Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/377

 the appearance and the character of those who were selected as pharmakoi which made of the word a term of vulgar abuse such as we find it to be in Aristophanes ; for the scattering of the victim's ashes to the winds and waves must not be interpreted as an act denoting any abhorrence of the dead man. Its significance is rather this. Religious motives had involved an act of bloodshed, and the people who had performed it as a religious duty were, like Orestes, none the less guilty of blood. In any case of blood-guilt it was held prudent for the guilty party to take precautions against his victim's vengeance; and one means to this end was, as we shall see later, to burn the body and scatter its ashes. In the modern story from Santorini there is a precaution mentioned which has precisely the same object; the victim's hands, as well as his head, were cut off. This, as I shall show later, is a survival of the old [Greek: maschalismos] or mutilation of murdered men, by which they were rendered innocuous, if they should return from the grave, and incapable of vengeance upon their murderers. There is then, I repeat, nothing in the ritual itself which suggests any contempt or hatred of the victim, as there assuredly would have been if from the first he had been the incarnation of the city's defilement.

Possibly then the pharmakos was originally a messenger from men to gods, sent in any time of great calamity and peril; possibly too this significance of the rite had not in Herodotus' time been wholly supplanted by the lower view to which Lysias gave utterance. Lysias was addressing a jury and abusing an opponent; a vulgar and base presentment of the pharmakos suited the occasion. But sober and reflective men may still have read in the ritual its early meaning and have recognised in the pharmakos, for all his sorry appearance, the purified representative of a people sent by them to lay their prayers before some god.

This, I am aware, is a suggestion and no more. To prove the existence of this motive underlying any given case of human sacrifice in ancient times is, owing to the meagre character of the data, impossible. But since at any rate the conception of the dead as messengers was known to the ancients—for that much, I think, I have proved—the suggestion deserves consideration. If it be right, it shows that even the most ugly and repulsive