Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/373

 the custom of human sacrifice as cause and effect first entered men's minds; but that in the historical age that correlation was acknowledged seems to me highly probable. Such a view would certainly have militated against the substitution of animal for human victims; for only a man would have been felt to be capable of understanding the message and of delivering it to the god to whom he was sent. This perhaps is the reason why the use of a surrogate animal—though early introduced, as one version of the story of Iphigenia proves—never met with universal acceptance, and why also at the present day there remains a vague but real feeling that for the proper laying of foundations a human victim is preferable to beast or bird.

To single out particular instances of ancient sacrifice in which this motive may have operated is, owing to the general absence of data concerning the ritual, well-nigh impossible. The sacrifice to Lycaean Zeus was performed upon an altar before which, according to Pausanias, there stood two columns and upon them two gilded eagles; and we may surmise that as the eagles represented to his mind the messengers sent by Zeus to men, so did the human victim represent the messenger of men to Zeus. But this can be only a conjecture, for Pausanias' silence admits of no more.

Of the ceremony connected with the pharmakos, or human scape-goat, at Athens and elsewhere somewhat more is known. Certain persons ungainly in appearance and debased in character were maintained at the public expense, in order that, if any calamity such as a pestilence should befall the city, they might be sacrificed to purify the city from pollution. These persons were called [Greek: pharmakoi], 'scape-goats,' or [Greek: katharmata], 'purifications .' 'If calamity overtook a city through divine wrath, whether it were famine or pestilence or any other bane,' a pharmakos was led out to an appointed place for sacrifice. Cheese, barley-cake, and dried figs were given to him. He was smitten seven times on the privy parts with squills and wild figs and other wild plants; and finally he was burnt with fire upon fuel collected from wild trees, and the ashes were scattered to the winds and the sea. At Athens, it appears, this rite was performed, not under the stress of oc-*.]