 The title of Empedocles’ hexameter poem, Purifications, is not likely to be original; still, the title provides a valuable guide to its contents. Purification or cleansing (καθαρμός) could be performed both prior to pollution (to ward it off) and after it was incurred (to dissolve its power). Ritual and symbolic washing with water or blood were lustral, as was abstinence from select harmful practices. Seers held that the purification of the body could remove disease; at the same time, Pythagoreans and Orphic mystics apparently understood purification as the emancipation of the soul from the body. Musaeus and Epimenides also had Purifications attached to their names. Any one or indeed all of these associations may have attracted the title to Empedocles’ work.