peripsehmata

Updated: July 10, 2026

The Latins called a victim that which in great calamities, where God seemed to be especially enraged, was offered to appease God's wrath, a piaculum; and they sometimes sacrificed human victims, perhaps because they had heard that a human victim would appease God for the entire human race. The Greeks sometimes called them katharmata and sometimes peripsehmata.

Philipp Melanchthon - Apology of the Augsburg Confession