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.’