Passing next to the corn-goddess Demeter, and remembering that in European folk-lore the pig is a common embodiment of the corn-spirit,48 we may now ask whether the pig, which was so closely associated with Demeter, may not have been originally the goddess herself in animal form? The pig was sacred to her;49 in art she was portrayed carrying or accompanied by a pig;50 and the pig was regularly sacrificed in her mysteries, the reason assigned being that the pig injures the corn and is therefore an enemy of the goddess.51 But after an animal has been conceived as a god, or a god as an animal, it sometimes happens, as we have seen, that the god sloughs off his animal form and becomes purely anthropomorphic; and that then the animal, which at first had been slain in the character of the god, comes to be viewed as a victim offered [pg 017] to the god on the ground of its hostility to the deity; in short, the god is sacrificed to himself on the ground that he is his own enemy. This happened to Dionysus,52 and it may have happened to Demeter also. And in fact the rites of one of her festivals, the Thesmophoria, bear out the view that originally the pig was an embodiment of the corn-goddess herself, either Demeter or her daughter and double Persephone. The Attic Thesmophoria was an autumn festival, celebrated by women alone in October,53 and appears to have represented with mourning rites the descent of Persephone (or Demeter)54 into the lower world, and with joy her return from the dead.55 Hence the name Descent or Ascent variously applied to the first, and the name Kalligeneia (fair-born) applied to the third day of the festival. Now from an old scholium on Lucian56 we learn some details about the mode of celebrating the Thesmophoria, which shed important light on the part of the festival called the Descent or the Ascent. The scholiast tells us that it was customary at the Thesmophoria to throw pigs, cakes of dough, and branches of pine-trees into “the chasms of Demeter and Persephone,” which appear to have been sacred caverns or vaults.57 In these caverns or vaults [pg 018] there were said to be serpents, which guarded the caverns and consumed most of the flesh of the pigs and dough-cakes which were thrown in. Afterwards—apparently at the next annual festival58—the decayed remains of the pigs, the cakes, and the pine-branches were fetched by women called “drawers,” who, after observing rules of ceremonial purity for three days, descended into the caverns, and, frightening away the serpents by clapping their hands, brought up the remains and placed them on the altar. Whoever got a piece of the decayed flesh and cakes, and sowed it with the seed-corn in his field, was believed to be sure of a good crop. With the feeding of the serpents in the vaults by the women we may compare an ancient Italian ritual. At Lanuvium a serpent lived in a sacred cave within a grove of Juno. On certain appointed days a number of holy maidens, with their eyes bandaged, entered the grove carrying cakes of barley in their hands. Led, as it was believed, by the divine spirit, they walked straight to the serpent's den and offered him the cakes. If they were chaste, the serpent ate the cakes, the parents of the girls rejoiced, and farmers prognosticated an abundant harvest. But if the girls were unchaste, the serpent left the cakes untasted, and ants came and crumbled the rejected viands and so removed them bit by bit from the sacred grove, thereby purifying the hallowed spot from the stain it had contracted by the presence of a defiled maiden.59
To explain the rude and ancient ritual of the Thesmophoria [pg 019] the following legend was told. At the moment when Pluto carried off Persephone, a swineherd called Eubuleus chanced to be herding his swine on the spot, and his herd was engulfed in the chasm down which Pluto vanished with Persephone. Accordingly at the Thesmophoria pigs were annually thrown into caverns to commemorate the disappearance of the swine of Eubuleus.60 It follows from this that the casting of the pigs into the vaults at the Thesmophoria formed part of the dramatic representation of Persephone's descent into the lower world; and as no image of Persephone appears to have been thrown in, we may infer that the descent of the pigs was not so much an accompaniment of her descent as the descent itself, in short, that the pigs were Persephone. Afterwards when Persephone or Demeter (for the two are equivalent) took on human form, a reason had to be found for the custom of throwing pigs into caverns at her festival; and this was done by saying that when Pluto carried off Persephone, there happened to be some swine browsing near, which were swallowed up along with her. The story is obviously a forced and awkward attempt to bridge over the gulf between the old conception of the corn-spirit as a pig and the new conception of her as an anthropomorphic goddess. A trace of the older conception survived in the legend that when the sad mother was searching for traces of the vanished Persephone, the footprints of the lost one were obliterated by the footprints of a pig;61 originally, we may conjecture, the footprints of the pig were the footprints of Persephone and of Demeter herself. A consciousness of the intimate connexion of the pig with the corn lurks in the legend that the swineherd Eubuleus was a brother of Triptolemus, to whom Demeter first imparted the secret of the corn. Indeed, according to one version of the story, Eubuleus himself received, jointly with his brother Triptolemus, the gift of the corn from Demeter as a reward for revealing to her the fate of Persephone.62 Further, it is to be noted that at the Thesmophoria [pg 020] the women appear to have eaten swine's flesh.63 The meal, if I am right, must have been a solemn sacrament or communion, the worshippers partaking of the body of the god.
As thus explained, the Thesmophoria has its analogies in the folk-customs of Northern Europe which have been already described. Just as at the Thesmophoria—an autumn festival in honour of the corn-goddess—swine's flesh was partly eaten, partly kept in caverns till the following year, when it was taken up to be sown with the seed-corn in the fields for the purpose of securing a good crop; so in the neighbourhood of Grenoble the goat killed on the harvest-field is partly eaten at the harvest-supper, partly pickled and kept till the next harvest;64 so at Pouilly the ox killed on the harvest-field is partly eaten by the harvesters, partly pickled and kept till the first day of sowing in spring,65 probably to be then mixed with the seed, or eaten by the ploughmen, or both; so at Udvarhely the feathers of the cock which is killed in the last sheaf at harvest are kept till spring, and then sown with the seed on the field;66 so in Hesse and Meiningen the flesh of pigs is eaten on Ash Wednesday or Candlemas, and the bones are kept till sowing-time, when they are put into the field sown or mixed with the seed in the bag;67 so, lastly, the corn from the last sheaf is kept till Christmas, made into the Yule Boar, and afterwards broken and mixed with the seed-corn at sowing in spring.68 Thus, to put it generally, the corn-spirit is killed in animal form in autumn; part of his flesh is eaten as a sacrament by his worshippers; and part of it is kept till next sowing-time or harvest as a pledge and security for the continuance or renewal of the corn-spirit's energies. Whether in the interval between autumn and spring he is conceived as dead, or whether, like the ox in the bouphonia, he is supposed to come to life again immediately after being killed, is not clear. At the Thesmophoria, according to Clement and Pausanias, as emended by Lobeck,69 the pigs [pg 021] were thrown in alive, and were supposed to reappear at the festival of the following year. Here, therefore, if we accept Lobeck's emendations, the corn-spirit is conceived as alive throughout the year; he lives and works under ground, but is brought up each autumn to be renewed and then replaced in his subterranean abode.70
If persons of fastidious taste should object that the Greeks never could have conceived Demeter and Persephone to be embodied in the form of pigs, it may be answered that in the cave of Phigalia in Arcadia the Black Demeter was portrayed with the head and mane of a horse on the body of a woman.71 Between the portrait of a goddess as a pig, and the portrait of her as a woman with a horse's head, there is little to choose in respect of barbarism. The legend told of the Phigalian Demeter indicates that the horse was one of the animal forms assumed in ancient Greece, as in modern Europe,72 by the corn-spirit. It was said that in her search for her daughter, Demeter assumed the form of a mare to escape the addresses of Poseidon, and that, offended at his importunity, she withdrew in dudgeon to a cave not far from Phigalia in the highlands of Western Arcadia. The very cavern, now turned into a little Christian chapel with its holy pictures, is still shewn to the curious traveller far down the side of that profound ravine through which the brawling Neda winds under overhanging woods to the sea. There, robed in black, she tarried so long that the fruits of the earth were perishing, and mankind would have died of famine if Pan had not soothed the angry goddess and persuaded her to quit the cave. In memory of this event, the Phigalians set up an image of the Black Demeter in the cave; it represented a woman dressed in a long robe, with the head and mane of a horse.73 The Black Demeter, in whose absence the fruits [pg 022] of the earth perish, is plainly a mythical expression for the bare wintry earth stripped of its summer mantle of green.
Passing now to Attis and Adonis, we may note a few facts which seem to shew that these deities of vegetation had also, like other deities of the same class, their animal embodiments. The worshippers of Attis abstained from eating the flesh of swine.74 This appears to indicate that the pig was regarded as an embodiment of Attis. And the legend that Attis was killed by a boar75 points in the same direction. For after the examples of the goat Dionysus and the pig Demeter it may almost be laid down as a rule that an animal which is said to have injured a god was originally the god himself. Perhaps the cry of “Hyes Attes! Hyes Attes!”76 which was raised by the worshippers of Attis, may be neither more nor less than “Pig Attis! Pig Attis!”—hyes being possibly a Phrygian form of the Greek hȳs, “a pig.”77
In regard to Adonis, his connexion with the boar was not always explained by the story that he had been killed by the animal.78 According to another story, a boar rent with his tusk the bark of the tree in which the infant Adonis was born.79 According to yet another story, he perished at the [pg 023] hands of Hephaestus on Mount Lebanon while he was hunting wild boars.80 These variations in the legend serve to shew that, while the connexion of the boar with Adonis was certain, the reason of the connexion was not understood, and that consequently different stories were devised to explain it. Certainly the pig ranked as a sacred animal among the Syrians. At the great religious metropolis of Hierapolis on the Euphrates pigs were neither sacrificed nor eaten, and if a man touched a pig he was unclean for the rest of the day. Some people said this was because the pigs were unclean; others said it was because the pigs were sacred.81 This difference of opinion points to a hazy state of religious thought in which the ideas of sanctity and uncleanness are not yet sharply distinguished, both being blent in a sort of vaporous solution to which we give the name of taboo. It is quite consistent with this that the pig should have been held to be an embodiment of the divine Adonis, and the analogies of Dionysus and Demeter make it probable that the story of the hostility of the animal to the god was only a late misapprehension of the old view of the god as embodied in a pig. The rule that pigs were not sacrificed or eaten by worshippers of Attis and presumably of Adonis, does not exclude the possibility that in these rituals the pig was slain on solemn occasions as a representative of the god and consumed sacramentally by the worshippers. Indeed, the sacramental killing and eating of an animal implies that the animal is sacred, and that, as a general rule, it is spared.82
The attitude of the Jews to the pig was as ambiguous as that of the heathen Syrians towards the same animal. The Greeks could not decide whether the Jews worshipped swine or abominated them.83 On the one hand they might not eat swine; but on the other hand they might not kill them. And if the former rule speaks for the uncleanness, the latter [pg 024] speaks still more strongly for the sanctity of the animal. For whereas both rules may, and one rule must, be explained on the supposition that the pig was sacred; neither rule must, and one rule cannot, be explained on the supposition that the pig was unclean. If, therefore, we prefer the former supposition, we must conclude that, originally at least, the pig was revered rather than abhorred by the Israelites. We are confirmed in this opinion by observing that down to the time of Isaiah some of the Jews used to meet secretly in gardens to eat the flesh of swine and mice as a religious rite.84 Doubtless this was a very ancient ceremony, dating from a time when both the pig and the mouse were venerated as divine, and when their flesh was partaken of sacramentally on rare and solemn occasions as the body and blood of gods. And in general it may be said that all so-called unclean animals were originally sacred; the reason for not eating them was that they were divine.
In ancient Egypt, within historical times, the pig occupied the same dubious position as in Syria and Palestine, though at first sight its uncleanness is more prominent than its sanctity. The Egyptians are generally said by Greek writers to have abhorred the pig as a foul and loathsome animal.85 If a man so much as touched a pig in passing, he stepped into the river with all his clothes on, to wash off the taint.86 To drink pig's milk was believed to cause leprosy to the drinker.87 Swineherds, though natives of Egypt, were forbidden to enter any temple, and they were the only men who were thus excluded. No one would give his daughter in marriage to a swineherd, or marry a swineherd's daughter; the swineherds married among themselves.88 [pg 025] Yet once a year the Egyptians sacrificed pigs to the moon and to Osiris, and not only sacrificed them, but ate of their flesh, though on any other day of the year they would neither sacrifice them nor taste of their flesh. Those who were too poor to offer a pig on this day baked cakes of dough, and offered them instead.89 This can hardly be explained except by the supposition that the pig was a sacred animal which was eaten sacramentally by his worshippers once a year.
The view that in Egypt the pig was sacred is borne out by the very facts which, to moderns, might seem to prove the contrary. Thus the Egyptians thought, as we have seen, that to drink pig's milk produced leprosy. But exactly analogous views are held by savages about the animals and plants which they deem most sacred. Thus in the island of Wetar (between New Guinea and Celebes) people believe themselves to be variously descended from wild pigs, serpents, crocodiles, turtles, dogs, and eels; a man may not eat an animal of the kind from which he is descended; if he does so, he will become a leper, and go mad.90 Amongst the Omaha Indians of North America men whose totem is the elk, believe that if they ate the flesh of the male elk they would break out in boils and white spots in different parts of their bodies.91 In the same tribe men whose totem is the red maize, think that if they ate red maize they would have running sores all round [pg 026] their mouths.92 The Bush negroes of Surinam, who practise totemism, believe that if they ate the capiaï (an animal like a pig) it would give them leprosy;93 perhaps the capiaï is one of their totems. The Syrians, in antiquity, who esteemed fish sacred, thought that if they ate fish their bodies would break out in ulcers, and their feet and stomach would swell up.94 The Nyanja-speaking tribes of Central Angoniland, in British Central Africa, believe that if a person eats his totemic animal, his body will break out in spots. The cure for this eruption of the skin is to bathe the body in a decoction made from the bone of the animal, the eating of which caused the malady.95 The Wagogo of German East Africa imagine that the sin of eating the totemic animal is visited not on the sinner himself but on his innocent kinsfolk. Thus when they see a child with a scald head, they say at once that its father has been eating his totem and that is why the poor child has scabs on its pate.96 Among the Wahehe, another tribe of German East Africa, a man who suffers from scab or other skin disease will often set the trouble down to his having unwittingly partaken of his totemic animal.97 Similarly among the Waheia, another tribe of the same region, if a man kills or eats the totemic animal of his clan, he is supposed to suffer from an eruption of the skin.98 In like manner the Bantu tribes of Kavirondo, in Central Africa, hold that the eating of the totem produces a severe cutaneous eruption, which can however be cured by mixing an extract of certain herbs with the fat of a black ox and rubbing the body of the sufferer all over with the mixture.99 The Chasas of Orissa believe that if they were to injure their totemic animal, they [pg 027] would be attacked by leprosy and their line would die out.100 These examples prove that the eating of a sacred animal is often believed to produce leprosy or other skin-diseases; so far, therefore, they support the view that the pig must have been sacred in Egypt, since the effect of drinking its milk was believed to be leprosy. Such fancies may perhaps have been sometimes suggested by the observation that the eating of semi-putrid flesh, to which some savages are addicted, is apt to be followed by eruptions on the skin. Indeed, many modern authorities attribute leprosy to this cause, particularly to the eating of half rotten fish.101 It seems not impossible that the abhorrence which the Hebrews entertained of leprosy, and the pains which they took to seclude lepers from the community, may have been based on religious as well as on purely sanitary grounds; they may have imagined that the disfigurement of the sufferers was a penalty which they had incurred by some infraction of taboo. Certainly we read in the Old Testament of cases of leprosy which the historian regarded as the direct consequence of sin.102
Again, the rule that, after touching a pig, a man had to wash himself and his clothes, also favours the view of the sanctity of the pig. For it is a common belief that the effect of contact with a sacred object must be removed, by washing or otherwise, before a man is free to mingle with his fellows. Thus the Jews wash their hands after reading the sacred scriptures. Before coming forth from the tabernacle after the sin-offering, the high priest had to wash himself, and put off the garments which he had worn in the holy place.103 It was a rule of Greek ritual that, in offering an expiatory sacrifice, the sacrificer should not touch the sacrifice, and that, after the offering was made, he must wash his body and his clothes in a river or spring before he could enter a city or his own house.104 The Parjas, a small tribe of [pg 028] the Central Provinces in India, are divided into clans which have for their respective totems the tiger, the tortoise, the goat, a big lizard, a dove, and so on. If a man accidentally kills his totemic animal, “the earthen cooking-pots of his household are thrown away, the clothes are washed, and the house is purified with water in which the bark of the mango or jamun tree (Eugenia jambolana) has been steeped. This is in sign of mourning, as it is thought that such an act will bring misfortune.”105 If a Chadwar of the Central Provinces who has the pig for his totem should even see a pig killed by somebody else, he will throw away the household crockery and clean the house as if on the death of a member of his family.106 The Polynesians felt strongly the need of ridding themselves of the sacred contagion, if it may be so called, which they caught by touching sacred objects. Various ceremonies were performed for the purpose of removing this contagion. We have seen, for example, how in Tonga a man who happened to touch a sacred chief, or anything personally belonging to him, had to perform a certain ceremony before he could feed himself with his hands; otherwise it was believed that he would swell up and die, or at least be afflicted with scrofula or some other disease.107 We have seen, too, what fatal effects are supposed to follow, and do actually follow, from contact with a sacred object in New Zealand.108 In short, primitive man believes that what is sacred is dangerous; it is pervaded by a sort of electrical sanctity which communicates a shock to, even if it does not kill, whatever comes in contact with it. Hence the savage is unwilling to touch or even to see that which he deems peculiarly holy. Thus Bechuanas, of the Crocodile clan, think it “hateful and unlucky” to meet or see a crocodile; the sight is thought to cause inflammation of the eyes. Yet the crocodile is their most sacred object; they call it their father, swear by it, and celebrate it in their festivals.109 The goat is the sacred animal of the Madenassana [pg 029] Bushmen; yet “to look upon it would be to render the man for the time impure, as well as to cause him undefined uneasiness.”110 The Elk clan, among the Omaha Indians, believe that even to touch the male elk would be followed by an eruption of boils and white spots on the body.111 Members of the Reptile clan in the same tribe think that if one of them touches or smells a snake, it will make his hair white.112 In Samoa people whose god was a butterfly believed that if they caught a butterfly it would strike them dead.113 Again, in Samoa the reddish-seared leaves of the banana-tree were commonly used as plates for handing food; but if any member of the Wild Pigeon family had used banana leaves for this purpose, it was supposed that he would suffer from rheumatic swellings or an eruption all over the body like chicken-pox.114 The Mori clan of the Bhils in Central India worship the peacock as their totem and make offerings of grain to it; yet members of the clan believe that were they even to set foot on the tracks of a peacock they would afterwards suffer from some disease, and if a woman sees a peacock she must veil her face and look away.115 Thus the primitive mind seems to conceive of holiness as a sort of dangerous virus, which a prudent man will shun as far as possible, and of which, if he should chance to be infected by it, he will carefully disinfect himself by some form of ceremonial purification.
In the light of these parallels the beliefs and customs of the Egyptians touching the pig are probably to be explained as based upon an opinion of the extreme sanctity rather than of the extreme uncleanness of the animal; or rather, to put it more correctly, they imply that the animal was looked on, not simply as a filthy and disgusting creature, but as a being endowed with high supernatural powers, and that as [pg 030] such it was regarded with that primitive sentiment of religious awe and fear in which the feelings of reverence and abhorrence are almost equally blended. The ancients themselves seem to have been aware that there was another side to the horror with which swine seemed to inspire the Egyptians. For the Greek astronomer and mathematician Eudoxus, who resided fourteen months in Egypt and conversed with the priests,116 was of opinion that the Egyptians spared the pig, not out of abhorrence, but from a regard to its utility in agriculture; for, according to him, when the Nile had subsided, herds of swine were turned loose over the fields to tread the seed down into the moist earth.117 But when a being is thus the object of mixed and implicitly contradictory feelings, he may be said to occupy a position of unstable equilibrium. In course of time one of the contradictory feelings is likely to prevail over the other, and according as the feeling which finally predominates is that of reverence or abhorrence, the being who is the object of it will rise into a god or sink into a devil. The latter, on the whole, was the fate of the pig in Egypt. For in historical times the fear and horror of the pig seem certainly to have outweighed the reverence and worship of which he may once have been the object, and of which, even in his fallen state, he never quite lost trace. He came to be looked on as an embodiment of Set or Typhon, the Egyptian devil and enemy of Osiris. For it was in the shape of a black pig that Typhon injured the eye of the god Horus, who burned him and instituted the sacrifice of the pig, the sun-god Ra having declared the beast abominable.118 Again, the story that Typhon was hunting a boar when he discovered and mangled the body of Osiris, and that this was the reason why pigs were sacrificed once a year,119 is clearly a modernised version of an older story that Osiris, like Adonis and Attis, was slain [pg 031] or mangled by a boar, or by Typhon in the form of a boar. Thus, the annual sacrifice of a pig to Osiris might naturally be interpreted as vengeance inflicted on the hostile animal that had slain or mangled the god. But, in the first place, when an animal is thus killed as a solemn sacrifice once and once only in the year, it generally or always means that the animal is divine, that he is spared and respected the rest of the year as a god and slain, when he is slain, also in the character of a god.120 In the second place, the examples of Dionysus and Demeter, if not of Attis and Adonis, have taught us that the animal which is sacrificed to a god on the ground that he is the god's enemy may have been, and probably was, originally the god himself. Therefore, the annual sacrifice of a pig to Osiris, coupled with the alleged hostility of the animal to the god, tends to shew, first, that originally the pig was a god, and, second, that he was Osiris. At a later age, when Osiris became anthropomorphic and his original relation to the pig had been forgotten, the animal was first distinguished from him, and afterwards opposed as an enemy to him by mythologists who could think of no reason for killing a beast in connexion with the worship of a god except that the beast was the god's enemy; or, as Plutarch puts it, not that which is dear to the gods, but that which is the contrary, is fit to be sacrificed.121 At this later stage the havoc which a wild boar notoriously makes amongst the corn would supply a plausible reason for regarding him as the foe of the corn-spirit, though originally, if I am right, the very freedom with which the boar ranged at will through the corn led people to identify him with the corn-spirit, to whom he was afterwards opposed as an enemy.
As the depredations committed by wild swine on the growing crops in countries where these creatures abound are necessarily unfamiliar to most English readers, it may be well to illustrate them by examples. Thus, for instance, in Palestine the wild boar “is eagerly chased and destroyed on account of the frightful ravages it makes among the [pg 032] crops. Not only does it devour any fruits within reach, but in a single night a party of wild boars will uproot a whole field, and destroy the husbandman's hopes for the year. The places they love to frequent are the reedy marshes and thickets by rivers and lakes, and they swarm in the thickets all along the banks of the Jordan from Jericho to the Lake of Gennesaret. From these fastnesses, whence neither dog nor man can dislodge them, they make nightly forays upon the corn-fields and root-crops of the villagers, returning at daybreak to their coverts. About Jericho they are especially destructive, and when the barley crop is ripening, the husbandmen have to keep nightly watch to drive them away. Their presence can always be detected by the crashing noise they make in forcing their way through the thickets, when the men fire, guided by the sound.”122 Wild pigs are the special enemies of the crops in South Africa; the fences constructed by the Zulus round their gardens are mainly designed to guard against the devastating depredations of these brutes, though porcupines, baboons, hippopotamuses, and elephants also make havoc of the ripe grain. Sometimes small huts are erected on platforms in the gardens, and in these huts watchers are set to scare away the nocturnal invaders.123 So in British Central Africa sentinels are posted day and night in huts raised on platforms to protect the maize fields from the inroads of baboons and of wild pigs, which are still more destructive than the baboons, for they grub up the plants as well as devour the grain; and the watchers drum continually on any metal they have at hand to keep the marauders at bay.124 In the island of Nias whole fields are sometimes trampled down by these pests between sunset and sunrise. Often the stillness of the serene equatorial night is broken by the strident cries of the watchers of the fields; the sound goes echoing through the wooded valleys for a long time, and here and there a dull grunting tells that the efforts of the sentinels have not been in vain.125 [pg 033] In Northern Luzon, of the Philippine Archipelago, the rice-fields are similarly exposed to the depredations of wild hogs, and watchers remain on guard day and night in outlooks, sometimes in commodious structures of stone erected for the purpose, who burn fires at night to frighten the animals away.126 At the beginning of their annual agricultural labours the Banars of Cambodia pray to Yang-Seri that he would be pleased to give them plenty of rice and to prevent the wild boars from eating it up.127 In Gayo-land, a district of Sumatra, the worst enemies of the rice crops are wild swine and field mice; the whole of the harvest is sometimes destroyed by their inroads.128 Among the Kai of German New Guinea people who are engaged in the labour of the fields will on no account eat pork. The reason is that pigs, both wild and tame, are the most dangerous foes of the crops; therefore it seems clear to the mind of the Kai that if a field labourer were to eat pork, the flesh of the dead pig in his stomach would attract the living pigs into the field.129 Perhaps this superstition, based on the principle of sympathetic magic, may explain the aversion to pork which was entertained by some of the agricultural peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean in antiquity.
To people thus familiarised with the ravages of wild boars among the ripe crops the idea might naturally present itself that the animal is either the enemy of the corn-god or perhaps the corn-god himself come in person to enjoy his own despite all the efforts of mankind to keep him out of his rights. Hence we can understand how an agricultural people like the ancient Egyptians may have identified the wild boar either with their corn-god Osiris or with his enemy Typhon. The view which identifies the pig with Osiris derives not a little support from the sacrifice of pigs to him on the very day on which, according to tradition, Osiris himself was killed;130 for thus the killing [pg 034] of the pig was the annual representation of the killing of Osiris, just as the throwing of the pigs into the caverns at the Thesmophoria was an annual representation of the descent of Persephone into the lower world; and both customs are parallel to the European practice of killing a goat, cock, and so forth, at harvest as a representative of the corn-spirit.
Again, the theory that the pig, originally Osiris himself, afterwards came to be regarded as an embodiment of his enemy Typhon, is supported by the similar relation of red-haired men and red oxen to Typhon. For in regard to the red-haired men who were burned and whose ashes were scattered with winnowing-fans, we have seen fair grounds for believing that originally, like the red-haired puppies killed at Rome in spring, they were representatives of the corn-spirit himself, that is, of Osiris, and were slain for the express purpose of making the corn turn red or golden.131 Yet at a later time these men were explained to be representatives, not of Osiris, but of his enemy Typhon,132 and the killing of them was regarded as an act of vengeance inflicted on the enemy of the god. Similarly, the red oxen sacrificed by the Egyptians were said to be offered on the ground of their resemblance to Typhon;133 though it is more likely that originally they were slain on the ground of their resemblance to the corn-spirit Osiris. We have seen that the ox is a common representative of the corn-spirit and is slain as such on the harvest-field.
Osiris was regularly identified with the bull Apis of Memphis and the bull Mnevis of Heliopolis.134 But it is hard [pg 035] to say whether these bulls were embodiments of him as the corn-spirit, as the red oxen appear to have been, or whether they were not in origin entirely distinct deities who came to be fused with Osiris at a later time. The universality of the worship of these two bulls135 seems to put them on a different footing from the ordinary sacred animals whose worships were purely local. Hence if the latter were evolved from totems, as they may have been, some other origin would have to be found for the worship of Apis and Mnevis. If these bulls were not originally embodiments of the corn-god Osiris, they may possibly be descendants of the sacred cattle worshipped by a pastoral people.136 If this were so, ancient Egypt would exhibit a stratification of three great types of religion or superstition corresponding to three great stages of society. Totemism, which may be roughly described as a species of superstitious respect paid to wild animals and plants by many tribes in the hunting stage of society, would be represented by the worship of the local sacred animals; the worship of cattle, which belongs to society in the pastoral stage, would be represented by the cults of Apis and Mnevis; and the worship of cultivated plants, which is peculiar to society in the agricultural stage, would be represented by the religion of Osiris and Isis. The Egyptian reverence for cows, which were never killed,137 might belong either to the second or the third of these stages. The consecration of cows to Isis, who was portrayed with cow's horns138 and may have been supposed to be incarnate in the animals, would indicate that they, like the red oxen, were embodiments of the corn-spirit. However, this identification of Isis with the cow, like that of Osiris with the bulls Apis and Mnevis, may be only an effect of [pg 036] syncretism. But whatever the original relation of Apis to Osiris may have been, there is one fact about the former which ought not to be passed over in a disquisition on the custom of killing a god. Although the bull Apis was worshipped as a god with much pomp and profound reverence, he was not suffered to live beyond a certain length of time which was prescribed by the sacred books, and on the expiry of which he was drowned in a holy spring.139 The limit, according to Plutarch, was twenty-five years;140 but it cannot always have been enforced, for the tombs of the Apis bulls have been discovered in modern times, and from the inscriptions on them it appears that in the twenty-second dynasty two of the holy steers lived more than twenty-six years.141
To prevent misunderstandings it may be well to add that what I have just said as to the stratification of three great types of religion or superstition corresponding to three great types of society is not meant to sketch, even in outline, the evolution of religion as a whole. I by no means wish to suggest that the reverence for wild animals and plants, the reverence for domestic cattle, and the reverence for cultivated plants are the only forms of religion or superstition which prevail at the corresponding stages of social development; all that I desire to convey is that they are characteristic of these stages respectively. The elements which make up any religious system are far too numerous and their interaction far too complex to be adequately summed up in a few simple formulas. To mention only a single factor of which I have taken no account in indicating roughly a certain correspondence between the strata of religion and of society, the fear of the spirits of the dead appears to have been one of the most powerful factors, [pg 037] perhaps, indeed, the most powerful of all, in shaping the course of religious evolution at every stage of social development from the lowest to the highest; and for that very reason it is not specially characteristic of any one form of society. And the three types of religion or superstition which I have selected as characteristic of three stages of society are far from being strictly limited each to its corresponding step in the social ladder. For example, although totemism, or a particular species of reverence paid by groups of men to wild animals and plants, probably always originated in the hunting stage of society, it has by no means been confined to that primitive phase of human development but has often survived not only into the pastoral but into the agricultural stage, as we may see for example by the case of many tribes in Africa, India, and America; and it seems likely that a similar overlapping of the various strata takes place in every instance. In short, we cannot really dissect the history of mankind as it were with a knife into a series of neat sections each sharply marked off from all the rest by a texture and colour of its own; we may indeed do so theoretically for the convenience of exposition, but practically the textures interlace, the colours melt and run into each other by insensible gradations that defy the edge of the finest instrument of analysis which we can apply to them. It is a mere truism to say that the abstract generalisations of science can never adequately comprehend all the particulars of concrete reality. The facts of nature will always burst the narrow bonds of human theories.
Before quitting this part of our subject it may be well to illustrate by one or two examples the reverence which primitive pastoral tribes pay to their cattle, since, as I have just indicated, the worship of sacred bulls by the ancient Egyptians, like the modern Hindoo worship of cows, may very well have been directly derived from a similar respect paid by their remote ancestors to their cattle. A good instance is supplied by the Dinka, a large cattle-breeding tribe, or rather nation, of the White Nile. “Every idea and thought of the Dinka,” says Schweinfurth, “is how to acquire and maintain cattle: a kind of reverence would [pg 038] seem to be paid to them; even their offal is considered of high importance; the dung, which is burnt to ashes for sleeping in and for smearing their persons, and the urine, which is used for washing and as a substitute for salt, are their daily requisites. It must be owned that it is hard to reconcile this latter usage with our ideas of cleanliness. A cow is never slaughtered, but when sick it is segregated from the rest, and carefully tended in the large huts built for the purpose. Only those that die naturally or by an accident are used as food. All this, which exists among most of the pastoral tribes of Africa, may perchance appear to be a lingering remnant of an exploded cattle-worship; but I may draw attention to the fact that the Dinka are by no means disinclined to partake of any feast of their flesh, provided that the slaughtered animal was not their own property. It is thus more the delight of actual possession, than any superstitious estimate, that makes the cow to them an object of reverence. Indescribable is the grief when either death or rapine has robbed a Dinka of his cattle. He is prepared to redeem their loss by the heaviest sacrifices, for they are dearer to him than wife or child. A dead cow is not, however, wantonly buried; the negro is not sentimental enough for that; such an occurrence is soon bruited abroad, and the neighbours institute a carousal, which is quite an epoch in their monotonous life. The bereaved owner himself is, however, too much afflicted at the loss to be able to touch a morsel of the carcass of his departed beast. Not unfrequently in their sorrow the Dinka remain for days silent and abstracted, as though their trouble were too heavy for them to bear.”142 A rich Dinka will sometimes keep a favourite ox and treat it with such marks of respect that an observer has compared the animal to the Apis of the ancient Egyptians. “Here and there,” we are told, “beside the hut of a wealthy negro is set up a great withered tree. From its boughs hang vessels containing food and perhaps trophies of war; to its trunk is fastened the great drum (Noqara), which summons to war or to the dance. To this tree, separated from the rest of the cattle, [pg 039] is tethered a great fat ox. It is of a white colour passing into a slaty grey on the shoulders and legs: its long horns are artificially bent to opposite sides and adorned with bunches of hair: the tuft of the tail is cut off. This is the makwi, the Apis of the negro. His master, who has singled him out from his youth for his colour and certain marks, has cherished and reared him in order that he may one day be his pride in the eyes of the village. He has gelded him, adorned him, trained him to walk at the head of the herd, to dance, and to fight. His makwi is always an object of his tenderest attention; he never fails to bring him a bundle of the finest herbs; if he can procure a bell, he hangs it round the animal's neck; and at evening, if he has milk or meriṣa enough for guests, the drum is beaten to summon the youth to come and dance round the deified ox.”143
Again, speaking of the Nuehr, another pastoral tribe of the Upper Nile, a traveller tells us that “as among the Dinka, so among the Nuehr-negroes the cattle enjoy a respect, indeed we may say a veneration, which reminds us of the animal worship of the ancient Egyptians, especially of that of the holy steer Apis, though the respect may be grounded on the simple fact that cattle are the only possession of these negroes. The largest and handsomest bull is the leader of the herd; he is decked with bunches of hair and small bells, marked out from the rest in every way, and regarded as the guardian genius of the herd as well as of the family. His loss is the greatest misfortune that can befall his owner. At night his master drives the animal round the herd, couched about the smoky fire, and sings of his beauty and courage, while the bull signifies his contentment by a complacent lowing. To him his master every morning commits the herd, in order that he may guide them to the best pastures and guard them from danger; in him he reveres his ideal of all that is beautiful and strong; nay he designates him by the same name which he applies to his own dim conception of a Supreme Being, Nyeledit, and to the thunder.”144