Pharmakós

With pharmakós ( φαρμακός ) a human sacrifice was designated in ancient Greece , which was intended for purification rituals .

Source location and term

The term pharmakós for human sacrifice , which has uniform characteristics throughout the Greek region, has already been documented by some authors from the 6th to 4th centuries, including Hipponax from Colophon, Aristophanes , Lysias and Demosthenes . Her utterances give only indirect information about the ritual, but her use of the expression and allusions to certain actions seem to require a lively and commonly understood terminology. Several later authors such as Callimachos , Strabo, and Plutarch provide direct descriptions of the ritual that coincide with those in Latin sources - Virgil ( Aeneid III.57), Ovid and Petronius . Through later grammarians, lexicographers and scholiasts ( Servius , Suda -Lexikon, Johannes Tzetzes and others) some legends of origin are also known.

It is unclear whether the word phármakon is the gender-neutral form of pharmakós . The term phármakon was used by the Greeks to mean both " poison " and " remedy ". Some later sources such as B. the Suda and Herodian also use the word katharma ( κάθαρμα , "waste", "[useless] remains of the sacrifice") with the same meaning as pharmakós . A common synonym for pharmakós was perípsema ( περίψημα , "rubbish", "dirt").

In the Greek translation of the Old Testament of the Septuagint and the New Testament , the word pharmakós (sometimes phármakos ) is used to mean “magician”.

Occurrence of the ritual

This ritual is reported for many Greek cities and colonies in the Mediterranean. It was carried out to purify the city when epidemics, famine, war or other crises and dangers were feared or had occurred. In some cities, like Abdera , the sacrifice was made on a specific day each year. A connection with the Thargelion celebrations has been suggested for Athens and other cities in Ionia . It is generally assumed, however, that the offering of the pharmakós - at least in its original form - was not part of the official religious calendar.

In all cities a man (some sources speak for Athens of two men or of a man and a woman) as pharmakós was chosen from the poor, slaves or strangers or - as in Abdera - bought. One of the prisoners sentenced to death was chosen to jump from the cliffs of Leukas . The pharmakós was either chosen because of its particular ugliness - as in Kolophon - or at random and was fed abundantly at the city's expense - in Marseille for a year. For the sacrifice, the man was hung with plant ornaments, led or chased through the city in procession or in pursuit, whipped with rods, insulted with insults and cursed out of the city by the townspeople. In Abdera, Athens and other Ionian cities, the man was then pelted with stones and chased away or stoned . In Marseille and Leukas he was plunged from a cliff into the sea. The victim was probably burned in Colophon and the ashes scattered into the sea.

Another pharmakós ritual was probably the annual execution of a convicted person in Rhodes . Porphyrios reports that during the Kronia celebrations the condemned man was led out of the city through a certain gate and that he was given wine to drink before he was killed. According to Porphyrios, this execution was originally the annual human sacrifice for Kronos .

All sources report the participation of all city dwellers in the sacrifice, even where - as in Athens - this seems unlikely.

Some authors emphasize that many sources speak of a broadcast rather than a killing of the pharmakós and that the ritual did not involve killing a human. Others, on the other hand, see the main characteristic of the pharmakós ritual in the unanimous exercise of violence on the part of the urban community. They also point out that the reports often deliberately obscure the killing. In any case, it can be assumed that chasing an already seriously injured person into uninhabited areas will result in death, especially since his acceptance by other communities appears extremely unlikely.

The offering of sacrifices called pharmakós was practiced in a ritualized form until the last centuries before Christianity.

Anthropological research approaches

Louis-Jules Gernet has pointed out that characteristics of the pharmakós can also be found in some mythological persons: For example, with Dolon , who is described in the Iliad as "dirty" and quick to walk and by Euripides as "poor devil", and with Thersites . Based on an attribute - estolisménos , armed, armed, adorned - with which the pharmakós is described in the Suda lexicon , Gernet has also put forward the assumption that the pharmakós could have been a mask. However, he himself points out that there are no further indications for this assumption.

Henri Jeanmaire has pointed out that the documents in which the sacrificial cult practices of pharmakós and human sacrifice in general are directly mentioned come mainly from early Christian authors who wanted to condemn the pagan forms of cult. However, these testimonies refer to local historical works by Greek philosophers and their reliability cannot be questioned.

In his analysis of King Oedipus, Jean-Pierre Vernant recognized the motif of the king's sacrifice in the figure of the pharmakós , as also occurs in the sacrifice of the fool king. The fool king has all the characteristics of the king - only the other way around: he embodies the crisis time of the carnival, in which all social values ​​appear upside down, and the cathartic restoration of order through his solemn killing.

The Cambridge Ritualists have linked the pharmakós ritual with the death and regeneration motif of the change of the seasons.

Walter Burkert considers the explanatory attempts based on the model of the Cambridge Ritualists to be speculations that obscure the "simple and terrifying character of this drama". He emphasizes the collective character of sacrifice and connects it with other reports on mythical, non-ritualized or even political forms of human sacrifice or expulsion, which are found in great abundance in ancient sources.

René Girard extensively addressed the pharmakós rituals in setting up the framework for his theory of the scapegoat .

literature

• Walter Burkert : Greek religion of the classical and archaic epoch ( The Religions of Mankind - Vol. 15), W. Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 1977
• Louis-Jules Gernet , J.-P. Vernant (ed.): Anthropologie de la Grèce Antique , Flammarion, Paris 1999
• René Girard : The Holy and Violence , Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 1994
• René Girard: The End of Violence Herder, Freiburg 1983
• René Girard: expulsion and persecution , Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 1992
• Irene Huber: Rituals to ward off epidemics and damage in the Near East and Greece , Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, 2005
• Dennis D. Hughes: Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece , Routledge, London - New York 1991
• Henri Jeanmaire : Dionysus. Histoire du culte de Bacchus , Payot, Paris 1951
• Jean-Pierre Vernant : Ambiguïté et renversement; Sur la structure énigmatique d'OEdipe-Roi , in: J.-P. Vernant / P. Vidal Naquet, Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne , Éd. La Découverte, Paris 2004.

Remarks

1. ↑ Further sources and more detailed information are available from Burkert pp. 139–141, Huber pp. 115–126 and Hughes pp. 139–164.
2. ↑ Burkert p. 140: The call: "Become our rubbish ( perípsema )" accompanied the sacrifice to Poseidon of a young man on the cliffs of Leukas.
3. ^ De abstinentia 2.53, after Hughes, p. 123.
4. ^ Hughes pp. 139ff and 189. Hughes refers to contradictions in the older texts and to a lack of sources in the later lexicographers and scholiasts. He is of the opinion that the historicity of any form of human sacrifice cannot be positively proven for ancient Greece. Huber (2005) comes to the same conclusion.
5. ↑ So Burkert p. 141.
6. ^ For example, Strabo reports that an attempt was made to refresh the victim who had fallen down in Leukas; see Burkert p. 141.
7. ↑ Burkert, p. 140.
8. ↑ For Burkert as well as for J.-P. Vernant is the institution of ostrakismòs , the “ broken court ”, the democratic rationalization of a tradition similar to human sacrifice.
9. ^ The mimetic theory of René Girard .