United States or Djibouti ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
To this Florus subjoined: Now we are celebrating Plato's nativity, why should we not mention Carneades, the most famous of the whole Academy, since both of them were born on Apollo's feast; Plato, whilst they were celebrating the Thargelia at Athens, Carneades, whilst the Cyrenians kept their Carnea; and both these feasts are, upon the same day.
Thargelia was a great beauty, extremely charming, and at the same time sagacious; she had numerous suitors among the Greeks, and brought all who had to do with her over to the Persian interest, and by their means, being men of the greatest power and station, sowed the seeds of the Median faction up and down in several cities.
In the Athenian Thargelia the Pharmakos was supposed to bear in his person crimes and evils, and was driven forth from the city. The same conception is found, perhaps, in the Roman Mamuralia and Lupercalia.
Finally, an image of the god was made out of paste, and this was divided into morsels and eaten in a hideous sacrament by those who communicated." Compare the festival of Thargelia at Athens, originally connected with the ripening of the crops. A procession was formed and the first fruits of the year offered to Apollo, Artemis and the Horae.
Similarly the object of beating the human scapegoat on the genital organs with squills and so on, must have been to release his reproductive energies from any restraint or spell under which they might be laid by demoniacal or other malignant agency; and as the Thargelia at which he was annually sacrificed was an early harvest festival celebrated in May, we must recognise in him a representative of the creative and fertilising god of vegetation.
For example, the Romans, at the height of their civilisation, went mad drunk with blood at their gladiatorial shows; the Athenians of the age of Pericles and Socrates offered up human sacrifices at the Thargelia, like the veriest savages; and the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the most civilised commercial people of the world in their time, as the English are now, gave their own children to be burnt alive as victims to Baal.
But such sacrifices were not confined to extraordinary occasions of public calamity; it appears that every year, at the festival of the Thargelia in May, two victims, one for the men and one for the women, were led out of Athens and stoned to death.
At the Athenian festival of the Thargelia, to which I referred in the last chapter, it appears that the victims, in later times, instead of being slain, were tossed from a height into the sea, and after being rescued were then simply banished; while at Leucatas a similar festival the fall of the victim was graciously broken by tying feathers and even living birds to his body.
The purpose of the scourging was not to intensify the agony of the divine sufferer, but on the contrary to dispel any malignant influences by which at the supreme moment he might conceivably be beset. Thus far I have assumed that the human victims at the Thargelia represented the spirits of vegetation in general, but it has been well remarked by Mr.
These analogies, accordingly, support the interpretation which, following my predecessors W. Mannhardt and Mr. W. R. Paton, I have given of the beating inflicted on the human victims at the Greek harvest festival of the Thargelia.
Word Of The Day