Pharmakos
The scapegoat — a person selected to carry the community's pollution and be driven out or ritually sacrificed to purify the city.
The Meaning of Pharmakos
The pharmakos (distinct from pharmakon, though etymologically related) was a ritual scapegoat practice attested in several Greek cities, particularly Athens and Abdera. During certain festivals (especially the Thargelia in Athens), one or two individuals — often social outcasts, prisoners, or specially selected ugly people — were designated pharmakoi. They were fed well, led through the city while the crowd struck them with branches, and then driven out of the city's boundaries — in some accounts killed, in others merely expelled. The ritual was designed to concentrate the city's accumulated pollution (miasma) onto a single bearer and then remove it by removing the bearer. It was the religious mechanics of collective purification: the city's sins and pollution were not individual but social, and required a social remedy. René Girard's scapegoat theory drew heavily on the pharmakos ritual to argue that sacrificial violence was the foundation of social order. Jacques Derrida's essay "Plato's Pharmacy" analyzed the double meaning of pharmakon (remedy/poison) by tracing it to the pharmakos figure.
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Fun Fact
René Girard built his entire theory of mimetic desire and sacrificial violence around the pharmakos ritual — the Greek scapegoat became the foundation of a major school of modern social thought.
Words We Inherited
English words and phrases that trace back to this myth. See our full guide to English words from Greek mythology.
Explore Further
Miasma
💭 conceptRitual pollution
Miasma was the concept of ritual pollution — a spiritual contamination caused by bloodshed, sacrilege, or contact with death that could infect an entire community.
Pharmakon
💭 conceptThe substance that is both cure and poison
The Greek word that means simultaneously medicine and poison — a concept that embodies the duality at the heart of all power.
Miasma
💭 conceptSpiritual pollution from bloodshed
The concept of ritual pollution caused by murder, contact with death, or moral transgression that required purification.
Thargelia
💭 conceptFestival, Apollo, purification
Athenian purification festival honouring Apollo with scapegoat rituals and first-fruits offerings
Nosos
💭 conceptDisease and Pollution
The Greek concept of disease as moral and spiritual corruption, not merely physical illness.
Catharsis
💭 conceptEmotional purification through art
Aristotle's concept that tragedy purifies the audience by arousing and then releasing pity and fear.
Agrionia
💭 conceptFestival, Dionysus, madness
Nocturnal festival of Dionysus involving ritual madness, pursuit, and symbolic dismemberment
Catharsis
💭 conceptRitual and Drama
The concept of emotional purification through experiencing pity and fear in Greek tragedy.
Orgia
💭 conceptreligion, mystery cults
Secret rites or sacred acts — the hidden ritual performances of mystery cults, particularly Dionysian worship, not originally referring to sexual excess.
God of Healing
💭 conceptHealing, medicine, plague, purification
Apollo and his son Asclepius govern healing — Apollo as the source of medical knowledge and Asclepius as its practitioner.
Dionysian Mysteries
💭 conceptReligion
Ecstatic ritual practices devoted to Dionysus involving wine, music, and spiritual liberation
Panacea
💭 conceptLanguage and medicine
An English word meaning a universal remedy or cure-all, derived from Panakeia, a Greek goddess of universal healing and daughter of the god of medicine Asclepius