The
city of Abdera in Thrace was publicly purified once a year, and one
of the burghers, set apart for the purpose, was stoned to death as a
scapegoat or vicarious sacrifice for the life of all the others; six
days before his execution he was excommunicated, "in order that he
alone might bear the sins of all the people."
From the Lover's Leap, a white bluff at the southern end of their
island, the Leucadians used annually to hurl a criminal into the sea
as a scapegoat. But to lighten his fall they fastened live birds and
feathers to him, and a flotilla of small boats waited below to catch
him and convey him beyond the boundary. Probably these humane
precautions were a mitigation of an earlier custom of flinging the
scapegoat into the sea to drown. The Leucadian ceremony took place
at the time of a sacrifice to Apollo, who had a temple or sanctuary
on the spot. Elsewhere it was customary to cast a young man every
year into the sea, with the prayer, "Be thou our offscouring." This
ceremony was supposed to rid the people of the evils by which they
were beset, or according to a somewhat different interpretation it
redeemed them by paying the debt they owed to the sea-god.
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