Chapter III: Harvest Festivals (2)

That in primitive pharmakos-ceremonies the human pharmakos was actually put to death scarcely admits of doubt: that Istros believed this took place at the ceremony of the Thargelia in honour of Apollo may be _inferred_ from his aetiology. There still remains in the minds of some a feeling that the Athens of the fifth century was too civilized a place to have suffered the actual death of human victims, and that periodically, as part of a public state ritual. This misgiving arises mainly, as was indicated at the outset, from a misunderstanding of the gist of the ceremony. Tzetzes, after the manner of his day, calls it a θυσία, a burnt sacrifice; but it was not really a sacrifice in our modern sense at all, though, as will later be shown, it was one of the diverse notions that went to the making of the ancient idea of sacrifice.

The pharmakos was not a sacrifice in the sense of an offering _made to appease an angry god_. It came to be associated with Apollo when he took over the Thargelia, but primarily it was not intended to please or to appease any spirit or god. It was, as ancient authors repeatedly insist, a καθαρμός, a purification. The essence of the ritual was not atonement, for there was no one to atone, but riddance, the artificial making of an ἄγος, a pollution, to get rid of all pollution. The notion, so foreign to our scientific habit of thought, so familiar to the ancients, was that evil of all kinds was a physical infection that could be caught and transferred; it was highly catching. Next, some logical savage saw that the notion could be utilized for artificial riddance. The Dyaks[270] sweep misfortunes out of their houses and put them into a toy-house made of bamboo; this they set adrift on a river. On the occasion of a recent outbreak of influenza in Pithuria ‘a man had a small carriage made, after a plan of his own, for a pair of scape-goats which were harnessed to it and driven to a wood at some distance where they were let loose. From that hour the disease completely ceased in the town. The goats never returned; had they done so the disease must have come back with them.’ It is needless for our purpose to accumulate instances of the countless varieties of scape-goats, carts, cocks, boats, that the ingenuity of primitive man has invented. The instance chosen shows as clearly as possible that, as the gist of the ceremony is magical riddance, it is essential that the scape-goat, whatever form he takes, _should never return_.

This necessity for utter destruction comes out very clearly in an account of the way the Egyptians treated their scape-goats. Plutarch[271] in his discourse on Isis and Osiris says, on the authority of Manetho, that in the dog-days they used to burn men alive whom they called Typhonians, and _their ashes they made away with by winnowing and scattering them_. The winnowing-fan in which the corn was tossed and by means of which the chaff was blown utterly away was to Clement of Alexandria[272] the symbol of utter ruin and destruction. In his protest against the ruinous force of convention among pagan people, he says finely: ‘let us fly from convention, it strangles men, it turns them away from truth, it leads them afar from life; convention is a noose, a place of execution, a pit, a winnowing-fan; convention is ruin.’

The pharmakos is killed then, not because his death is a vicarious sacrifice, but because he is so infected and tabooed that his life is a practical impossibility. The uneducated, among whom his lot would necessarily be cast, regard him as an infected horror, an incarnate pollution; the educated who believe no such nonsense know that the kindest thing is to put an end to a life that is worse than death. Moreover nearly every civilized state to this day offers ‘human sacrifice’ in the shape of the criminals it executes. Why not combine religious tradition with a supposed judicial necessity? Civilized Athens had its barathron; why should civilized Athens shrink from annually utilizing two vicious and already condemned criminals to ‘purify the city’?

The question of whether the pharmakos was actually put to death in civilized Athens is of course for our purpose a strictly subordinate one. It has only been discussed in detail because the answer that we return to it depends in great measure on how far we realize the primary gist of a pharmakos, i.e. the two notions of (_a_) the _physicalness_, the actuality of evil, and (_b_) the possibility of contagion and transfer.

Our whole modern conception of the scape-man is apt to be unduly influenced by the familiar instance of the Hebrew scape-goat. We remember how

‘The scape-goat stood all skin and bone
_While moral business, not his own,_
_Was bound about his head_.’

And the pathos of the proceeding haunts our minds and prevents us from realizing the actuality and the practicality of the more primitive physical taboo. It is interesting to note that even in this moralized Hebrew conception, the scape-goat was not a sacrifice proper; its sending away was _preceded by sacrifice_. The priest ‘made an atonement for the children of Israel for all their sins once a year,’ and when the sacrifice of bullock and goat and the burning of incense, and the sprinkling of blood was over, then and not till then the live goat was presented to the Lord[273]. The Hebrew scriptures emphasize the fact that the burden laid upon the goat is not merely physical evil, not pestilence or famine, but rather the burden of moral guilt. ‘And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness. And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities into a land not inhabited.’

But so close is the connection of moral and physical that even here, where the evil laid upon the scape-goat is moral only, there is evident danger of infection; the goat is sent forth into a land not inhabited and it would be manifestly undesirable that he should return. At Athens we hear of no confession of sins, it is famine and pestilence from which a terror-stricken city seeks riddance.

This physical aspect of evil is still more clearly brought out in a ceremony performed annually at Chaeronea. Plutarch[274] himself, when he was archon, had to preside over the ritual and has left us the account. A household slave was taken and ceremonially beaten with rods of agnus castus—again a plant of cathartic quality—and driven out of doors to the words, ‘Out with hunger, in with wealth and health.’ The ceremony was called the ‘expulsion of hunger,’ and Plutarch speaks of it as an ‘ancestral sacrifice.’ It was performed by each householder for his own house, and by the archon for the common hearth of the city. When Plutarch was archon he tells us the ceremony was largely attended. The name of the ‘ceremony’ is instructive, it is ἐξέλασις, riddance, expulsion, not as the pharmakos was, καθαρμός, purification; both are called θυσίαι, sacrifices, only by concession to popular usage when every religious ceremony is regarded as of the nature of burnt sacrifice. The ceremony of the pharmakos was taken on by Apollo, but in the Chaeronea ‘expulsion’ there is no pretence that any god is worshipped; the performance remains frankly magical.

At Chaeronea the slave was merely beaten and expelled. At Delphi a pharmakos ceremony of still milder form took place in which the victim was merely a puppet.

In his 12th _Greek Question_ Plutarch asks, ‘What is Charila among the Delphians?’ His answer is as follows: ‘Concerning Charila they tell a story something on this wise. The Delphians were afflicted by a famine following after a drought. They came to the gates of the king’s palace with their children and their wives to make supplication. And the king distributed grain and pulse to the noblest of them as there was not enough for all. And there came a little girl who had lost both her father and mother, and she made supplication. But he struck her with his shoe and threw the shoe into her face. Now she was poor and desolate but of noble spirit, and she went away and loosed her girdle and hanged herself. As the famine went on and pestilence was added thereto, the Pythia gave an oracle to the king that he must appease Charila, a maiden who had died by her own hand. After some difficulty they found out that this was the name of the girl who had been struck. So they performed a sacrifice which had in it some admixture of a purification, and this they still perform every nine years.’

The tale told of Charila is, of course, pure aetiology, to account for certain features in an established ritual. The expression Plutarch uses, a ‘sacrifice with admixture of purification’ (μεμιγμένην τινὰ καθαρμοῦ θυσίαν), is interesting because it shows that though by his time almost every religious ceremony was called a θυσία, his mind is haunted by the feeling that the Charila ceremony was in reality a purification, a καθαρμός; he would have been nearer the truth had he said it was a ‘purification containing in it a certain element of sacrifice.’

He then proceeds to give the actual ritual. ‘The king is seated to preside over the pulse and the grain and he distributes it to all, both citizens and strangers: there is brought in an image of Charila as a little girl, and when they all receive the corn, the king strikes the image with his shoe and the leader of the Thyiades takes the image and conducts it to a certain cavernous place, and there fastening (a rope) round the neck of the image they bury it where they buried the strangled Charila.’

The festival Charila, festival of rejoicing and grace, is like the Thargelia, a festival of first-fruits containing the ceremony of the Pharmakos, only in effigy. Charila is beaten with a shoe: leather is to this day regarded as magically expulsive, though the modern surrogate is of white satin. On a curious vase in the National Museum at Athens[275], we have a representation of a wedding procession at which a man is in the act of throwing a shoe. It is still to-day regarded as desirable that bride and bridegroom should be hit, evil influences are thereby expelled, and the shower of fertilizing rice is made the more efficacious. The effigy of Charila is buried, not burnt, possibly a more primitive form of destruction. The origin of the ceremony is dated back to the time when the king was priest, but the actual celebrants are women.

A pharmakos ceremony that is known to have taken place at Marseilles adds some further instructive details. Servius, in commenting on the words _auri sacra fames_[276] ‘accursed hunger of gold,’ notes that _sacer_ may mean accursed as well as holy, and he seems, rather vaguely, to realize that between these two meanings is the middle term ‘devoted.’ The use of the term, he says, is derived from a custom among the Gauls: ‘Whenever the inhabitants of Marseilles suffer from a pestilence, one of the poorer class offers himself to be kept at the public expense and fed on specially pure foods. After this has been done he is decorated with sacred boughs and clad in holy garments, and led about through the whole city to the accompaniment of curses, in order that upon him may fall all the ills of the whole city, and thus he is cast headlong down.’

Here we have the curious added touch that the vehicle of impurity is purified. To our modern minds pure and impure stand at two opposite poles, and if we were arraying a scape-goat we certainly should not trouble about his preliminary purification. But the ancients, as Servius dimly feels, knew of a condition that combined the two, the condition that the savage describes as ‘taboo.’ For this condition the Latins used the word ‘sacer,’ the Greeks, as has already been seen, the word ἄγος. It is in such complex primitive notions as those of _sacer_ and ἄγος, that our modern habit of clear analysis and differentiation causes us to miss the full and complex significance.

* * * * *

The leading out of the pharmakos is then a purely magical ceremony based on ignorance and fear; it is not a human sacrifice to Apollo or to any other divinity or even ghost, it is a ceremony of physical expulsion. It is satisfactory to find that the etymology[277] of the word confirms this view, φαρμακός means simply ‘magic-man.’ Its Lithuanian cognate is _burīn_, magic; in Latin it appears as _forma_, formula, magical spell; our _formulary_ retains some vestige of its primitive connotation. Φάρμακον in Greek means healing drug, poison, and dye, but all, for better for worse, are magical. To express its meaning we need what our language has lost, a double-edged word like the savage ‘medicine.’ The pharmakos of the Thargelia shows us a state of things in which man does not either tend or avert god[278] or ghost, but seeks, by the ‘medicine’ he himself makes, to do, on his own account, his spring or rather Whitsuntide ‘thorough cleaning.’ The ceremony of the pharmakos went in some sense to the making of the Greek and modern notion of sacrifice, but the word itself has other and perhaps more primitive connotations.

Tzetzes, looking back at the ceremony of the expulsion of the pharmakos, calls it a sacrifice (θυσία), but we need not imitate him in his confusion of ideas new and old. The rite of the Thargelia was a rite of expulsion, of riddance, which incidentally, as it were, involved loss of life to a human being. The result is, indeed, in both cases the same to the human being, but the two ceremonials of sacrifice and riddance express widely different conditions and sentiments in the mind of the worshipper.

It may indeed be doubted whether we have any certain evidence of ‘human sacrifice’ in our sense among the Greeks even of mythological days. A large number of cases which were by the tragedians regarded as such, resolve themselves into cases of the blood feud, cases such as those of Iphigeneia and Polyxena, when the object was really the placation of a ghost, not the service of an Olympian. Perhaps a still larger number are primarily not sacrifices, θυσίαι, but ceremonies of riddance and purification, καθαρμοί. The ultimate fact that lies behind such ceremonies is the use of a human pharmakos, and then later, when the real meaning was lost, all manner of aetiological myths are invented and some offended Olympian is introduced.

The case of the supposed ‘human sacrifice’ of Athamas is instructive, both as to its original content and as to the shifting sentiments with which it was regarded. When Xerxes came to Alos in Achaia his guides, Herodotus[279] tells us, anxious to give him all possible information as to local curiosities, told him the tradition about the sanctuary of Zeus Laphystios: ‘The eldest of the race of Athamas is forbidden to enter the Prytaneion which is called by the Achaians the _Leïton_. If he enters he can only go out to be sacrificed.’ It was further told how some, fearing this fate, had fled the country, and coming back and entering the Prytaneion were decked with fillets and led out in procession to be sacrificed (ὡς θύεταί τε ἐξηγέοντο στέμμασι πᾶς πυκασθεὶς καὶ ὡς σὺν πομπῇ ἐξαχθείς). Here there is obvious confusion, as the man who left the country to avoid death would never have been so foolish as, immediately on his return, to enter the forbidden place. The point is clear: great stress is laid on the leading forth in procession—the descendant of the royal race was a scape-goat. Herodotus makes this quite clear. Athamas was sacrificed because the Achaeans _were making a purification of the land_ (καθαρμὸν τῆς χώρης ποιευμένων Ἀχαιῶν). Herodotus gives as the cause of this primitive and perfectly intelligible custom various conflicting reasons which well reflect the various stages of opinion through which the thinking Greek passed. We have first the real reason—Athamas as a scape-goat. Then the public conscience is uneasy, and we have a legend that the ‘sacrifice’ is interrupted at the moment of consummation either by Herakles (according to Sophocles in the lost _Athamas_) or by Kytissoros. It is wrong to sacrifice; hence the sacrifice is interrupted, but it is wrong to interrupt sacrifice, so the descendants of Kytissoros are punished. Then, finally, it is felt that the sacrifice must go on, but it is a dreadful thing, an ἄγος, so a chance of escape is given to the victim. Finally in the same complex legend we have the substitution of a ram for the human victim Phrixos.

Sometimes incidentally we learn that other peoples adopted the device which may have satisfied the Athenians, i.e. needing a pharmakos they utilized a man already condemned by the state. Thus in the long list of ‘human sacrifices’ drawn up by Porphyry[280] in his indictment of human ignorance and fear he mentions that on the 6th day of the month Metageitnion a man was sacrificed to Kronos, a custom, he says, which was maintained for a long time unchanged. _A man who had been publicly condemned to death_ was kept till the time of the festival of Kronia. When the festival came they brought him outside the gates before the image (ἕδους) of Aristobule, gave him wine to drink and slew him. The victim is already doomed, and it would seem intoxicated before he is sacrificed.

In noting the substitution of animal for human sacrifice, one curious point remains to be observed. The step seems to us momentous because to us human life is sacrosanct. But to the primitive mind the gulf between animal and human is not so wide. The larger animals, and certain animals which for various reasons were specially venerated, were in early days also regarded as sacrosanct, and to slay them was murder, to be atoned for by purification.

This notion comes out very clearly in the ritual of the Murder of the Ox, the _Bouphonia_[281], or, as it was sometimes called, the Dipolia[282]. The Bouphonia by the time of Aristophanes[283] was a symbol of what was archaic and obsolete. After the Just Logos in the _Clouds_ has described the austere old educational _régime_ of ancient Athens, the Unjust Logos remarks:

‘Bless me, that’s quite the ancient lot Dipolia-like, chock-full
Of crickets and Bouphonia too.’

And the scholiast comments, ‘Dipolia, a festival at Athens, in which they sacrifice to Zeus Polieus, on the 14th day of Skirophorion. It is a mimetic representation of what happened about the cakes (πέλανοι) and the cows[284].’ What happened was this: ‘Barley mixed with wheat, or cakes made of them, was laid upon the bronze altar of Zeus Polieus, on the Acropolis. Oxen were driven round the altar, and the ox which went up to the altar and ate the offering on it was sacrificed. The axe and knife with which the beast was slain had been previously wetted with water, brought by maidens called “water-carriers.” The weapons were then sharpened and handed to the butchers, one of whom felled the ox with the axe and another cut its throat with the knife. As soon as he had felled the ox, the former threw the axe from him and fled, and the man who had cut the beast’s throat apparently imitated his example. Meantime the ox was skinned and all present partook of its flesh. Then the hide was stuffed with straw and sewed up, and next the stuffed animal was set on its feet and yoked to a plough as if it were ploughing. A trial then took place in an ancient law court, presided over by the king (as he was called), to determine who had murdered the ox. The maidens who had brought the water accused the men who had sharpened the axe and knife, the men who had sharpened the axe and knife blamed the men who had handed these implements to the butchers, the men who had handed the implements to the butchers blamed the butchers and the butchers blamed the axe and knife, which were accordingly found guilty and condemned and cast into the sea.’

The remarks of the Unjust Logos are amply justified. That a mummery so absurd, with all its leisurely House-that-Jack-built hocus-pocus, should be regularly carried on in the centre of civilized Athens was enough to make the most careless and the most conventional reflect on the nature and strength of religious conservatism. But the rite was once of real and solemn import, and, taken as such, the heart of a terror-stricken service of Aversion. The ox had to be killed, man imperatively demanded his feast of flesh-meat, but it was a dreadful ἄγος, an abomination, to kill it, as bad as, perhaps worse than killing a man, and the ghost of the ox and the spirits of vengeance generally must at all costs be tricked or appeased. So great is the terror that no one device is enough. You pretend that the ox is not really dead, or at least that he has come to life: if that is not enough you pretend that he was himself an offender: he ate the sacred cakes, not by compulsion, but of his own free, wicked will. Last you pretend that you did not do it yourself, it was some one else. No, not some one else, but some_thing_ else. Finally that thing is got rid of; the ἄγος, the pollution, is thrown into the sea.

The important point for the moment is that the ox, though no surrogate for human sacrifice, is as good as human, is a man. His murdered ghost, or at least the pollution of his murder, cries for placation and purification. It is satisfactory to note that if you had to be purified yourself for murdering an ox, an ox, even a bronze ox, had to be purified for murdering you. Pausanias[285] was told the following story about a bronze ox, dedicated at Olympia by the Corcyreans. A little boy was sitting playing under the ox, and suddenly he lifted up his head and broke it against the bronze, and a few days after he died of the wounds. The Eleans consulted as to whether they should remove the ox out of the Altis, as being guilty of blood, but the Delphic oracle, always conservative in the matter of valuable property, ordained ‘that they were to leave it and perform the same ceremonies as were customary among the Greeks in the case of involuntary homicide.’

To return to the Bouphonia, the confused notion that a thing must be done, and yet that its doing involves an ἄγος, a pollution, comes out in all the rituals known as Flight-ceremonies. The gist of them is very clear in the account given by Diodorus[286] of the ceremonies of embalming among the Egyptians. He tells us ‘the man called He-who-slits-asunder (παρασχίστης) takes an Aethiopian stone, and, making a slit in the prescribed way, instantly makes off with a run, and they pursue him and pelt him with stones, and heap curses on him, _as though transferring the pollution of the thing on to him_.’

The _Flight-Ceremony_ recorded by Plutarch[287] is specially instructive, and must be noted in detail, the more so as it, like the Bouphonia, is connected with rites of the threshing-floor. In his 12th _Greek Question_, Plutarch says that among the three great festivals celebrated every eighth year at Delphi was one called _Stepterion_[288], and in another discourse (_De defect. orac._ XIV.) he describes the rite practised, though he mixes it up with so much aetiological mythology that it is not very easy to disentangle the actual facts. This much is clear; every eighth year a hut (καλιάς) was set up about the threshing-floor at Delphi. This hut, Plutarch says, bore more resemblance to a kingly palace than to a snake’s lair; we may therefore safely infer that it held a snake. A boy with both his parents alive was led up by a certain prescribed way[289] with lighted torches; fire was set to the hut, a table overturned, and the celebrants took flight without looking back through the gates of the precinct; afterwards the boy went off to Tempe, fasted, dined, and was brought back crowned with laurel in solemn procession. Plutarch never says that the boy killed the snake, but as the ceremony was supposed to be a mimetic representation of the slaying of the Python and the banishment of Apollo, this may be inferred. Plutarch is of course _more suo_ shocked at the idea that Apollo could need purification, and at a loss to account decently for the curious ceremonial, but he makes one acute remark: ‘finally the wanderings and the servitude of the boy and the purifications at Tempe raise a suspicion of some great pollution and deed of daring’ (μεγάλου τινὸς ἄγους καὶ τολμήματος ὑποψίαν ἔχουσι). This hits the mark: a sacred snake has been slain; the slayer has incurred an ἄγος, from which he must be purified. The slaying is probably formal and sacrificial, for the boy is led to the hut with all due solemnity, and has been carefully selected for the purpose; but the τόλμημα, the outrage, the deed of daring, is an ἄγος, so he must take flight after its accomplishment. Sacred snake, or sacred ox, or human victim, the procedure is the same.

* * * * *

To resume. The outcome of our examination of the ceremony of the pharmakos is briefly this: the gist of the pharmakos rite is physical purification, καθαρμός, and this notion, sometimes alone, sometimes combined with the notion of the placation of a ghost, is the idea underlying among the Greeks the notion we are apt to call Human Sacrifice. To this must be added the fact that in a primitive state of civilization the line between human and animal ‘sacrifice’ is not sharply drawn.

KALLYNTERIA, PLYNTERIA.

Plutarch[290] tells us that it was on a day of ill-omen that Alcibiades returned to Athens: ‘On the day of his return they were solemnizing the Plynteria to the Goddess. For on the 6th day of the third part of Thargelia the Praxiergidae solemnize the rites that may not be disclosed: they take off the adornments of the image, and cover it up. Hence the Athenians account this day as most unlucky of all, and do no work on it. And it seemed as though the Goddess were receiving him in no friendly or kindly fashion, as she hid her face from him and seemed to banish him from her presence.’ At the Plynteria, as at other ‘unlucky’ festivals, the sanctuaries, Pollux[291] tells us, were roped round. The object was in part to keep out the common herd, perhaps primarily to ‘avert’ evil influences.

Photius[292] discusses the two festivals, the Kallynteria and the Plynteria, together, placing the Kallynteria first; they have indeed practically always been bracketed in the minds of commentators as substantially identical in content. The Plynteria, it is usually stated, was the washing festival. The image of Pallas was taken in solemn procession down to the sea, stripped of its gear, veiled from the eyes of the vulgar, washed in sea-water, and brought back. At the Kallynteria it was re-dressed, re-decked, ‘beautified.’ This simple explanation of the sequence of rites presents only one trifling difficulty. Photius expressly tells us that the Kallynteria preceded the Plynteria; the Kallynteria took place on the 19th of the month Thargelion, and the Plynteria on the second day of the 3rd decade, i.e. on the 22nd[293]. It would be strange if the image was first ‘beautified’ and then washed. The explanation of the seeming incongruity is of course a simple one. The word καλλύνειν means not only ‘to beautify’ but to brush out, to sweep, ‘to give a shine to.’ The Greek for broom is καλλύντριον, also καλ<λ>υντρόν in Hesych. s.v. σαρόν; and καλλύσματα, if we may trust Hesychius[294], means sweepings (σάρματα). In a word the Kallynteria is a festival of what the Romans call _everruncatio_, the festival of ‘those who do the sweeping.’ They swept out the sacred places, made them as we say now-a-days ‘beautifully clean,’ and then, having done their sweeping first like good housewives, when the house was ready they washed the image and brought it back in new shining splendour.

It is evident that when we hear of sweeping out sanctuaries and washing an image we have come to a religious stage in which there is a definite god worshipped, and that god is conceived of as anthropomorphic. There may have been rites of the Thargelia, including the Pharmakos, i.e. the ceremony of the expulsion of evil, before there were any Kallynteria or Plynteria. Be this as it may, the Kallynteria and Plynteria throw light on the purport of the pharmakos, and emphasize the fact that all the cleansing, whether of image, sanctuary or people, was but a preliminary to the bringing in of the first-fruits.

This connection between first-fruits and purification explains a feature in the Plynteria that would otherwise remain obscure. In the procession that took place at the Plynteria, probably, though not quite certainly, the procession in which the image was taken down to the sea, Hesychius[295] tells us they carried a cake or mass of dried figs, which went by the name of _Hegeteria_. Hesychius is at no loss to account for the strange name. Figs were the first cultivated fruit of which man partook; the cake of figs is called Hegeteria because it ‘Led the Way’ in the matter of diet!

We may perhaps be allowed to suggest a possible alternative. May not the fig-cake be connected with the root of ἅγος rather than with ἄγω? Figs were used in purification. Is not the Hegeteria the fig-cake of purification? A necklace of figs was hung about the neck of the pharmakos, and the statues of the gods had sometimes a like adornment. Primitive man is apt to get a little confused as to cause and effect. He performs a rite of purification to protect his first-fruits; he comes to think the offering of those first-fruits is in itself a rite of purification.

As usual when we come to consider the analogous Roman festival the meaning of the rites practised is more baldly obvious. Plutarch[296] in his _Roman Questions_ asks, ‘Why did not the Romans marry in the month of May?’ and for once he hits upon the right answer: ‘May it be that in this month they perform the greatest of purificatory ceremonies?’ What these purificatory ceremonies, these καθαρμοί, were, he tells us explicitly: ‘for at the present day they throw images from the bridge into the river, but in old times they used to throw human beings.’ We must here separate sharply the fact stated by Plutarch, the actual ritual that took place in his own day, from his conjecture about the past. We _know_ images, puppets, were thrown from the bridge, we may conjecture, as Plutarch did, that they were the surrogates of human sacrifice, but we must carefully bear in mind that this is pure conjecture. The _fact_ Plutarch certifies in another of his _Questions_[297], and adds the name of the puppets. ‘What,’ he asks, ‘is the reason that in the month of May they throw images of human beings from the wooden bridge into the river, calling them Argeioi?’ Ovid[298] tells us a little more: ‘Then (i.e. on May 15th) the Vestal is wont to throw from the oaken bridge the images of men of old times, made of rushes.’ He adds that it was in obedience to an oracle: ‘Ye nations, throw two bodies in sacrifice to the Ancient One who bears the sickle, bodies to be received by the Tuscan streams.’ Ovid and Plutarch clearly both held that the _Argei_ of rushes were surrogates. It seems possible, on the other hand, that the myth of human sacrifice may have arisen from a merely dramatic apotropaic rite. The one certain thing is that the _Argei_[299] _were_ pharmakoi, were καθάρματα.

That the time of the Argei, and indeed the whole month till the Ides of June, was unlucky is abundantly proved by the conduct of the Flaminica. Plutarch[300] goes on to say that the Flaminica is wont to be gloomy (σκυθρωπάζειν) and not to wash nor to adorn herself. Ovid[301] adds details of this mourning; he tells us that he consulted the Flaminica Dialis as to the marriage of his daughter, and learnt that till the Ides of June there was no luck for brides and their husbands, ‘for thus did the holy bride of the Dialis speak to me: “Until tranquil Tiber has borne to the sea in his tawny waters the cleansings from Ilian Vesta it is not lawful for me to comb my shorn locks with the boxwood, nor to pare my nails with iron, nor to touch my husband though he be priest of Jove.... Be not in haste. Better will thy daughter marry when Vesta of the Fire shines with a cleansed hearth.”’

The Roman Vestalia fell a little later than the Kallynteria and Plynteria, but their content is the same. I borrow the account of the ritual of the Vestalia from Mr Warde-Fowler[302]. On June 7 the _penus_, or innermost sanctuary of Vesta, which was shut all the rest of the year and to which no man but the pontifex maximus had at any time right of entry, was thrown open to all matrons. During the seven following days they crowded to it barefoot. The object of this was perhaps to pray for a blessing on the household. On plain and old-fashioned ware offerings of food were carried into the temple: the Vestals themselves offered the sacred cakes made of the first ears of corn, plucked as we saw in the early days of May; bakers and millers kept holiday, all mills were garlanded and donkeys decorated with wreaths and cakes. On June 15 the temple (_aedes_) was swept and the refuse taken away and either thrown into the Tiber or deposited in some particular spot. Then the _dies nefasti_ came to an end, and the 15th itself became _fastus_ as soon as the last act of cleansing had been duly performed. _Quando stercus delatum fas_, ‘When the rubbish has been carried away.’

Dr Frazer[303] has collected many savage parallels to the rites of the Vestalia. The most notable is the _busk_ or festival of first-fruits among the Creek Indians of North America, held in July or August when the corn is ripe. Before the celebration of the _busk_ no Indian would eat or even touch the new corn. In preparation for its rites they got new clothes and household utensils: old clothes, rubbish of all kinds, and the old corn that remained were carefully burnt. The village fires were put out and the ashes swept away, and in particular the hearth and altar of the temple were dug up and cleaned out. The public square was carefully swept out ‘for fear of polluting the first-fruit offerings.’ Before the sacramental eating of the new corn a strict fast was observed, and (for the precautions taken by the savage ritualist are searching and logical) a strong purgative was swallowed. With the new corn was solemnly dispensed the freshly-kindled fire, and the priest publicly announced that the new divine fire had purged away the sins of the past year. Such powerful ‘medicine’ was the new corn that some of the men rubbed their new corn between their hands, then on their faces and breasts.

To resume. In the Anthesteria we have seen that sacrifice was in intent purification, and that this purification took the form of the placation of ghosts. In the Thargelia, purification is again the end and aim of sacrifice, but this purification, though it involves the taking of a human life, is of the nature of a merely magical cleansing to prepare for the incoming first-fruits.

We pass to the consideration of the autumn festival of sowing, the _Thesmophoria_.