The Guilt Sponge

“The city of Athens prudently kept on hand a number of unfortunate souls, whom it maintained at public expense, for appointed times as well as in certain emergencies . . . The rite is therefore a repetition of the original, spontaneous ‘lynching’ that restored order in the community by reestablishing, around the figure of the surrogate victim, that sentiment of social accord that had been destroyed in the onslaught of reciprocal violence . . . That is why the pharmakos was paraded about the city. He was used as a kind of sponge to sop up impurities, and afterward he was expelled from the community or killed in a ceremony that involved the entire populace . . . It is not surprising that the word pharmakos in classical Greek means both poison and antidote for poison, both sickness and cure — in short, any substance capable of perpetrating a very good or very bad action, according to the circumstances and the dosage” (Girard, Violence and the Sacred, pp. 94-95).