Pharmakos
The pharmakos (Greek old: φαρμακος) is a Rite of purification largely used in the ancient Greece. In order to fight a calamity, a person was chosen and trailed out of the city, where it was sometimes put at death. This sacrificial, innocent victim in itself, was supposed, like the Scapegoat Hebrew, to take care of all the evils of the city. Its expulsion was to make it possible to purge the city of the evil which touched it, from where the ambiguity of the term which could mean as well “remedy” as “poison”.
The pharmakos was the subject of studies on behalf of several modern philosophers. Jacques Derrida analyzed in the pharmacy of Plato the opposite significances of the term. Rene Girard did of it one of the bases of its theory of the crowned scapegoat in violence and the .
Jane Ellen Harrison writes that in the Mystères of Éleusis, “each man takes with him his pharmakos , a young pig” in the rites of purification to Éleusis in ancient Greece.
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