
RoastieBeef
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The Ancient Greeks Sacrificed Ugly People
Is the tradition of Halloween tainted by the blood of primeval human sacrifices? The origins of Halloween lie in Samhain, the Celtic New Year festival, in...
In early Greek history, during times of plague or famine, when the precarious agrarian societies started to fear for their survival, each Greek town would elect its ugliest inhabitant, known as the pharmakos. ("Ugly" in this case probably meant deformed in some way, and certainly from the fringes of society. An aristocrat with a big nose would not qualify.) For a while, this person would be fed at public expense with the most exquisite delicacies available at the time—figs, barley cakes and cheese. Afterwards, he or she (or they – some places, like Athens, would choose two lucky uggos, a man and a woman) would be driven through the town while being violently smote with leeks and wild plants by a wrathful mob. This ugly unfortunate's fate largely depended on the town’s own tradition. In some places he or she was merely cast out of the city, while in others the pharmakoswould be stoned to death, burned, or thrown off a cliff.
How popular was this ritual? In some places, so popular that it became annual. In Athens, for instance, it was celebrated during the yearly Thargelia festival.
Why a society choose to sacrifice its ugliest inhabitant in such a brutal way is complicated. First of all, ancient Greek society was obsessed with purity; those who deviated from institutionalized norms were viewed as a threat. Physical imperfections were seen as corresponding to moral flaws so therefore, disabled children were exposed and abandoned outside the city walls, and the ugly and deformed were suspiciously regarded as tainted beings.
Secondly, Greek mythology frequently suggests that the sacrifice of one individual has the power to save an entire community—a primordial reflection of a pre-civilization time when a herd needed to sacrifice its weakest members to predators in order to survive. The pharmakos ritual, then, acted like a catharsis, a purification of the iniquities of the entire society through the sacrifice of one of its marginal members. The related word pharmakon, which later originated the English word "pharmacy," meant both poison and medicine. This reflects the ambiguous role of the unfortunate pharmakos: he held the guilt for all the evils that had affected society, but he was also its savior. But, at a psychological level, people could not accept their redeemer to be just any scum—therefore, for a period of time, he had to be treated as a very important person. In exceptionally difficult times, this fiction was no longer enough. According to some authors, it had to be the king himself who was sacrificed for the community’s sake.