It is time to resume the various shifting notions that cluster round the term Ker, perhaps the most untranslateable of all Greek words. Ghost, bacillus, disease, death-angel, death-fate, fate, bogey, magician have all gone to the making of it. So shifting and various is the notion that it is hard to say what is primary, what developed, but deep down in the lowest stratum lie the two kindred conceptions of ghost and bacillus. It is only by a severe effort of the imagination that we can think ourselves back into an adequate mental confusion to realize all the connotations of Ker. When the lexicographers came to define the word they had no easy task. Their struggles—they are honest men, if not too intelligent—are instructive. Happily they make no attempt at real formulation, but jot things down as they come. Hesychius, after his preliminary statement ‘κηρ (neuter, with circumflex accent) the soul, (oxytone, feminine) death-bringing fate, death,’ gives us suggestive particulars: κῆρας· ἀκαθαρσίας, μολύσματα, βλάβας, where we see the unclean bacilli; κηρόν· λεπτὸν νοσηρόν, which reminds us of the evil skinny Ker of the vase-painting (fig. 17); κηριοῦσθαι· ἐκπλήττεσθαι, where the bogey Ker is manifest; κηριωθῆναι· ὑπὸ σκοτοδινοῦ ληφθῆναι, where the whirlwind seems indicated, though it may be the dizziness of death. Kerukainae were the female correlatives of Kerykes, ‘women whose business it was to collect things polluted’ and carry them off to the sea[545]. Most curious and primitive of all, we are told[546] that κήρυκες itself means not only messengers, ministers, a priestly race descended from Hermes, but ‘they call the insects that impregnate the wild fig κήρυκας.’ Here are bacilli indeed, but for life not for death. THE KER AS ERINYS. It has been already indicated that a Ker is sometimes an avenger, but this aspect of the word has been advisedly reserved because it takes us straight to the idea of the Erinys.