He then proceeds to give the actual ritual. ‘The king is seated to preside over the pulse and the grain and he distributes it to all, both citizens and strangers: there is brought in an image of Charila as a little girl, and when they all receive the corn, the king strikes the image with his shoe and the leader of the Thyiades takes the image and conducts it to a certain cavernous place, and there fastening (a rope) round the neck of the image they bury it where they buried the strangled Charila.’ The festival Charila, festival of rejoicing and grace, is like the Thargelia, a festival of first-fruits containing the ceremony of the Pharmakos, only in effigy. Charila is beaten with a shoe: leather is to this day regarded as magically expulsive, though the modern surrogate is of white satin. On a curious vase in the National Museum at Athens[275], we have a representation of a wedding procession at which a man is in the act of throwing a shoe. It is still to-day regarded as desirable that bride and bridegroom should be hit, evil influences are thereby expelled, and the shower of fertilizing rice is made the more efficacious. The effigy of Charila is buried, not burnt, possibly a more primitive form of destruction. The origin of the ceremony is dated back to the time when the king was priest, but the actual celebrants are women. A pharmakos ceremony that is known to have taken place at Marseilles adds some further instructive details. Servius, in commenting on the words _auri sacra fames_[276] ‘accursed hunger of gold,’ notes that _sacer_ may mean accursed as well as holy, and he seems, rather vaguely, to realize that between these two meanings is the middle term ‘devoted.’ The use of the term, he says, is derived from a custom among the Gauls: ‘Whenever the inhabitants of Marseilles suffer from a pestilence, one of the poorer class offers himself to be kept at the public expense and fed on specially pure foods. After this has been done he is decorated with sacred boughs and clad in holy garments, and led about through the whole city to the accompaniment of curses, in order that upon him may fall all the ills of the whole city, and thus he is cast headlong down.’ Here we have the curious added touch that the vehicle of impurity is purified. To our modern minds pure and impure stand at two opposite poles, and if we were arraying a scape-goat we certainly should not trouble about his preliminary purification. But the ancients, as Servius dimly feels, knew of a condition that combined the two, the condition that the savage describes as ‘taboo.’ For this condition the Latins used the word ‘sacer,’ the Greeks, as has already been seen, the word ἄγος. It is in such complex primitive notions as those of _sacer_ and ἄγος, that our modern habit of clear analysis and differentiation causes us to miss the full and complex significance. * * * * *