Scapegoating rituals transferred communal death-anxiety onto a sacrificial other

Evidence

People in the ancient world often used animals as a tangible locus of their death anxiety. For example, on the ancient Hebrew Day of Atonement, two goats were chosen by lot: “the Lord’s Goat” was offered as the blood sacrifice for the sins of Israel, and the second, “Azazel,” or scapegoat, was cast out into the wilderness bearing the sins of God’s people. In ancient Greece, the scapegoat was not an animal but a person. When a community was in the grip of an infectious disease or famine, the pharmakos, or human scapegoat, was the object of the village’s scorn. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 508

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the Greek pharmakos tradition and the Hebrew origin of the scapegoat concept.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — scapegoating as a third mechanism alongside grief and structural stabilization.