Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/247

Rh it came to be in both nobody knows. We certainly cannot connect the Turkic with the Aryan group, and yet the root mak is very widely spread. Thus vourmak means literally "to make blows" or "to whip." It is odd that it is seldom employed in any Turkic tongue to mean beating with a stick or whip. In that case the root dyon is more commonly used. When we remember that in the Greek Ritual the Pharmakos was beaten with agnus castus, with squills and other flowers, that must have some significance. We may note that vourmak, "to beat," may just as often have the termination mek when the Turkish laws of euphony demand it. One of the Turkish substantival gerunds of vourmak is vourour or vûrûr, which seems to be, curiously enough, the exact philological equivalent of the Latin verber, a thong or whip, which is apparently an oddly reduplicated form. From this it seems the real meaning of Pharmakos is just a beaten or whipped person, and at last, by a later process of semantics, one who has been driven out with blows. Whether one is justified in bringing in Latin in this case is a matter of question, but it is certainly interesting to note that the reduplicated root in verber and verberare and in verbero (one who deserves a flogging) has in some ways a look as if it did not belong to the Latin tongue, but was an importation as in the Greek. It is certainly suggestive of the root vour or phar. I note in the old Etymologicon of Voss he says as regards verbera, "sed cum Salmasio dicamus verber esse ab aeolico pro ." Of course, no stress can he laid on this or on Voss. An interesting analogy is also to be found in the Greek, a scoundrel.

According to this view,, "I give drugs or poisons," is, of course, from the same roots. Probably in the earliest times it implied an early medicine man, a Shaman, something equivalent to those found with all their ritual among the Africans and Central Asians. Thus means, as it would with early races, "to drive out evil spirits with a whip, or with blows." Such a connotation is, on my theory, earlier than "to give poisons," but one knows that the ritual of the savage cure largely consists in driving out the spirit of disease or witchcraft by noisy incantations or by actual physical ill-usage of the patient. If I am right, it is curious to consider that our word "pharmacist" has for its