I have already referred to the circumstances that were responsible for the identification of the cow with the Great Mother, the sky, and the moon. Once this had happened, the process seems to have been extended to include other animals which were used as food, such as the sheep, goat, pig, and antelope (or gazelle and deer). In Egypt the cow continued to occupy the pre-eminent place as a divine animal; and the cow-cult extended from the Mediterreanean to equatorial Africa, to Western Europe, and as far East as India. But in the Mediterranean area the pig played a more prominent part than it did in Egypt.[423] In the latter country Osiris, Isis, and especially Set, were identified with the pig; and in Syria the place of Set as the enemy of Osiris (Adonis) was taken by an actual pig. But throughout the Eastern Mediterranean the pig was also identified with the Great Mother and associated with lunar and sky phenomena. In fact at Troy the pig was represented[424] with the star-shaped decorations with which Hathor's divine cow (in her rôle as a sky-goddess) was embellished in Egypt. To complete the identification with the cow-mother Cretan fable represents a sow suckling the infant Minos or the youthful Zeus-Dionysus as his Egyptian prototype was suckled by the divine cow.
Now the cowry-shell was called χοῖρος by the Greeks. The pig, in fact, was identified both with the Great Mother and the shell; and it is clear from what has been said already in these pages that the reason for this strange homology was the fact that originally the Great Mother was nothing more than the cowry-shell.
But it was not only with the shell itself that the pig was identified but also with what the shell symbolized. Thus the term χοῖρος had an obscene significance in addition to its usual meaning "pig" and its acquired meaning "cowry". This fact seems to have played some part in fixing upon the pig the notoriety of being "an unclean animal".[425] But it was mainly for other reasons of a very different kind that the eating of swine-flesh was forbidden. The tabu seems to have arisen originally because the pig was a sacred animal identified with the Great Mother and the Water God, and especially associated with both these deities in their lunar aspects.
According to a Cretan legend the youthful god Zeus-Dionysus was suckled by a sow. For this reason "the Cretans consider this animal sacred, and will not taste of its flesh; and the men of Præsos perform sacred rites with the sow, making her the first offering at the sacrifice".[426]
But when the pig also assumed the rôle of Set, as the enemy of Osiris, and became the prototype of the devil, an active aversion took the place of the sacred tabu, and inspired the belief in the unwholesomeness of pig flesh. To this was added the unpleasant reputation as a dirty animal which the pig itself acquired, for the reasons which I have already stated.
I have already referred to the irrelevance of Miss Jane Harrison's denial of the birth of Aphrodite from the sea (p. 141). Miss Harrison does not seem to have realized that in her book[427] she has collected evidence which is much more relevant to the point at issue. For, in the interesting account of the Eleusinian Mysteries (pp. 150 et seq.), she has called attention to the important rite upon the day "called in popular parlance 'ἄλαδε μύσται,' 'to the sea ye mystics'" (p. 152), which, I think, has a direct bearing upon the myth of Aphrodite's birth from the sea.
The Mysteries were celebrated at full moon; and each of the candidates for admission "took with him his own pharmakos,[428] a young pig".
"Arrived at the sea, each man bathed with his pig" (p. 152). On one occasion, so it is said, "when a mystic was bathing his pig, a sea-monster ate off the lower part of his body" (p. 153). So important was the pig in this ritual "that when Eleusis was permitted (b.c. 350-327) to issue her autonomous coinage it is the pig she chooses as the sign and symbol of her mysteries" (p. 153).
"On the final day of the Mysteries, according to Athenæus, two vessels called plemochoæ are emptied, one towards the East and the other towards the West, and at the moment of outpouring a mystic formulary was pronounced.... What the mystic formulary was we cannot certainly say, but it is tempting to connect the libation of the plemochoæ with a formulary recorded by Proclos. He says 'In the Eleusinian mysteries, looking up to the sky they cried aloud "Rain," and looking down to earth they cried "Be fruitful"'" (p. 161).
In these latter incidents we see, perhaps, a distant echo of Hathor's pots of blood-coloured beer that were poured out upon the soil, which in a later version of the story became the symbol of the inundation of the river and the token of the earth's fruitfulness. The personification in the Great Mother of these life-giving powers of the river occurred at about the same time; and this was rationalized by the myth that she was born of the sea. She was also identified with the moon and a sow. Hence these Mysteries were celebrated, both in Egypt and in the Mediterranean, at full moon, and the pig played a prominent part in them. The candidates washed the sacrificial pig in the sea, not primarily as a rite of purification,[429] as is commonly claimed, but because the sacrificial animal was merely a surrogate of the cowry, which lived in the sea, and of the Great Mother,[430] who was sprung from the cowry and hence born of the sea. In the story of the man carrying the pig being attacked by a sea-monster, perhaps we have an incident of that widespread story of the shark guarding the pearls. We have already seen how it was distorted into the fantastic legend of the dog's rôle in the digging up of mandrakes. In the version we are now considering the pearl's place is taken by the pig, both of them surrogates of the cowry.