"At the time when Oedipus (V cent. b.C.) appeared in the theatre, there still existed an ancient ritual, certainly of eastern origin: the Pharmakos. Each year the community of Athens chose one of its marginal members, afflicted by physical or psychic disabilities, and set a ban upon him, accompanying him in a procession to the gates of the city so that he would be expelled together with all the contaminations present in the social group". (J.P. Vernant)
The Pharmakos was supposed to take upon himself all evil violence and transform it, with his own death, into beneficial violence, peace and fertility; in classic Greek the word coming from this, pharmakon, means both "illness" and "remedy", "poison" and "antidote".
Movimento V - Anatomia del sacro (V Movement - Anatomy of the sacred) is the last stage of Pharmakos, a conceptual parable in five movements, of which the first (Embryo) already potentially contained the fundamental elements for a development structured in a series of successive evolutions.
The conceptual nucleus of Pharmakos is the possible encounter between the body as a sacrificial object, and the body as the subject of a medical-scientific investigation, the extremities of a parable on the nature and evolution of the sense of the body. (...)"
Fenomenal!
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