stoned, he is beaten, chased beyond the boundaries. He ceases to be a member of society, or ceases to be human, he is ἄτιμος, a pariah, to the Greeks a "wolf," or φαρμακός, to the Germans "Vogelfrei." Such a hapless outlaw was a natural vehicle for the convenient economy of transferring of sins—the beaten outlaw became the scapegoat.
In Russia θέμις survives because the mir, the community, lives on with much of its old intensity of group feeling. Maxim Gorky[1] saw with his own eyes on the 15th July, 1891, in the village of Kandýbovka, in the province of Cherson, the horrid ceremony of the "Vývod, or Leading-Out" of the woman taken in adultery. The details are too gruesome for reproduction, the central fact is the woman as verberata. Among the Athenians the guilty pair are expelled side by side, in Russia the woman is alone. The important point is that the ceremony has no religious or even magical side. It is purely social.
Professor Murray, very jealous for the honour of the Greeks, has always steadily maintained that the pharmakos was not a human sacrifice. The reason now is clear. The sacrilegious man who breaks the θέμις of the clan is not killed, still less sacramentally eaten, he is beaten out.
Superstition in Essex.
A Witch and Her "Niggets."
A contributor in the current number of the St. Albans Diocesan Gazette gives the following extract from a letter he recently received containing details of a witch living in Essex within forty miles of London:
You may remember that there was a notorious reputed witch who died, and after her death her husband used to have his bed-
- ↑ Gorky's statement, exactly dated, is of course a valuable document, but I regret to see his gruesome account chosen out of the mass of accessible material as pleasant and profitable reading in the 'selections' published for the elementary student, by Dr. E. Boehme, in the Sammluug Göschen.
