262 WARFARE IN THE HUMAN BODY 



the derivation of Pharmakos is what I have suggested, the 

 use of the word certainly goes back beyond all historic 

 times. Assuredly farmacion must be a very ancient word, 

 and the horror of the orthodox Islamite for it is natural 

 enough. We may compare the Catholic Church and 

 its views of Freemasonry. There were political reasons 

 for this, but the Church has a deep-seated jealousy and 

 dislike and even fear of secret societies. 



While considering this subject I have come across some 

 who actually declared that we might start the history of 

 the word from Odyssey ix. 393. That is certainly of to-day 

 compared with its real history, for even Hipponax of the 

 sixth century B.C. had to explain it. And when this 

 passage in the Odyssey uses (pocpfjuocaaeiv in the sense of to 

 ' temper," how is it possible for us to look on mere temper- 

 ing as a primitive meaning when we know what we do of 

 the whole body of Wayland Smith legends ? A smith was 

 always a magician in the old times. Of course, the 

 scholiast interprets the word in this passage as " harden- 

 ing." As a matter of fact, it was probably " curing." 

 What a magic sorcerer or smith did was to cure the iron 

 of its native softness and bewitch it, almost certainly 

 with incantations and ritual, as he plunged it into the 

 tempering medium. We might even say that he drove 

 out the devil of softness. Wherever there is an element 

 of magic in a word one expects that to be primary. The 

 expression (potpfjbdffffstv y^aXzov, " to temper or strengthen 

 brass," cannot be primary. One needs some imagination 

 to deal with words like this. One of the weaknesses of 

 the common dictionary is its habit of putting the usually 

 accepted meaning first and the original meaning after- 

 wards. So, when one looks at Liddell and Scott one sees 

 <puppuff<reiv means, to begin with, " to medicate," and 



