The leading out of the pharmakos is then a purely magical ceremony based on ignorance and fear; it is not a human sacrifice to Apollo or to any other divinity or even ghost, it is a ceremony of physical expulsion. It is satisfactory to find that the etymology[277] of the word confirms this view, φαρμακός means simply ‘magic-man.’ Its Lithuanian cognate is _burīn_, magic; in Latin it appears as _forma_, formula, magical spell; our _formulary_ retains some vestige of its primitive connotation. Φάρμακον in Greek means healing drug, poison, and dye, but all, for better for worse, are magical. To express its meaning we need what our language has lost, a double-edged word like the savage ‘medicine.’ The pharmakos of the Thargelia shows us a state of things in which man does not either tend or avert god[278] or ghost, but seeks, by the ‘medicine’ he himself makes, to do, on his own account, his spring or rather Whitsuntide ‘thorough cleaning.’ The ceremony of the pharmakos went in some sense to the making of the Greek and modern notion of sacrifice, but the word itself has other and perhaps more primitive connotations. Tzetzes, looking back at the ceremony of the expulsion of the pharmakos, calls it a sacrifice (θυσία), but we need not imitate him in his confusion of ideas new and old. The rite of the Thargelia was a rite of expulsion, of riddance, which incidentally, as it were, involved loss of life to a human being. The result is, indeed, in both cases the same to the human being, but the two ceremonials of sacrifice and riddance express widely different conditions and sentiments in the mind of the worshipper. It may indeed be doubted whether we have any certain evidence of ‘human sacrifice’ in our sense among the Greeks even of mythological days. A large number of cases which were by the tragedians regarded as such, resolve themselves into cases of the blood feud, cases such as those of Iphigeneia and Polyxena, when the object was really the placation of a ghost, not the service of an Olympian. Perhaps a still larger number are primarily not sacrifices, θυσίαι, but ceremonies of riddance and purification, καθαρμοί. The ultimate fact that lies behind such ceremonies is the use of a human pharmakos, and then later, when the real meaning was lost, all manner of aetiological myths are invented and some offended Olympian is introduced.