Scapegoats and Disability

by Kristina Chew, PhD on September 1st, 2006

[This is not a book review but some thoughts that I have been pulling together in studying disability in the ancient world of the Greeks and, more specifically, in ancient Greek tragedy.]

As the mother of an autistic child—of a disabled child—I have too often seen my son treated as two seemingly contradictory things, as both a “blessing” and also as a “problem”: I have been told many times that Charlie, being an autistic child, is a “blessing.” I have often heard it said that a society can be judged by how it treats its weakest members—the disabled, the old, the young, the infirm. Those who dedicate themselves to working with disabled persons, to raising funds to help provide for them or to support research, are often said to be “angels” and blessings, if not blessed, themselves.

I have also witnessed the exclusion, both actual and physical and otherwise, of Charlie from our community, as if he were anything but a “blessing.” Last year, various powers that be insisted that Charlie be placed in certain “out of district” centers that would “best suit his needs”; the powers that be acted as if we should be feeling so lucky that an “appropriate placement” for Charlie had been found. It did seem as if the various powers that be were, to some extent, trying to impress on us their compassion and care for Charlie when it was more than obvious to us that they simply wanted to get this problem child out of their school district. Once the “problem” (my autistic child) was removed, things in the school district (which is now our former school district) would be all right.

Removing Charlie—disabled and different—from the community might bring a certain feeling of relief to some, but to do so is to treat him like a pharmakos, the ancient Greek term for a “scapegoat” who was ritually expelled in an annual ceremony. The ancient figure of the pharmakos—of the “scapegoat”—-captures the ambivalence our culture regards disability with. This ambivalence—often combined with dread and loathing—-has practical results in that it affects how a community (and at least the aforementioned powers that be) treats, makes policies for, legislates, and looks at someone like Charlie.

On the first day of the festival of the Thargelia, which was held yearly in classical Athens, two pharmakoi was expelled from the city in a ceremony to rid the city of all defilement from the previous year. They were paraded through the streets wearing a necklace of dried figs, beaten about their sexual organs with scilla bulbs, figs, and wild plants, and then expelled. The origin of the ritual was the Athenians’ impious murder of Androgaeus the Cretan; the custom of repeated purification through the expulsion of a designated “scapegoat” was introduced to remove the defilement associated with this legendary crime.

Who was chosen to be the pharmakos? Write the French classicists Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Videl-Naquet in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (1988):

They were most likely recruited among the dregs of the population, from among the kakourgoi [those doing ill, mischievous, villanous; malefactora], gibbet fodder whose crimes, physical ugliness, lowly condition and base and repugnant occupations marked them out as inferior, degraded beings, phauloi [of low rank, common], the refuse of society. In the Frogs, Aristophanes [who wrote comic plays] contrasts the well-born citizens who are wise, just, good, and honest, resembling the sound city currency, with the false coins of copper, “the foreigners, rascals, knaves, sons of knaves, and newcomers” whom the city would not easily have chosen at random, even for pharmakoi. Tzetzes, citing fragments from the poet Hipponax, notes that when a loimos [plague, pestilence] afflicted the city, they chose the most ugly person of all (amorphoteron) as the katharmos [cleansing, purification] and pharmakos of the stricken town. (pp. 128-129)

Vernant and Vidal-Naquet note both “ambiguity and reversal” in the figure of the pharmakos, who they describe as one side of a “polarity” with the divine king.

Combined with the Thargelia’s ceremony involving the expulsion of the pharmakos was a celebration of the renewals of spring and of fertility. In this ceremony, the first fruits of the land were consecrated to the god Apollo and young boys carried the eiresione, an olive or laurel branch strewn with wool garlands and fruits, cakes, and small phials containing oil and wine. The eiresione were then left hanging outside the doors of houses until the next year’s Thargelia. “But this renewal symbolized by the eiresione could only take place if every defilement had been banished from the group and from the land and men made pure once again,” Vernant and Vidal-Naquet write. The rebirth and renewal symbolized in the first fruits of the eiresione recall the “end of the aphoria, the sterility that afflicted the land of Attica in punishment for the murder of Androgaeus, the very murder that the expulsion of the pharmakos is intended to expiate” (p. 130). The expulsion of the scapegoat—of the community’s defilement—and a renewal of new fruits, new births, are both part of the same festival of the Thargelia.

As Vernant and Vidal-Naquet further argue, the figure of the pharmakos actually partakes of both aspects of the Thargelia festival, purification by expulsion of a scapegoat and renewal and fertility.

In the ritual of the Thargelia, in classical Athens, certain features that evoke the sovereign, the master of fertility are still detectable in the figure of the pharmakos. The revolting figure who has to embody the defilement lives at the expense of the State, feeding on dishes of exceptional purity: fruit, cheese, and sacred cakes of maza; he is adorned in the procession, like the eiresione, with necklaces of figs and with branches and he is beaten on his sexual organs with scilla bulbs; and the reason for this is that he possesses the beneficient virtue of fertility. His defilement is a religious qualification that can be used to good effect. His agos [curse, defilement], like that of Oedipus, turns him into a katharmos, a katharsios, a purifier. (p. 133)

Vernant and Vidal-Naquet’s analysis of the myth of Oedipus focuses on his being both king and scapegoat—both the source of power and the source of defilement and pollution in the community. Oedipus is a figure of contradiction, of polar opposites—the highest and the lowest, the king and the scapegoat—and as such simultaneously both the “blessing” and the “problem” as I have described Charlie. Oedipus and the pharmakos are simultaneously revered and feared—even hated.

Charlie did end up attending an out-of-district private autism school in December of 2005, after we had to take him out of school briefly and after we had objected to other such placements that we felt were not in his best interests at all, but that would be merely places to warehouse him. While it is currently true that Charlie learns best in a self-contained autism classroom, there are numerous other ways for him to be part of a community, and this inclusion starts in the hearts and minds of people who are willing to address their own “defilement,” instead of foisting it upon a disabled child. A scapegoat.

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