Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/250

 2 2 2 Collectanea,

votirtnak was ourviak. He was, of course, wrong. He was an authority on the Semitic language, but evidently knew little of Turkish. It is impossible to speak of it as an old form when all existing Turkish documents, being in the Arabian character, must necessarily be subsequent to the eighth century, when the Turks of the Khanates were endowed simultaneously with Islam and the Persi-Arabic alphabet. Nor do I understand how he could have thought oiirmak could have been degraded into the popular form vourmak. According to all philologic knowledge, any degradation would have been in the opposite direction. It may be noted that as there is no Arabic character to represent the V sound the Turks use the ivau for this purpose. There are, in fact, hundreds of words in Turkish beginning with a v sound and thousands in which the v is incorporated. They are all represented by the Arabic luati.

In this paper I have not troubled to speak about the actual meaning of the Pharmakos ceremony. Professor Murray seems wedded to the belief that it was in every case a j?ii?nefna. On the other hand, Sir James Frazer is equally certain that even in civilized Greece the Thargelian rites took darker forms than the mere expulsion of this quasi-religious outcast when he was beaten with agnus castus or squills and expelled from the city. Certainly, the derivation which I offer seems on the surface to support Professor Murray's contention But the general body of anthro- pological lore on this subject points steadily to darker customs which may have been resurrected in classical Greece during the times of abnormal wrath on the part of the gods or in times of scarcity, if the Pharmakos represented, as he often must have done, the spirit of winter.

It would, of course, be interesting to get some early references to the use of faj-maciou, but it is very difficult to trace any Oriental expression before mediaeval times. One has to remember that using the pen was, in its way, a solemn rite. Up to the tenth century every sheet of writing was headed among the Mahom- medans, " In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate and Most Merciful " ; and is still in all literary work. An Orientalist friend of mine to whom I have referred asks, " How, with such a headline, would a pious scribe dare to refer to a blood-drinking