The noun φαρμακον (pharmakon) means medicine or drug (hence our English word pharmacy). This word is very common in the classics, and may refer to any healing or sickening concoction, with a fitting adjective indicating which it is (a sickening one would make sick and a healing one would heal, as advertised).

In Homeric times, remedies were applied mostly on the outside, rather than ingested, but that changed over time. In the classical age, our word could denote any brew that would stave off infirmity, prevent it, restore health or maintain it, and for obvious reasons became strongly associated to magic and witchcraft. It could denote any enchanted potion, for whatever intended outcome, or even more general, any charm or spell. It could denote any remedy for anything that warranted intervention in whatever way. It was even used to refer to laundering lye, dyes and paints or any chemical reagent used by tanners.

It's unclear where our word came from. There are several groups of words in Greek, or more broadly in the Indo-European basin, that resemble it, but none of them carry the sort of meaning that would allow the formation of a word for magic potion, or, crucially, the hocus pocus theatricals that have always been a major element in the delivery of such.

In our article on the many Hebrew roots of Greek, we showcase a long list of Greek words that have no clear European connection but do look suspiciously similar to Semitic ones. It must be understood that right after the Bronze Age Collapse (12th century BC), long before the Greek language had stabilized, the dominant people in the Mediterranean were the Phoenicians, who spoke a Semitic language closely related to Biblical Hebrew. That said, a very rare Hebrew verb פרם (param) is of somewhat unclear meaning but exists in Arabic in the sense of chopping up onions and, by implication, herbs and mushrooms and such — precisely the kind of activity one would expect from a brewer of potions. Our verb occurs in Leviticus only, once in a description of what should be done with the clothes of a leprous person (13:45), and twice in a description what should not be done to or by the priestly elite (10:6, 21:10).

In Aramaic, this verb continued to mean what it did in Hebrew, but also assumed the Arabic take and indeed came to mean to chop up onions and beets (and presumably herbs). Noun פורמא (purma) denoted a piece of cloth (which follows the Hebrew meaning of tearing garments) but specifically a bandage to be applied over one's eyes. Donkeys tied to mills were blinkered with such bandages, and it was explained that demons too have such eye-coverings, which a man's sin could remove so that the demons could see what they were doing and the man went insane. The noun פרמקוס (paremakos) transliterates φαρμακοσ (pharmakos), magician or sorcerer, but it's not clear at all which came first. The Aramaic noun קוס (qos) means cup, from קצץ (qasas), meaning to remove by cutting off.

Our noun φαρμακον (pharmakon), medicine or magic potion, does not occur in the New Testament, but from it derive: