Talk:Pharmakos

Comments
This article is total garbage! Whoever wrote this article does not even know enough Greek to pluralize pharmakos to pharmakoi! Pharmakoi are druggies, thus explaining the word "pharmacology" as well as explaining why people put them to death back in the day when people were sane enough to to put druggies to death! The Bible translates the greek "pharmakoi" into the english "sorcerer", meaning poisoner, not prisoner, you Godless drug-addled morons. Gopchristian 14:55, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

cleanup tag
This page needs serious work. It doesn't relate any coherent narrative, and lacks an encyclopedic tone (for example, the statement "pharmakoi are druggies" is utterly out of place in an encyclopedia). Mostly it needs much better writing, but it's currently written so poorly that I can't reliably extract the necessary facts to put in a rewrite. --Trovatore 14:36, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Gopchristian's view is utter nonsense, imposing 20th C. christian morals onto ancient pre-christian greeks. The greeks did not put "druggies" to death. Drugs were an integral part of the mystery rites such as those practiced at Eleusis. --Tchoutoye 00:16, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

(10/10/2006) I changed "prisoner" to "poisoner" since that is the phrase I saw in a few online lexicons.

I imagine "lyminal" means "liminal" Pamour (talk) 20:47, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

pharmakos
Liddell and Scott gives two words that can be transliterated as "pharmakos": one with a circumflex accent on the second syllable meaning "poisoner" and so on, which occurs at the earliest in the Septuagint; the other with an accute accent on the final syllable meaning "scapegoat", which occurs in Greek of the 5th cent. BC. I would like to speculate here that this latter word may incorporate three Egyptian elements: p- (def. art.)+ hryt ("fear") + mkt ("protective magic"). There is no evidence (as far as I know) that the Egyptians used the scapegoat ritual, though there is plenty of evidence of magical practices in the country from early dynastic times to the present day. Not unlike many other countries in fact. Pamour (talk) 21:21, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Pharmakon as a sorcerer?? WRONG
The article says "The victims themselves were referred to as pharmakoi and the sorcerer was referred to as a pharmakon." I looked for the article cited as a source and it says NOTHING about a sorcerer being called the pharmakon. Pharmakon is just the same as pharmakos, just that it is in a different declension. This article should either be rewritten or erased completely. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.241.159.4 (talk) 03:00, 30 November 2012 (UTC)