

frequently and fundamentally misapprehended. It appears at first sight to

involve what we in our modern terminology call ‘Human Sacrifice.’ To be

told that this went on in civilized Athens in the 5th cent. B.C. shocks

our preconceived notions of what an Athenian of that time would be likely

to do or suffer. The result is that we are inclined to get out of the

difficulty in one of two ways: either we try to relegate the ceremony of

the pharmakos to the region of prehistoric tradition, or we so modify and

mollify its main issues as to make it unmeaning.

The issue before us is a double one and must not be confused. We have to

determine what the ceremonial of the pharmakos was, and next, did that

ceremonial last on into historic times?

My own view is briefly this: that we have no positive evidence that it

did last on into the 5th century B.C., but that, if the gist of the

ceremonial is once fairly understood, there is no a priori difficulty

about its continuance, and that, this a priori difficulty being removed,

we shall accept an overwhelming probability. The evidence for the

historical pharmakos is just as good as e.g. the evidence for the

chewing of the buckthorn at the Anthesteria.

It should be noted at the outset that the pharmakos, i.e. the human

scape-goat, though it seems to us a monstrous and horrible notion,

was one so familiar to the Greek mind as to be in Attic literature

practically proverbial. Aristophanes[254] wants to point the contrast

between the old mint of sterling state officials and the new democratic

coinage: he says, now-a-days we fill offices by

‘Any chance man that we come across,

Not fit in old days for a pharmakos,

These we use

And these we choose,

The veriest scum, the mere refuse,’

and again in a fragment[255]:

‘_Your_ kinsman! how and whence, you pharmakos,’

and in the _Knights_[256] Demos says to Agoracritos:

‘I bid you take the seat

In the Prytaneum where this pharmakos

Was wont to sit.’

Pharmakos is in fact, like its equivalent ‘offscouring’ (κάθαρμα), a

current form of utter abuse, disgust and contempt.

Moreover its ritual import was perfectly familiar. Lysias[257] in his

speech against Andokides is explicit: ‘We needs must hold that in

avenging ourselves and ridding ourselves of Andokides we purify the city

and perform apotropaic ceremonies, and solemnly expel a pharmakos and rid

ourselves of a criminal; for of this sort the fellow is.’

For the fullest details of the horrid ceremony we are indebted to a

very late author. Tzetzes[258] (A.D. 1150) in his _Thousand Histories_

describes it as follows: ‘The pharmakos was a purification of this sort

of old. If a calamity overtook the city by the wrath of God, whether it

were famine or pestilence or any other mischief, they led forth as though

to a sacrifice the most unsightly of them all as a purification and a

remedy to the suffering city. They set the sacrifice in the appointed

place, and gave him cheese with their hands and a barley cake and figs,

and seven times they smote him with leeks and wild figs and other wild

plants. Finally they burnt him with fire with the wood of wild trees and

scattered the ashes into the sea and to the winds, for a purification,

as I said, of the suffering city. Just as, I think, Lycophron records it

of the Locrian maidens, speaking somewhat after this manner, I do not

remember the exact verse, “when, having consumed their limbs with fuel

from fruitless trees, the flame of fire cast into the sea the ashes of

the maidens that died on the hill of Traron.”’

Tzetzes is not inventing the ceremonies, and in his awkward confused

way he goes on to tell us his source—the iambic poet Hipponax. ‘And

Hipponax gives us the best complete account of the custom when he says,

‘_to purify the city and strike_ (the pharmakos) _with branches_’; and

in another place he says in his first iambic poem, ‘_striking him in the

meadow and beating him with branches and with leeks like a pharmakos_’;

and again in other places he says as follows: ‘_we must make of him a

pharmakos_’; and he says, ‘_offering him figs and a barley cake and

cheese such as pharmakoi eat_’; and ‘_they have long been waiting

agape for them, holding branches in their hands as pharmakoi do_’; and

somewhere else he says in the same iambic poem, ‘_may he be parched with

hunger, so that in (their) anger he may be led as pharmakos and beaten

seven times_.’

Tzetzes quotes for us six fragmentary statements from Hipponax, and the

words of Hipponax correspond so closely in every detail with his own

account that we are justified in supposing that his account of the end

of the ceremonial, the burning and scattering of the ashes, is also

borrowed; but the evidence of this from Hipponax he omits.

Hipponax makes his statements apparently, not from any abstract interest

in ritual, but as part of an insult levelled at his enemy Boupalos. This

is made almost certain by another fragment of Hipponax[259] in which

he says, ‘as they uttered imprecations against that abomination (ἅγος)

Boupalos.’ The fragments belong obviously to one or more iambic poems

in which Hipponax expresses the hope that Boupalos will share the fate

of a pharmakos, will be insulted, beaten, driven out of the city, and

at last presumably put to death. Hipponax is _not_ describing an actual

historical ceremony, but to make his insults have any point he must have

been alluding to a ritual that was, in the 6th century B.C., perfectly

familiar to his hearers.

Some of the statements of Hipponax as to the details of the ritual are

confirmed from other sources, and are given in these with certain slight

variations which seem to show that Hipponax was not the only source of

information.

Helladius[260] the Byzantine, quoted by Photius, says that ‘it was the

custom at Athens to lead in procession two pharmakoi with a view to

purification; one for the men, one for the women. The pharmakos of the

men had black figs round his neck, the other had white ones, and he says

they were called συβάκχοι.’ Helladius added that ‘this purification was

of the nature of an apotropaic ceremony to avert diseases, and that it

took its rise from Androgeôs the Cretan, when at Athens the Athenians

suffered abnormally from a pestilential disease, and the custom obtained

of constantly purifying the city by pharmakoi.’

The man and woman and the black and white figs are variant details.

Helladius is our sole authority for the curious name συβάκχοι: what this

means is not certain. The term may have meant ‘pig-Bacchoi.’ The Bacchoi,

as will later be seen, were sacred and specially purified persons with

magical powers, and the term may have been applied to mark analogous

functions. Crete was the home of ceremonies of purification.

Harpocration, in the passage already quoted, confirms the view that there

were two pharmakoi, but he says they were both men: one for the women,

one for the men. The discrepancy is not serious. It would be quite easy

if necessary to dress up a man as a woman, and even a string of white

figs would be sufficient presentment of gender; _simulata pro veris_ is a

principle of wide acceptation in primitive ritual.

The beating of the pharmakoi was a point of cardinal importance. It was

a ceremonial affair and done to the sound of the flute. Hesychius[261]

says, ‘The song of the branches is a measure that they play on the flute

when the pharmakoi are expelled, they being beaten with branches and fig

sprigs. The pharmakos was actually called “he of the branches.”’ It must

have been a matter of very early observation that beating is expulsive.

You beat a bush, a bird escapes; you beat a garment, the dust comes

out; you beat a man, the evil, whatever it be, will surely emerge. We

associate beating with moral stimulus, but the first notion is clearly

expulsive.

Probably some notion of the application or instigation of good as well

as the expulsion of evil early came in. This may be conjectured from the

fact that rods made of special plants and trees were used, notably leeks

and fig-trees. Plants with strong smells, and plants the eating of which

is purgative, are naturally regarded as ‘good medicine’; as expulsive of

evil, and hence in a secondary way as promotive of good.

Pythagoras[262] taught that to have a leek hung up over a doorway was a

good thing to prevent the entrance of evil, and Dioscorides[263] records

the same belief. Lucian[264] makes Menippus relate how before he was

allowed to consult the oracle of the dead he was ‘purged and wiped clean

and consecrated with leek and torches.’

The _locus classicus_ on beating with leek is of course the beating of

the god Pan by his Arcadian worshippers. Theocritus[265] makes Simichidas

sing:

‘Dear Pan, if this my prayer may granted be

Then never shall the boys of Arcady

Flog thee on back and flank with leeks that sting

When scanty meat is left for offering;

If not, thy skin with nails be flayed and torn

And amid nettles mayst thou couch till morn.’

And the scholiast remarks, ‘they say that a festival was held in Arcadia

in which the youths beat Pan with leeks when the officials sacrificed a

small victim, and there was not enough to eat for the worshipper; or the

Arcadians when they went out hunting if they had good sport paid honour

to Pan; if the reverse they maltreated him with leeks because, being a

mountain god, he had power over the produce of the chase.’ The first

explanation confuses cause with effect, the second is undoubtedly right.

Pan is beaten because, as lord of the chase, he has failed to do his

business.

It is sometimes said that Pan is beaten, and the pharmakoi beaten, in

order to ‘stimulate their powers of fertility.’ In a sense this is

ultimately true, but such a statement gives a false and misleading

emphasis. The image and the pharmakoi are beaten partly to drive out evil

influences, partly, it should not be forgotten, to relieve the feelings

of the beaters. When the evil influences are beaten out, the god will

undoubtedly do better next time, but it is only in this sense that the

powers of fertility are stimulated. The pharmakos has no second chance.

He is utterly impure, so that the more purifying influences, the more

good medicine brought to bear upon him, the better; but he is doomed to

death, not to reform. In the Lupercalia, already discussed (p. 51), the

women are struck by the _februum_ as a fertility charm, but even here the

primary notion must have been the expulsion of evil influences.

The beating, like the pharmakos, became proverbial. Aristophanes[266]

makes Aeacus ask how he is to torture the supposed Xanthias, and the real

Xanthias makes answer:

‘Oh, in the usual way, but when you beat him

Don’t do it with a leek or a young onion.’

Here undoubtedly the meaning is, ‘don’t let this be a merely ceremonial

beating, a religious performance,’ and the allusion gains in point by the

fact that the supposed slave was a real god to be treated worse than a

pharmakos. Lucian[267] says that the Muses, he is sure, would never deign

to come near his vulgar book-buyer, and instead of giving him a crown of

myrtle they will beat him with myrrh and mallow and _get rid of him_, so

that he may not pollute their sacred fountains. Clearly here the vulgar

book-buyer is a pharmakos.

We have then abundant evidence that the pharmakos was beaten; was he also

put to death? Tzetzes, as has been seen, states that he was burnt with

the wood of certain fruitless trees, and that his ashes were scattered

to the sea and the winds. The scholiast on Aristophanes[268] also states

expressly that by δημόσιοι, i.e. people fed and kept at the public

expense, was meant ‘those who were called pharmakoi, and these pharmakoi

purified cities by their slaughter.’ So far his statement is of the

most general character, and it need not have been inferred that he was

speaking of Athens, but he goes on, ‘for the Athenians maintained certain

very ignoble and useless persons, and on the occasion of any calamity

befalling the city, I mean a pestilence or anything of that sort, they

sacrificed these persons with a view to purification from pollution and

they called them purifications’ (καθάρματα). Tzetzes said a pharmakos was

excessively ungainly (ἀμορφότερον), the scholiast, worthless and useless.

Aristophanes himself regarded them as the ‘scum’ of humanity.

The scholiast is of course a late and somewhat dubious authority, and did

the fact of the death of the pharmakos rest on him and on Tzetzes alone,

we might be inclined to question it. A better authority is preserved for

us by Harpocration[269]; he says, ‘Istros (_circ._ B.C. 230), in the

first book of his Epiphanies of Apollo, says that Pharmakos is a proper

name, and that Pharmakos stole sacred _phialae_ belonging to Apollo, and

was taken and stoned by the men with Achilles, and the ceremonies done at

the Thargelia are mimetic representations of these things.’ The aetiology

of Istros is of course wrong, but it is quite clear that he believed the

ceremonies of the Thargelia to include the stoning of a man to death.

That in primitive pharmakos-ceremonies the human pharmakos was actually

put to death scarcely admits of doubt: that Istros believed this took

place at the ceremony of the Thargelia in honour of Apollo may be

_inferred_ from his aetiology. There still remains in the minds of some a

feeling that the Athens of the fifth century was too civilized a place to

have suffered the actual death of human victims, and that periodically,

as part of a public state ritual. This misgiving arises mainly, as was

indicated at the outset, from a misunderstanding of the gist of the

ceremony. Tzetzes, after the manner of his day, calls it a θυσία, a burnt

sacrifice; but it was not really a sacrifice in our modern sense at all,

though, as will later be shown, it was one of the diverse notions that

went to the making of the ancient idea of sacrifice.

The pharmakos was not a sacrifice in the sense of an offering _made to

appease an angry god_. It came to be associated with Apollo when he took

over the Thargelia, but primarily it was not intended to please or to

appease any spirit or god. It was, as ancient authors repeatedly insist,

a καθαρμός, a purification. The essence of the ritual was not atonement,

for there was no one to atone, but riddance, the artificial making of an

ἄγος, a pollution, to get rid of all pollution. The notion, so foreign

to our scientific habit of thought, so familiar to the ancients, was

that evil of all kinds was a physical infection that could be caught and

transferred; it was highly catching. Next, some logical savage saw that

the notion could be utilized for artificial riddance. The Dyaks[270]

sweep misfortunes out of their houses and put them into a toy-house made

of bamboo; this they set adrift on a river. On the occasion of a recent

outbreak of influenza in Pithuria ‘a man had a small carriage made, after

a plan of his own, for a pair of scape-goats which were harnessed to it

and driven to a wood at some distance where they were let loose. From

that hour the disease completely ceased in the town. The goats never

returned; had they done so the disease must have come back with them.’

It is needless for our purpose to accumulate instances of the countless

varieties of scape-goats, carts, cocks, boats, that the ingenuity of

primitive man has invented. The instance chosen shows as clearly as

possible that, as the gist of the ceremony is magical riddance, it is

essential that the scape-goat, whatever form he takes, _should never

return_.

This necessity for utter destruction comes out very clearly in an account

of the way the Egyptians treated their scape-goats. Plutarch[271] in his

discourse on Isis and Osiris says, on the authority of Manetho, that in

the dog-days they used to burn men alive whom they called Typhonians,

and _their ashes they made away with by winnowing and scattering them_.

The winnowing-fan in which the corn was tossed and by means of which

the chaff was blown utterly away was to Clement of Alexandria[272] the

symbol of utter ruin and destruction. In his protest against the ruinous

force of convention among pagan people, he says finely: ‘let us fly from

convention, it strangles men, it turns them away from truth, it leads

them afar from life; convention is a noose, a place of execution, a pit,

a winnowing-fan; convention is ruin.’

The pharmakos is killed then, not because his death is a vicarious

sacrifice, but because he is so infected and tabooed that his life is

a practical impossibility. The uneducated, among whom his lot would

necessarily be cast, regard him as an infected horror, an incarnate

pollution; the educated who believe no such nonsense know that the

kindest thing is to put an end to a life that is worse than death.

Moreover nearly every civilized state to this day offers ‘human

sacrifice’ in the shape of the criminals it executes. Why not combine

religious tradition with a supposed judicial necessity? Civilized Athens

had its barathron; why should civilized Athens shrink from annually

utilizing two vicious and already condemned criminals to ‘purify the

city’?

The question of whether the pharmakos was actually put to death in

civilized Athens is of course for our purpose a strictly subordinate one.

It has only been discussed in detail because the answer that we return

to it depends in great measure on how far we realize the primary gist

of a pharmakos, i.e. the two notions of (_a_) the _physicalness_, the

actuality of evil, and (_b_) the possibility of contagion and transfer.

Our whole modern conception of the scape-man is apt to be unduly

influenced by the familiar instance of the Hebrew scape-goat. We remember

how

‘The scape-goat stood all skin and bone

_While moral business, not his own,_

_Was bound about his head_.’

And the pathos of the proceeding haunts our minds and prevents us from

realizing the actuality and the practicality of the more primitive

physical taboo. It is interesting to note that even in this moralized

Hebrew conception, the scape-goat was not a sacrifice proper; its

sending away was _preceded by sacrifice_. The priest ‘made an atonement

for the children of Israel for all their sins once a year,’ and when

the sacrifice of bullock and goat and the burning of incense, and the

sprinkling of blood was over, then and not till then the live goat was

presented to the Lord[273]. The Hebrew scriptures emphasize the fact that

the burden laid upon the goat is not merely physical evil, not pestilence

or famine, but rather the burden of moral guilt. ‘And Aaron shall lay

both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over him all

the iniquities of the children of Israel and all their transgressions in

all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send

him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness. And the goat shall

bear upon him all their iniquities into a land not inhabited.’

But so close is the connection of moral and physical that even here,

where the evil laid upon the scape-goat is moral only, there is evident

danger of infection; the goat is sent forth into a land not inhabited and

it would be manifestly undesirable that he should return. At Athens we

hear of no confession of sins, it is famine and pestilence from which a

terror-stricken city seeks riddance.

This physical aspect of evil is still more clearly brought out in a

ceremony performed annually at Chaeronea. Plutarch[274] himself, when he

was archon, had to preside over the ritual and has left us the account.

A household slave was taken and ceremonially beaten with rods of agnus

castus—again a plant of cathartic quality—and driven out of doors to

the words, ‘Out with hunger, in with wealth and health.’ The ceremony

was called the ‘expulsion of hunger,’ and Plutarch speaks of it as an

‘ancestral sacrifice.’ It was performed by each householder for his own

house, and by the archon for the common hearth of the city. When Plutarch

was archon he tells us the ceremony was largely attended. The name of

the ‘ceremony’ is instructive, it is ἐξέλασις, riddance, expulsion, not

as the pharmakos was, καθαρμός, purification; both are called θυσίαι,

sacrifices, only by concession to popular usage when every religious

ceremony is regarded as of the nature of burnt sacrifice. The ceremony of

the pharmakos was taken on by Apollo, but in the Chaeronea ‘expulsion’

there is no pretence that any god is worshipped; the performance remains

frankly magical.

At Chaeronea the slave was merely beaten and expelled. At Delphi a

pharmakos ceremony of still milder form took place in which the victim

was merely a puppet.

In his 12th _Greek Question_ Plutarch asks, ‘What is Charila among the

Delphians?’ His answer is as follows: ‘Concerning Charila they tell a

story something on this wise. The Delphians were afflicted by a famine

following after a drought. They came to the gates of the king’s palace

with their children and their wives to make supplication. And the king

distributed grain and pulse to the noblest of them as there was not

enough for all. And there came a little girl who had lost both her father

and mother, and she made supplication. But he struck her with his shoe

and threw the shoe into her face. Now she was poor and desolate but of

noble spirit, and she went away and loosed her girdle and hanged herself.

As the famine went on and pestilence was added thereto, the Pythia gave

an oracle to the king that he must appease Charila, a maiden who had died

by her own hand. After some difficulty they found out that this was the

name of the girl who had been struck. So they performed a sacrifice which

had in it some admixture of a purification, and this they still perform

every nine years.’

The tale told of Charila is, of course, pure aetiology, to account for

certain features in an established ritual. The expression Plutarch uses,

a ‘sacrifice with admixture of purification’ (μεμιγμένην τινὰ καθαρμοῦ

θυσίαν), is interesting because it shows that though by his time almost

every religious ceremony was called a θυσία, his mind is haunted by

the feeling that the Charila ceremony was in reality a purification,

a καθαρμός; he would have been nearer the truth had he said it was a

‘purification containing in it a certain element of sacrifice.’

He then proceeds to give the actual ritual. ‘The king is seated to

preside over the pulse and the grain and he distributes it to all, both

citizens and strangers: there is brought in an image of Charila as a

little girl, and when they all receive the corn, the king strikes the

image with his shoe and the leader of the Thyiades takes the image and

conducts it to a certain cavernous place, and there fastening (a rope)

round the neck of the image they bury it where they buried the strangled

Charila.’

The festival Charila, festival of rejoicing and grace, is like the

Thargelia, a festival of first-fruits containing the ceremony of the

Pharmakos, only in effigy. Charila is beaten with a shoe: leather is to

this day regarded as magically expulsive, though the modern surrogate is

of white satin. On a curious vase in the National Museum at Athens[275],

we have a representation of a wedding procession at which a man is in the

act of throwing a shoe. It is still to-day regarded as desirable that

bride and bridegroom should be hit, evil influences are thereby expelled,

and the shower of fertilizing rice is made the more efficacious. The

effigy of Charila is buried, not burnt, possibly a more primitive form of

destruction. The origin of the ceremony is dated back to the time when

the king was priest, but the actual celebrants are women.

A pharmakos ceremony that is known to have taken place at Marseilles adds

some further instructive details. Servius, in commenting on the words

_auri sacra fames_[276] ‘accursed hunger of gold,’ notes that _sacer_

may mean accursed as well as holy, and he seems, rather vaguely, to

realize that between these two meanings is the middle term ‘devoted.’

The use of the term, he says, is derived from a custom among the Gauls:

‘Whenever the inhabitants of Marseilles suffer from a pestilence, one of

the poorer class offers himself to be kept at the public expense and fed

on specially pure foods. After this has been done he is decorated with

sacred boughs and clad in holy garments, and led about through the whole

city to the accompaniment of curses, in order that upon him may fall all

the ills of the whole city, and thus he is cast headlong down.’

Here we have the curious added touch that the vehicle of impurity is

purified. To our modern minds pure and impure stand at two opposite

poles, and if we were arraying a scape-goat we certainly should not

trouble about his preliminary purification. But the ancients, as Servius

dimly feels, knew of a condition that combined the two, the condition

that the savage describes as ‘taboo.’ For this condition the Latins used

the word ‘sacer,’ the Greeks, as has already been seen, the word ἄγος. It

is in such complex primitive notions as those of _sacer_ and ἄγος, that

our modern habit of clear analysis and differentiation causes us to miss

the full and complex significance.

* * * * *

The leading out of the pharmakos is then a purely magical ceremony based

on ignorance and fear; it is not a human sacrifice to Apollo or to any

other divinity or even ghost, it is a ceremony of physical expulsion.

It is satisfactory to find that the etymology[277] of the word confirms

this view, φαρμακός means simply ‘magic-man.’ Its Lithuanian cognate is

_burīn_, magic; in Latin it appears as _forma_, formula, magical spell;

our _formulary_ retains some vestige of its primitive connotation.

Φάρμακον in Greek means healing drug, poison, and dye, but all, for

better for worse, are magical. To express its meaning we need what our

language has lost, a double-edged word like the savage ‘medicine.’ The

pharmakos of the Thargelia shows us a state of things in which man does

not either tend or avert god[278] or ghost, but seeks, by the ‘medicine’

he himself makes, to do, on his own account, his spring or rather

Whitsuntide ‘thorough cleaning.’ The ceremony of the pharmakos went in

some sense to the making of the Greek and modern notion of sacrifice, but

the word itself has other and perhaps more primitive connotations.

Tzetzes, looking back at the ceremony of the expulsion of the pharmakos,

calls it a sacrifice (θυσία), but we need not imitate him in his

confusion of ideas new and old. The rite of the Thargelia was a rite of

expulsion, of riddance, which incidentally, as it were, involved loss

of life to a human being. The result is, indeed, in both cases the same

to the human being, but the two ceremonials of sacrifice and riddance

express widely different conditions and sentiments in the mind of the

worshipper.

It may indeed be doubted whether we have any certain evidence of ‘human

sacrifice’ in our sense among the Greeks even of mythological days. A

large number of cases which were by the tragedians regarded as such,

resolve themselves into cases of the blood feud, cases such as those

of Iphigeneia and Polyxena, when the object was really the placation

of a ghost, not the service of an Olympian. Perhaps a still larger

number are primarily not sacrifices, θυσίαι, but ceremonies of riddance

and purification, καθαρμοί. The ultimate fact that lies behind such

ceremonies is the use of a human pharmakos, and then later, when the real

meaning was lost, all manner of aetiological myths are invented and some

offended Olympian is introduced.

The case of the supposed ‘human sacrifice’ of Athamas is instructive,

both as to its original content and as to the shifting sentiments with

which it was regarded. When Xerxes came to Alos in Achaia his guides,

Herodotus[279] tells us, anxious to give him all possible information as

to local curiosities, told him the tradition about the sanctuary of Zeus

Laphystios: ‘The eldest of the race of Athamas is forbidden to enter the

Prytaneion which is called by the Achaians the _Leïton_. If he enters

he can only go out to be sacrificed.’ It was further told how some,

fearing this fate, had fled the country, and coming back and entering

the Prytaneion were decked with fillets and led out in procession to

be sacrificed (ὡς θύεταί τε ἐξηγέοντο στέμμασι πᾶς πυκασθεὶς καὶ ὡς

σὺν πομπῇ ἐξαχθείς). Here there is obvious confusion, as the man who

left the country to avoid death would never have been so foolish as,

immediately on his return, to enter the forbidden place. The point is

clear: great stress is laid on the leading forth in procession—the

descendant of the royal race was a scape-goat. Herodotus makes this

quite clear. Athamas was sacrificed because the Achaeans _were making

a purification of the land_ (καθαρμὸν τῆς χώρης ποιευμένων Ἀχαιῶν).

Herodotus gives as the cause of this primitive and perfectly intelligible

custom various conflicting reasons which well reflect the various stages

of opinion through which the thinking Greek passed. We have first the

real reason—Athamas as a scape-goat. Then the public conscience is

uneasy, and we have a legend that the ‘sacrifice’ is interrupted at the

moment of consummation either by Herakles (according to Sophocles in the

lost _Athamas_) or by Kytissoros. It is wrong to sacrifice; hence the

sacrifice is interrupted, but it is wrong to interrupt sacrifice, so

the descendants of Kytissoros are punished. Then, finally, it is felt

that the sacrifice must go on, but it is a dreadful thing, an ἄγος, so

a chance of escape is given to the victim. Finally in the same complex

legend we have the substitution of a ram for the human victim Phrixos.

Sometimes incidentally we learn that other peoples adopted the device

which may have satisfied the Athenians, i.e. needing a pharmakos they

utilized a man already condemned by the state. Thus in the long list

of ‘human sacrifices’ drawn up by Porphyry[280] in his indictment of

human ignorance and fear he mentions that on the 6th day of the month

Metageitnion a man was sacrificed to Kronos, a custom, he says, which

was maintained for a long time unchanged. _A man who had been publicly

condemned to death_ was kept till the time of the festival of Kronia.

When the festival came they brought him outside the gates before the

image (ἕδους) of Aristobule, gave him wine to drink and slew him. The

victim is already doomed, and it would seem intoxicated before he is

sacrificed.

In noting the substitution of animal for human sacrifice, one curious

point remains to be observed. The step seems to us momentous because to

us human life is sacrosanct. But to the primitive mind the gulf between

animal and human is not so wide. The larger animals, and certain animals

which for various reasons were specially venerated, were in early days

also regarded as sacrosanct, and to slay them was murder, to be atoned

for by purification.

This notion comes out very clearly in the ritual of the Murder of the Ox,

the _Bouphonia_[281], or, as it was sometimes called, the Dipolia[282].

The Bouphonia by the time of Aristophanes[283] was a symbol of what was

archaic and obsolete. After the Just Logos in the _Clouds_ has described

the austere old educational _régime_ of ancient Athens, the Unjust Logos

remarks:

‘Bless me, that’s quite the ancient lot Dipolia-like, chock-full

Of crickets and Bouphonia too.’

And the scholiast comments, ‘Dipolia, a festival at Athens, in which

they sacrifice to Zeus Polieus, on the 14th day of Skirophorion. It is

a mimetic representation of what happened about the cakes (πέλανοι) and

the cows[284].’ What happened was this: ‘Barley mixed with wheat, or

cakes made of them, was laid upon the bronze altar of Zeus Polieus, on

the Acropolis. Oxen were driven round the altar, and the ox which went

up to the altar and ate the offering on it was sacrificed. The axe and

knife with which the beast was slain had been previously wetted with

water, brought by maidens called “water-carriers.” The weapons were then

sharpened and handed to the butchers, one of whom felled the ox with

the axe and another cut its throat with the knife. As soon as he had

felled the ox, the former threw the axe from him and fled, and the man

who had cut the beast’s throat apparently imitated his example. Meantime

the ox was skinned and all present partook of its flesh. Then the hide

was stuffed with straw and sewed up, and next the stuffed animal was set

on its feet and yoked to a plough as if it were ploughing. A trial then

took place in an ancient law court, presided over by the king (as he

was called), to determine who had murdered the ox. The maidens who had

brought the water accused the men who had sharpened the axe and knife,

the men who had sharpened the axe and knife blamed the men who had handed

these implements to the butchers, the men who had handed the implements

to the butchers blamed the butchers and the butchers blamed the axe and

knife, which were accordingly found guilty and condemned and cast into

the sea.’

The remarks of the Unjust Logos are amply justified. That a mummery so

absurd, with all its leisurely House-that-Jack-built hocus-pocus, should

be regularly carried on in the centre of civilized Athens was enough to

make the most careless and the most conventional reflect on the nature

and strength of religious conservatism. But the rite was once of real and

solemn import, and, taken as such, the heart of a terror-stricken service

of Aversion. The ox had to be killed, man imperatively demanded his feast

of flesh-meat, but it was a dreadful ἄγος, an abomination, to kill it, as

bad as, perhaps worse than killing a man, and the ghost of the ox and the

spirits of vengeance generally must at all costs be tricked or appeased.

So great is the terror that no one device is enough. You pretend that the

ox is not really dead, or at least that he has come to life: if that is

not enough you pretend that he was himself an offender: he ate the sacred

cakes, not by compulsion, but of his own free, wicked will. Last you

pretend that you did not do it yourself, it was some one else. No, not

some one else, but some_thing_ else. Finally that thing is got rid of;

the ἄγος, the pollution, is thrown into the sea.

The important point for the moment is that the ox, though no surrogate

for human sacrifice, is as good as human, is a man. His murdered ghost,

or at least the pollution of his murder, cries for placation and

purification. It is satisfactory to note that if you had to be purified

yourself for murdering an ox, an ox, even a bronze ox, had to be

purified for murdering you. Pausanias[285] was told the following story

about a bronze ox, dedicated at Olympia by the Corcyreans. A little boy

was sitting playing under the ox, and suddenly he lifted up his head

and broke it against the bronze, and a few days after he died of the

wounds. The Eleans consulted as to whether they should remove the ox out

of the Altis, as being guilty of blood, but the Delphic oracle, always

conservative in the matter of valuable property, ordained ‘that they were

to leave it and perform the same ceremonies as were customary among the

Greeks in the case of involuntary homicide.’

To return to the Bouphonia, the confused notion that a thing must be

done, and yet that its doing involves an ἄγος, a pollution, comes out

in all the rituals known as Flight-ceremonies. The gist of them is

very clear in the account given by Diodorus[286] of the ceremonies

of embalming among the Egyptians. He tells us ‘the man called

He-who-slits-asunder (παρασχίστης) takes an Aethiopian stone, and, making

a slit in the prescribed way, instantly makes off with a run, and they

pursue him and pelt him with stones, and heap curses on him, _as though

transferring the pollution of the thing on to him_.’

The _Flight-Ceremony_ recorded by Plutarch[287] is specially instructive,

and must be noted in detail, the more so as it, like the Bouphonia,

is connected with rites of the threshing-floor. In his 12th _Greek

Question_, Plutarch says that among the three great festivals celebrated

every eighth year at Delphi was one called _Stepterion_[288], and in

another discourse (_De defect. orac._ XIV.) he describes the rite

practised, though he mixes it up with so much aetiological mythology that

it is not very easy to disentangle the actual facts. This much is clear;

every eighth year a hut (καλιάς) was set up about the threshing-floor

at Delphi. This hut, Plutarch says, bore more resemblance to a kingly

palace than to a snake’s lair; we may therefore safely infer that

it held a snake. A boy with both his parents alive was led up by a

certain prescribed way[289] with lighted torches; fire was set to the

hut, a table overturned, and the celebrants took flight without looking

back through the gates of the precinct; afterwards the boy went off

to Tempe, fasted, dined, and was brought back crowned with laurel in

solemn procession. Plutarch never says that the boy killed the snake,

but as the ceremony was supposed to be a mimetic representation of the

slaying of the Python and the banishment of Apollo, this may be inferred.

Plutarch is of course _more suo_ shocked at the idea that Apollo could

need purification, and at a loss to account decently for the curious

ceremonial, but he makes one acute remark: ‘finally the wanderings and

the servitude of the boy and the purifications at Tempe raise a suspicion

of some great pollution and deed of daring’ (μεγάλου τινὸς ἄγους καὶ

τολμήματος ὑποψίαν ἔχουσι). This hits the mark: a sacred snake has been

slain; the slayer has incurred an ἄγος, from which he must be purified.

The slaying is probably formal and sacrificial, for the boy is led to

the hut with all due solemnity, and has been carefully selected for the

purpose; but the τόλμημα, the outrage, the deed of daring, is an ἄγος, so

he must take flight after its accomplishment. Sacred snake, or sacred ox,

or human victim, the procedure is the same.

* * * * *

To resume. The outcome of our examination of the ceremony of the

pharmakos is briefly this: the gist of the pharmakos rite is physical

purification, καθαρμός, and this notion, sometimes alone, sometimes

combined with the notion of the placation of a ghost, is the idea

underlying among the Greeks the notion we are apt to call Human

Sacrifice. To this must be added the fact that in a primitive state of

civilization the line between human and animal ‘sacrifice’ is not sharply

drawn.

KALLYNTERIA, PLYNTERIA.

Plutarch[290] tells us that it was on a day of ill-omen that Alcibiades

returned to Athens: ‘On the day of his return they were solemnizing

the Plynteria to the Goddess. For on the 6th day of the third part of

Thargelia the Praxiergidae solemnize the rites that may not be disclosed:

they take off the adornments of the image, and cover it up. Hence the

Athenians account this day as most unlucky of all, and do no work on it.

And it seemed as though the Goddess were receiving him in no friendly or

kindly fashion, as she hid her face from him and seemed to banish him

from her presence.’ At the Plynteria, as at other ‘unlucky’ festivals,

the sanctuaries, Pollux[291] tells us, were roped round. The object was

in part to keep out the common herd, perhaps primarily to ‘avert’ evil

influences.

Photius[292] discusses the two festivals, the Kallynteria and the

Plynteria, together, placing the Kallynteria first; they have indeed

practically always been bracketed in the minds of commentators as

substantially identical in content. The Plynteria, it is usually stated,

was the washing festival. The image of Pallas was taken in solemn

procession down to the sea, stripped of its gear, veiled from the eyes

of the vulgar, washed in sea-water, and brought back. At the Kallynteria

it was re-dressed, re-decked, ‘beautified.’ This simple explanation of

the sequence of rites presents only one trifling difficulty. Photius

expressly tells us that the Kallynteria preceded the Plynteria; the

Kallynteria took place on the 19th of the month Thargelion, and the

Plynteria on the second day of the 3rd decade, i.e. on the 22nd[293]. It

would be strange if the image was first ‘beautified’ and then washed.

The explanation of the seeming incongruity is of course a simple one.

The word καλλύνειν means not only ‘to beautify’ but to brush out, to

sweep, ‘to give a shine to.’ The Greek for broom is καλλύντριον, also

καλ<λ>υντρόν in Hesych. s.v. σαρόν; and καλλύσματα, if we may trust

Hesychius[294], means sweepings (σάρματα). In a word the Kallynteria is a

festival of what the Romans call _everruncatio_, the festival of ‘those

who do the sweeping.’ They swept out the sacred places, made them as we

say now-a-days ‘beautifully clean,’ and then, having done their sweeping

first like good housewives, when the house was ready they washed the

image and brought it back in new shining splendour.

It is evident that when we hear of sweeping out sanctuaries and washing

an image we have come to a religious stage in which there is a definite

god worshipped, and that god is conceived of as anthropomorphic. There

may have been rites of the Thargelia, including the Pharmakos, i.e. the

ceremony of the expulsion of evil, before there were any Kallynteria or

Plynteria. Be this as it may, the Kallynteria and Plynteria throw light

on the purport of the pharmakos, and emphasize the fact that all the

cleansing, whether of image, sanctuary or people, was but a preliminary

to the bringing in of the first-fruits.

This connection between first-fruits and purification explains a

feature in the Plynteria that would otherwise remain obscure. In the

procession that took place at the Plynteria, probably, though not quite

certainly, the procession in which the image was taken down to the sea,

Hesychius[295] tells us they carried a cake or mass of dried figs, which

went by the name of _Hegeteria_. Hesychius is at no loss to account for

the strange name. Figs were the first cultivated fruit of which man

partook; the cake of figs is called Hegeteria because it ‘Led the Way’ in

the matter of diet!

We may perhaps be allowed to suggest a possible alternative. May not

the fig-cake be connected with the root of ἅγος rather than with ἄγω?

Figs were used in purification. Is not the Hegeteria the fig-cake

of purification? A necklace of figs was hung about the neck of the

pharmakos, and the statues of the gods had sometimes a like adornment.

Primitive man is apt to get a little confused as to cause and effect. He

performs a rite of purification to protect his first-fruits; he comes

to think the offering of those first-fruits is in itself a rite of

purification.

As usual when we come to consider the analogous Roman festival the

meaning of the rites practised is more baldly obvious. Plutarch[296] in

his _Roman Questions_ asks, ‘Why did not the Romans marry in the month

of May?’ and for once he hits upon the right answer: ‘May it be that

in this month they perform the greatest of purificatory ceremonies?’

What these purificatory ceremonies, these καθαρμοί, were, he tells us

explicitly: ‘for at the present day they throw images from the bridge

into the river, but in old times they used to throw human beings.’ We

must here separate sharply the fact stated by Plutarch, the actual ritual

that took place in his own day, from his conjecture about the past. We

_know_ images, puppets, were thrown from the bridge, we may conjecture,

as Plutarch did, that they were the surrogates of human sacrifice, but

we must carefully bear in mind that this is pure conjecture. The _fact_

Plutarch certifies in another of his _Questions_[297], and adds the name

of the puppets. ‘What,’ he asks, ‘is the reason that in the month of May

they throw images of human beings from the wooden bridge into the river,

calling them Argeioi?’ Ovid[298] tells us a little more: ‘Then (i.e. on

May 15th) the Vestal is wont to throw from the oaken bridge the images of

men of old times, made of rushes.’ He adds that it was in obedience to an

oracle: ‘Ye nations, throw two bodies in sacrifice to the Ancient One who

bears the sickle, bodies to be received by the Tuscan streams.’ Ovid and

Plutarch clearly both held that the _Argei_ of rushes were surrogates. It

seems possible, on the other hand, that the myth of human sacrifice may

have arisen from a merely dramatic apotropaic rite. The one certain thing

is that the _Argei_[299] _were_ pharmakoi, were καθάρματα.

That the time of the Argei, and indeed the whole month till the Ides of

June, was unlucky is abundantly proved by the conduct of the Flaminica.

Plutarch[300] goes on to say that the Flaminica is wont to be gloomy

(σκυθρωπάζειν) and not to wash nor to adorn herself. Ovid[301] adds

details of this mourning; he tells us that he consulted the Flaminica

Dialis as to the marriage of his daughter, and learnt that till the Ides

of June there was no luck for brides and their husbands, ‘for thus did

the holy bride of the Dialis speak to me: “Until tranquil Tiber has borne

to the sea in his tawny waters the cleansings from Ilian Vesta it is not

lawful for me to comb my shorn locks with the boxwood, nor to pare my

nails with iron, nor to touch my husband though he be priest of Jove....

Be not in haste. Better will thy daughter marry when Vesta of the Fire

shines with a cleansed hearth.”’

The Roman Vestalia fell a little later than the Kallynteria and

Plynteria, but their content is the same. I borrow the account of the

ritual of the Vestalia from Mr Warde-Fowler[302]. On June 7 the _penus_,

or innermost sanctuary of Vesta, which was shut all the rest of the year

and to which no man but the pontifex maximus had at any time right of

entry, was thrown open to all matrons. During the seven following days

they crowded to it barefoot. The object of this was perhaps to pray for

a blessing on the household. On plain and old-fashioned ware offerings

of food were carried into the temple: the Vestals themselves offered

the sacred cakes made of the first ears of corn, plucked as we saw in

the early days of May; bakers and millers kept holiday, all mills were

garlanded and donkeys decorated with wreaths and cakes. On June 15 the

temple (_aedes_) was swept and the refuse taken away and either thrown

into the Tiber or deposited in some particular spot. Then the _dies

nefasti_ came to an end, and the 15th itself became _fastus_ as soon

as the last act of cleansing had been duly performed. _Quando stercus

delatum fas_, ‘When the rubbish has been carried away.’

Dr Frazer[303] has collected many savage parallels to the rites of the

Vestalia. The most notable is the _busk_ or festival of first-fruits

among the Creek Indians of North America, held in July or August when

the corn is ripe. Before the celebration of the _busk_ no Indian would

eat or even touch the new corn. In preparation for its rites they got

new clothes and household utensils: old clothes, rubbish of all kinds,

and the old corn that remained were carefully burnt. The village fires

were put out and the ashes swept away, and in particular the hearth and

altar of the temple were dug up and cleaned out. The public square was

carefully swept out ‘for fear of polluting the first-fruit offerings.’

Before the sacramental eating of the new corn a strict fast was observed,

and (for the precautions taken by the savage ritualist are searching and

logical) a strong purgative was swallowed. With the new corn was solemnly

dispensed the freshly-kindled fire, and the priest publicly announced

that the new divine fire had purged away the sins of the past year. Such

powerful ‘medicine’ was the new corn that some of the men rubbed their

new corn between their hands, then on their faces and breasts.

To resume. In the Anthesteria we have seen that sacrifice was in intent

purification, and that this purification took the form of the placation

of ghosts. In the Thargelia, purification is again the end and aim of

sacrifice, but this purification, though it involves the taking of a

human life, is of the nature of a merely magical cleansing to prepare for

the incoming first-fruits.

We pass to the consideration of the autumn festival of sowing, the

_Thesmophoria_.