Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/326

 COLLECTANEA.

The Pharmakos. Vol. xxvii. p. 218.

Through the kindness of the Editor I have seen an advance-proof of Mr. Morley Roberts' note on the Pharmakos. Of the sound- ness of the new Turkish derivation he offers I am quite incompetent to judge, but from the point of view of semantics I welcome it with delight, for it provides me with just the meaning which I now see to be imperative and above all things primary.

When in my Prolegomena (pp. 95-114) I discussed the phar- makos ceremony I saw in it, as most other commentators have seen, a vehicle of magical expulsion, but, accepting the current etymology^ which connects pharmakos with Lett, burf, Lith. burii, "magic," I put the magic first and the expulsion second. I have since come to see that we must here, as so often, invert the order, the social outlaw becomes the magical vehicle, and this inversion, this rising of the religious or rather magical out of the social is made a prac- tical certainty by Mr. Morley Roberts' new derivation — if sound.

The new light came to me from Glotz's La solidarite de lafajnilie, a book too little known among classical scholars. Glotz shows that the essence of dkfxi^ as contrasted with Sik?; is law, or rather in primitive day custom witliin the clanorya-os as contrasted with law outside, or relations with other clans. Primitive ^e/xts knows but two crimes: murder of a clansman and adultery. For both the punishment is one, not death, for that is to shed a clansman's sacred blood, but expulsiofi. The whole clan assembles, the criminal is stripped naked, pursued with furious cries of iraU, fSdXXe., he is

^See Prellwitz, Etyin. Wdrterbiich, s.v. (pdp/jLaKov, and Osthoff, " Allerhand Zauber-etymologisch beleuchtet," in Bezzenberger's Beitrage^ xxiv. p. 109.