Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/246

 COLLECTANEA.

The Pharmakos.

Years ago I began to wonder why the Greek scapegoat or outcast of the festival of the ThargeUa was called a Pharmakos. I could not understand what connection there could be between the Greek words cf)a.p[xaKov and (jiapixaKevw and the scapegoat that many have called the Human Medicine. However, the matter passed out of my mind till I got a copy of the second edition of T/ie Rise of the Greek Epic, and there Professor Murray's remarks in Appendix A brought the matter back to me. Professor Murray seemed to believe it was probably a foreign word, and, noting the long A in the Ionic, suggested that in Attic the A was short from analogy with ^dpfxaKov. This seemed to imply that he regarded Pharjtiakos, the scapegoat, as differently derived from <j)dpixaKov, the drug. Nevertheless, on page 34 of the Greek Epic he speaks of the Pharmakos as Human Medicine, which to my mind is a very late interpretation of the word. It certainly is a difficult problem to connect Pharmakos with a word for a drug or a man who used a drug, a pharmacist or physician. But following the clue which suggested a foreign origin, I sought for some other word in the same area which might suggest where it came from. I now believe that the original word and the two original roots which make it up came from the Turkic family of speech. For there is to be found in the Turkic tongues what looks like the very word in various forms. In Turkish itself it is spelt voiirmak, which means " to beat." In this word voiir is the root, which means " beat," and mak or, rather, mag, is the original root, both in the Turkic and Aryan families, which means " make." That mak is common to these two groups seems tolerably certain, though how