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. On the one hand they might not eat swine; but on the other hand they might not kill them.[190] And if the former rule speaks for the uncleanness, the latter 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 [pg 052] that, originally at least, the pig was held to be sacred rather than unclean by the Israelites. This is confirmed by the fact 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.[191] Doubtless this was a very ancient rite, 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 why they were not eaten 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.[192] 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.[193] To drink pig's milk was believed to cause leprosy to the drinker.[194] 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.[195] 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 [pg 053] 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.[196] 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 a sacred animal 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.[197] Amongst the Omaha Indians of North America men whose totem (sacred animal or plant) 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.[198] 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 their mouths.[199] The Bush negroes of Surinam, who have totemism, believe that if they ate the capiaï [pg 054] (an animal like a pig) it would give them leprosy;[200] probably the capiaï is one of their totems. In Samoa each man had generally his god in the shape of some species of animal; and if he ate one of these divine animals, it was supposed that the god avenged himself by taking up his abode in the eater's body, and there generating an animal of the kind he had eaten till it caused his death. For example, if a man whose god was the prickly sea-urchin, ate one of these creatures, a prickly sea-urchin grew in his stomach and killed him. If his god was an eel, and he ate an eel, he became very ill, and before he died the voice of the god was heard from his stomach saying, “I am killing this man; he ate my incarnation.”[201] These examples prove that the eating of a sacred animal is often believed to produce skin-disease or even death; 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.
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.[202] It was a rule of Greek ritual that, in offering an expiatory sacrifice, the sacrificer should not touch the sacrifice, and that, after the [pg 055] 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.[203] 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 sacred contagion. For example, in Tonga a man who happened to touch a sacred chief, or anything personally belonging to him, as his clothes or his mat, was obliged to go through the ceremony of touching the soles of the chief's (or of any chief's) feet with his hands, first applying the palm and then the back of each hand; next he had to rinse his hands in water, or, if there was no water near, the sap of the plantain or banana-tree might be used as a substitute. If he were to feed himself with his hands before he performed this ceremony, it was believed that he would swell up and die, or at least be afflicted with scrofula or some other disease.[204] We have already seen what fatal effects are supposed to follow, and do actually follow, from contact with a sacred object in New Zealand.[205] 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 [pg 056] eyes. Yet the crocodile is their most sacred object; they call it their father, swear by it, and celebrate it in their festivals.[206] The goat is the sacred animal of the Madenassana Bushmen; yet “to look upon it would be to render the man for the time impure, as well as to cause him undefined uneasiness.”[207] 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.[208] 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.[209] In Samoa people whose god was a butterfly believed that if they caught a butterfly it would strike them dead.[210] 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 clan had used banana leaves for this purpose, it was believed that he would have suffered from rheumatic swellings or an eruption all over the body like chicken-pox.[211]
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 such it was regarded with that primitive [pg 057] 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,[212] 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.[213] 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 must 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 boar that Typhon menaced the eye of the god Horus, who burned him and instituted the sacrifice of the pig, the sun-god Ra having declared the pig abominable.[214] [pg 058] 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 the pig was sacrificed once a year,[215] is a transparent modernisation of an older story that Osiris, like Adonis and Attis, was slain 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.[216] 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 fact that the pig was sacrificed once a year to Osiris, and the fact that he appears to have been sacrificed on the ground that he was the god's enemy, go to show, first, that originally the pig was a god, and, second, that he was Osiris. At a later age the pig was distinguished from Osiris when the latter became anthropomorphic and his original relation to the pig was forgotten; later still, the pig was opposed as an enemy to Osiris by mythologists who could think of no reason for killing an animal in connection with the worship of a god except that the animal was the god's [pg 059] 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.[217] At this later stage the havoc which a wild boar notoriously makes amongst the corn would supply a plausible reason for regarding him as an enemy of the corn-spirit, though originally, if I am right, the very fact that the boar was found ranging at will through the corn was the reason for identifying him with the corn-spirit, to whom he was afterwards opposed as an enemy. The view which identifies the pig with Osiris derives not a little support from the fact that the day on which the pigs were sacrificed to him was the day on which, according to tradition, Osiris was killed;[218] for thus the killing 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 Proserpine into the lower world; and both customs are parallel to the European practice of killing a goat, cock, etc., at harvest as a representative of the corn-spirit.
Again, the view 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.
Yet at a later time these men were explained to be representatives, not of Osiris, but of his enemy Typhon,[219] 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 sacrificed on the ground of their resemblance to Typhon;[220] 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.[221] But it is hard 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 rather entirely distinct deities which got fused with Osiris by syncretism. The fact that these two bulls were worshipped by all the Egyptians,[222] seems to put them on a different footing from the ordinary sacred animals whose cults were purely local. Hence, if the latter were evolved from totems, as they probably were, 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 [pg 061] worshipped by a pastoral people.[223] If this were so, ancient Egypt would exhibit a stratification of the three great types of religion corresponding to the three great stages of society. Totemism or (roughly speaking) the worship of wild animals—the religion of society in the hunting stage—would be represented by the worship of the local sacred animals; the worship of cattle—the religion of society in the pastoral stage—would be represented by the cults of Apis and Mnevis; and the worship of cultivated plants, especially of corn—the religion of society in the agricultural stage—would be represented by the worship of Osiris and Isis. The Egyptian reverence for cows, which were never killed,[224] might belong either to the second or third of these stages. The fact that cows were regarded as sacred to, that is, as embodiments of Isis, who was represented with cow's horns, 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 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 chapter dealing with the custom of killing the 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.[225] The limit, according to Plutarch, was twenty-five [pg 062] years;[226] but it cannot always have been enforced, for the tombs of the Apis bulls have been discovered in the present century, and from the inscriptions on them it appears that in the twenty-second dynasty two bulls lived more than twenty-six years.[227]
We are now in a position to hazard a conjecture—for it can be little more—as to the meaning of the tradition that Virbius, the first of the divine Kings of the Wood at Aricia, was killed by horses. Having found, first, that spirits of vegetation are not infrequently represented in the form of horses;[228] and, second, that the animal which in later legends is said to have injured the god was sometimes originally the god himself, we may conjecture that the horses by which Virbius was said to have been slain were really embodiments of him as a deity of vegetation. The myth that Virbius had been killed by horses was probably invented to explain certain features in his cult, amongst others the custom of excluding horses from his sacred grove. For myth changes while custom remains constant; men continue to do what their fathers did before them, though the reasons on which their fathers acted have been long forgotten. The history of religion is a long attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason; to find a sound theory for an absurd practice. In the case before us we may be sure that the myth is more modern than the custom and by no means represents the original reason for excluding horses from the grove. From the fact that horses were so excluded it might be inferred that they could not be the sacred animals or embodiments of the [pg 063] god of the grove. But the inference would be rash. The goat was at one time a sacred animal or embodiment of Athene, as may be inferred from the practice of representing her clad in a goat-skin (aegis). Yet the goat was neither sacrificed to her as a rule, nor allowed to enter her great sanctuary, the Acropolis at Athens. The reason alleged for this was that the goat injured the olive, the sacred tree of Athene.[229] So far, therefore, the relation of the goat to Athene is parallel to the relation of the horse to Virbius, both animals being excluded from the sanctuary on the ground of injury done by them to the god. But from Varro we learn that there was an exception to the rule which excluded the goat from the Acropolis. Once a year, he says, the goat was driven on to the Acropolis for a necessary sacrifice.[230] Now, as has been remarked before, when an animal is sacrificed once and once only in the year, it is probably slain, not as a victim offered to the god, but as a representative of the god himself. Therefore we may infer that if a goat was sacrificed on the Acropolis once a year, it was sacrificed in the character of Athene herself; and it may be conjectured that the skin of the sacrificed animal was placed on the statue of the goddess and formed the aegis, which would thus be renewed annually. Similarly at Thebes in Egypt rams were sacred and were not sacrificed. But on one day in the year a ram was killed, and its skin was placed on the statue of the god Ammon.[231] Now, if we knew the ritual of the Arician grove better, we might find the rule of excluding horses from it, like the rule of excluding goats from [pg 064] the Acropolis at Athens, was subject to an annual exception, a horse being once a year taken into the grove and sacrificed as an embodiment of the god Virbius. By the usual misunderstanding the horse thus killed would come in time to be regarded as an enemy offered up in sacrifice to the god whom he had injured, like the pig which was sacrificed to Demeter and Osiris or the goat which was sacrificed to Athene and Dionysus. It is so easy for a writer to record a rule without noticing an exception that we need not wonder at finding the rule of the Arician grove recorded without any mention of an exception such as I suppose. If we had had only the statements of Athenaeus and Pliny, we should have known only the rule which forbade the sacrifice of goats to Athene and excluded them from the Acropolis, without being aware of the important exception which the fortunate preservation of Varro's work has revealed to us.
The conjecture that once a year a horse may have been sacrificed in the Arician grove as a representative of the deity of the grove derives some support from the fact that a horse sacrifice of a similar character took place once a year at Rome. On the 15th of October in each year a chariot-race took place on the Field of Mars. The right-hand horse of the victorious team was sacrificed to Mars by being stabbed with a spear. The object of the sacrifice was to ensure good crops. The animal's head was cut off and adorned with a string of loaves. The inhabitants of two wards—the Sacred Way and the Subura—then contended with each other who should get the head. If the people of the Sacred Way got it, they fastened it to a wall of the king's house; if the people of the Subura got it, they fastened it to the Mamilian tower. The horse's [pg 065] tail was cut off and carried to the king's house with such speed that the blood dripped on the hearth of the house.[232] Further, it appears that the blood of the horse was caught and preserved till the 21st of April, when it was mixed by the Vestal virgins with the blood of the unborn calves which had been sacrificed six days before. The mixture was then distributed to shepherds, and used by them for fumigating their flocks.[233]
In this ceremony the decoration of the horse's head with a string of loaves, and the alleged object of the sacrifice, namely, to procure a good harvest, clearly indicate that the horse was killed as one of those animal representatives of the corn-spirit of which we have seen so many examples. The custom of cutting off the horse's tail is like the African custom of cutting off the tails of the oxen and sacrificing them to obtain a good crop.[234] In both the Roman and the African custom the animal represents the corn-spirit; and its fructifying power is supposed to reside especially in its tail. The latter idea occurs, as we have seen, in European folk-lore.[235] Again, the custom of fumigating the cattle in spring with the blood of the horse may be compared with the custom of giving the Maiden as fodder to the cattle at Christmas, and giving the Yule Boar to the ploughing oxen or horses to eat in spring.[236] All these customs aim at ensuring the blessing of the corn-spirit on the homestead and its inmates and storing it up for another year.