Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/248

220 early meaning exactly that of the ancient medicine man or exorcist.

There is another interesting point connected with Pharmakos which I have not seen mentioned. All over the East the word farmaçion is used with the meaning of an outlaw, and quite commonly with that of a cunning blood-drinking enemy of religion, a man who is a satanist or devil-worshipper. Of course, by a sort of meiosis it seems sometimes to mean a mere scoundrel, just in the same way as the almost equally interesting word epikouros is used in Northern Africa, where this verbal descendant of the name of the great philosopher has come to mean an enemy of religion, a Christian, and an Atheist or a scoundrel. This is somewhat on a par with the use of the word "Atheist" for the Christians at the time of Julian the Apostate. There does not seem to me any doubt whatever that farmaçion is actually the same word as Pharmakos. It is used in Turkey and Asia Minor and as far east as Afghanistan. It may be that the ancestors of the Greeks borrowed it originally from some Turkic race and returned it again to the Mahommedans with a fuller connotation.

Oddly enough, the word farmaçion has, since its readoption by Eastern races, taken on a new meaning. It now often means "a freemason," one who is looked upon by the orthodox as an outcast and a scoundrel, a sufi and one highly irreligious. Not being a freemason myself, I know nothing of its ritual, but, so far as I can learn, members of this society, or those who are really instructed in its ritual and doctrines, regard their common name as one very uncertain in its etymology. Its present or common meaning is undoubtedly false philology. Our word freemason is, of course, a translation from the French franc-maçon, but to my mind "franc" is nothing but a metathesized form of the vour of vourmak and the phar of Pharmakos with an added euphonic nasal. Thus, it is only by a later verbal accident that the "maçon" was turned into "mason," and connected with masonry and building. Probably, then, it is actually the same root as the mak of vourmak or farmaçion. I do not see much chance of connecting the original word mason, or Latin maceria, with the root mak, although there may possibly be some connection. The early societies and secret orders of the East (the East, as