Section 4. Osiris, the Pig and the Bull.
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. 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. To drink pig's milk was believed
to cause leprosy to the drinker. 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. 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. 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. 1
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. 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. 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.
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; 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. The Chasas of Orissa believe that if they were to
injure their totemic animal they would be attacked by leprosy and
their line would die out. 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. 2
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. 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. 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. We
have seen, too, what fatal effects are supposed to follow, and do
actually follow, from contact with a sacred object in New Zealand.
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. 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." 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. 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. In Samoa people whose god was a
butterfly believed that if they caught a butterfly it would strike them
dead. 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. 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. 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. 3
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 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, 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. 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. 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, is clearly a modernised version 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. 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
show, 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. 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. 4
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; 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 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. 5
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. Yet at a later time these men were explained to
be representatives, not of Osiris, but of his enemy Typhon, 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; 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. 6
Osiris was regularly identified with the bull Apis of Memphis and
the bull Mnevis of Heliopolis. 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 in origin entirely
distinct deities who came to be fused with Osiris at a later time.
The universality of the worship of these two bulls seems to put
them on a different footing from the ordinary sacred animals whose
worships were purely local. 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. The limit, according to Plutarch, was twenty-five
years; 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. 7