Section 2. Demeter, the Pig and the Horse.
PASSING next to the corn-goddess Demeter, and remembering
that in European folk-lore the pig is a common embodiment of the
corn-spirit, 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; in art
she was portrayed carrying or accompanied by a pig; 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. 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 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, 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, and appears to have represented with mourning rites
the descent of Persephone (or Demeter) into the lower world, and
with joy her return from the dead. 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 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. In these caverns or vaults 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 festival-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. 1
To explain the rude and ancient ritual of the Thesmophoria 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. 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; 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. Further, it is to
be noted that at the Thesmophoria the women appear to have
eaten swine's flesh. The meal, if I am right, must have been a
solemn sacrament or communion, the worshippers partaking of the
body of the god. 2
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; 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, 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; 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; 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. 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. 3
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. Between the portraits 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, by the cornspirit. 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. 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. The Black Demeter, in whose absence
the fruits of the earth perish, is plainly a mythical expression for
the bare wintry earth stripped of its summer mantle of green. 4
