object:1.49 - Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter
XLIX. Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals
1. Dionysus, the Goat and the Bull
HOWEVER we may explain it, the fact remains that in peasant
folk-lore the corn-spirit is very commonly conceived and represented
in animal form. May not this fact explain the relation in which
certain animals stood to the ancient deities of vegetation,
Dionysus, Demeter, Adonis, Attis, and Osiris?
To begin with Dionysus. We have seen that he was represented
sometimes as a goat and sometimes as a bull. As a goat he can hardly
be separated from the minor divinities, the Pans, Satyrs, and
Silenuses, all of whom are closely associated with him and are
represented more or less completely in the form of goats. Thus, Pan
was regularly portrayed in sculpture and painting with the face and
legs of a goat. The Satyrs were depicted with pointed goat-ears, and
sometimes with sprouting horns and short tails. They were sometimes
spoken of simply as goats; and in the drama their parts were played
by men dressed in goatskins. Silenus is represented in art clad in a
goatskin. Further, the Fauns, the Italian counterpart of the Greek
Pans and Satyrs, are described as being half goats, with goat-feet
and goat-horns. Again, all these minor goat-formed divinities
partake more or less clearly of the character of woodland deities.
Thus, Pan was called by the Arcadians the Lord of the Wood. The
Silenuses kept company with the tree-nymphs. The Fauns are expressly
designated as woodland deities; and their character as such is still
further brought out by their association, or even identification,
with Silvanus and the Silvanuses, who, as their name of itself
indicates, are spirits of the woods. Lastly, the association of the
Satyrs with the Silenuses, Fauns, and Silvanuses, proves that the
Satyrs also were woodland deities. These goat-formed spirits of the
woods have their counterparts in the folk-lore of Northern Europe.
Thus, the Russian wood-spirits, called _Ljeschie_ (from _ljes,_
"wood"), are believed to appear partly in human shape, but with the
horns, ears, and legs of goats. The _Ljeschi_ can alter his stature
at pleasure; when he walks in the wood he is as tall as the trees;
when he walks in the meadows he is no higher than the grass. Some of
the _Ljeschie_ are spirits of the corn as well as of the wood;
before harvest they are as tall as the corn-stalks, but after it
they shrink to the height of the stubble. This brings out--what we
have remarked before--the close connexion between tree-spirits and
corn-spirits, and shows how easily the former may melt into the
latter. Similarly the Fauns, though wood-spirits, were believed to
foster the growth of the crops. We have already seen how often the
corn-spirit is represented in folk-custom as a goat. On the whole,
then, as Mannhardt argues, the Pans, Satyrs, and Fauns perhaps
belong to a widely diffused class of wood-spirits conceived in
goat-form. The fondness of goats for straying in woods and nibbling
the bark of trees, to which indeed they are most destructive, is an
obvious and perhaps sufficient reason why wood-spirits should so
often be supposed to take the form of goats. The inconsistency of a
god of vegetation subsisting upon the vegetation which he
personifies is not one to strike the primitive mind. Such
inconsistencies arise when the deity, ceasing to be immanent in the
vegetation, comes to be regarded as its owner or lord; for the idea
of owning the vegetation naturally leads to that of subsisting on
it. Sometimes the corn-spirit, originally conceived as immanent in
the corn, afterwards comes to be regarded as its owner, who lives on
it and is reduced to poverty and want by being deprived of it. Hence
he is often known as "the Poor Man" or "the Poor Woman."
Occasionally the last sheaf is left standing on the field for "the
Poor Old Woman" or for "the Old Rye-woman."
Thus the representation of wood-spirits in the form of goats appears
to be both widespread and, to the primitive mind, natural. Therefore
when we find, as we have done, that Dionysus--a tree-god--is
sometimes represented in goat-form, we can hardly avoid concluding
that this representation is simply a part of his proper character as
a tree-god and is not to be explained by the fusion of two distinct
and independent worships, in one of which he originally appeared as
a tree-god and in the other as a goat.
Dionysus was also figured, as we have seen, in the shape of a bull.
After what has gone before we are naturally led to expect that his
bull form must have been only another expression for his character
as a deity of vegetation, especially as the bull is a common
embodiment of the corn-spirit in Northern Europe; and the close
association of Dionysus with Demeter and Persephone in the mysteries
of Eleusis shows that he had at least strong agricultural
affinities.
The probability of this view will be somewhat increased if it can be
shown that in other rites than those of Dionysus the ancients slew
an OX as a representative of the spirit of vegetation. This they
appear to have done in the Athenian sacrifice known as "the murder
of the OX" (_bouphonia_). It took place about the end of June or
beginning of July, that is, about the time when the threshing is
nearly over in Attica. According to tradition the sacrifice was
instituted to procure a cessation of drought and dearth which had
afflicted the land. The ritual was as follows. Barley mixed with
wheat, or cakes made of them, were laid upon the bronze altar of
Zeus Polieus on the Acropolis. Oxen were driven round the altar, and
the OX which went up to the altar and ate the offering on it was
sacrificed. The axe and knife with which the beast was slain had
been previously wetted with water brought by maidens called
"water-carriers." The weapons were then sharpened and handed to the
butchers, one of whom felled the OX with the axe and another cut its
throat with the knife. As soon as he had felled the OX, the former
threw the axe from him and fled; and the man who cut the beast's
throat apparently imitated his example. Meantime the OX was skinned
and all present partook of its flesh. Then the hide was stuffed with
straw and sewed up; next the stuffed animal was set on its feet and
yoked to a plough as if it were ploughing. A trial then took place
in an ancient law-court presided over by the King (as he was called)
to determine who had murdered the OX. The maidens who had brought
the water accused the men who had sharpened the axe and knife; the
men who had sharpened the axe and knife blamed the men who had
handed these implements to the butchers; the men who had handed the
implements to the butchers blamed the butchers; and the butchers
laid the blame on the axe and knife, which were accordingly found
guilty, condemned, and cast into the sea.
The name of this sacrifice,-- "the _murder_ of the OX,"--the pains
taken by each person who had a hand in the slaughter to lay the
blame on some one else, together with the formal trial and
punishment of the axe or knife or both, prove that the OX was here
regarded not merely as a victim offered to a god, but as itself a
sacred creature, the slaughter of which was sacrilege or murder.
This is borne out by a statement of Varro that to kill an OX was
formerly a capital crime in Attica. The mode of selecting the victim
suggests that the OX which tasted the corn was viewed as the
corn-deity taking possession of his own. This interpretation is
supported by the following custom. In Beauce, in the district of
Orleans, on the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth of April they make a
straw man called "the great _mondard._" For they say that the old
_mondard_ is now dead and it is necessary to make a new one. The
straw man is carried in solemn procession up and down the village
and at last is placed upon the oldest apple-tree. There he remains
till the apples are gathered, when he is taken down and thrown into
the water, or he is burned and his ashes cast into water. But the
person who plucks the first fruit from the tree succeeds to the
title of "the great _mondard._" Here the straw figure, called "the
great _mondard_" and placed on the oldest apple-tree in spring,
represents the spirit of the tree, who, dead in winter, revives when
the apple-blossoms appear on the boughs. Thus the person who plucks
the first fruit from the tree and thereby receives the name of "the
great _mondard_" must be regarded as a representative of the
tree-spirit. Primitive peoples are usually reluctant to taste the
annual first-fruits of any crop, until some ceremony has been
performed which makes it safe and pious for them to do so. The
reason of this reluctance appears to be a belief that the
first-fruits either belong to or actually contain a divinity.
Therefore when a man or animal is seen boldly to appropriate the
sacred first-fruits, he or it is naturally regarded as the divinity
himself in human or animal form taking possession of his own. The
time of the Athenian sacrifice, which fell about the close of the
threshing, suggests that the wheat and barley laid upon the altar
were a harvest offering; and the sacramental character of the
subsequent repast--all partaking of the flesh of the divine
animal--would make it parallel to the harvest-suppers of modern
Europe, in which, as we have seen, the flesh of the animal which
stands for the corn-spirit is eaten by the harvesters. Again, the
tradition that the sacrifice was instituted in order to put an end
to drought and famine is in favour of taking it as a harvest
festival. The resurrection of the corn-spirit, enacted by setting up
the stuffed OX and yoking it to the plough, may be compared with the
resurrection of the tree-spirit in the person of his representative,
the Wild Man.
The OX appears as a representative of the corn-spirit in other parts
of the world. At Great Bassam, in Guinea, two oxen are slain
annually to procure a good harvest. If the sacrifice is to be
effectual, it is necessary that the oxen should weep. So all the
women of the village sit in front of the beasts, chanting, "The OX
will weep; yes, he will weep!" From time to time one of the women
walks round the beasts, throwing manioc meal or palm wine upon them,
especially into their eyes. When tears roll down from the eyes of
the oxen, the people dance, singing, "The OX weeps! the OX weeps!"
Then two men seize the tails of the beasts and cut them off at one
blow. It is believed that a great misfortune will happen in the
course of the year if the tails are not severed at one blow. The
oxen are afterwards killed, and their flesh is eaten by the chiefs.
Here the tears of the oxen, like those of the human victims amongst
the Khonds and the Aztecs, are probably a rain-charm. We have
already seen that the virtue of the corn-spirit, embodied in animal
form, is sometimes supposed to reside in the tail, and that the last
handful of corn is sometimes conceived as the tail of the
corn-spirit. In the Mithraic religion this conception is graphically
set forth in some of the numerous sculptures which represent Mithras
kneeling on the back of a bull and plunging a knife into its flank;
for on certain of these monuments the tail of the bull ends in three
stalks of corn, and in one of them corn-stalks instead of blood are
seen issuing from the wound inflicted by the knife. Such
representations certainly suggest that the bull, whose sacrifice
appears to have formed a leading feature in the Mithraic ritual, was
conceived, in one at least of its aspects, as an incarnation of the
corn-spirit.
Still more clearly does the ox appear as a personification of the
corn-spirit in a ceremony which is observed in all the provinces and
districts of China to welcome the approach of spring. On the first
day of spring, usually on the third or fourth of February, which is
also the beginning of the Chinese New Year, the governor or prefect
of the city goes in procession to the east gate of the city, and
sacrifices to the Divine Husbandman, who is represented with a
bull's head on the body of a man. A large effigy of an ox, cow, or
buffalo has been prepared for the occasion, and stands outside of
the east gate, with agricultural implements beside it. The figure is
made of differently-coloured pieces of paper pasted on a framework
either by a blind man or according to the directions of a
necromancer. The colours of the paper prognosticate the character of
the coming year; if red prevails, there will be many fires; if
white, there will be floods and rain; and so with the other colours.
The mandarins walk slowly round the ox, beating it severely at each
step with rods of various hues. It is filled with five kinds of
grain, which pour forth when the effigy is broken by the blows of
the rods. The paper fragments are then set on fire, and a scramble
takes place for the burning fragments, because the people believe
that whoever gets one of them is sure to be fortunate throughout the
year. A live buffalo is next killed, and its flesh is divided among
the mandarins. According to one account, the effigy of the ox is
made of clay, and, after being beaten by the governor, is stoned by
the people till they break it in pieces, "from which they expect an
abundant year." Here the corn-spirit appears to be plainly
represented by the corn-filled ox, whose fragments may therefore be
supposed to bring fertility with them.
On the whole we may perhaps conclude that both as a goat and as a
bull Dionysus was essentially a god of vegetation. The Chinese and
European customs which I have cited may perhaps shed light on the
custom of rending a live bull or goat at the rites of Dionysus. The
animal was torn in fragments, as the Khond victim was cut in pieces,
in order that the worshippers might each secure a portion of the
life-giving and fertilising influence of the god. The flesh was
eaten raw as a sacrament, and we may conjecture that some of it was
taken home to be buried in the fields, or otherwise employed so as
to convey to the fruits of the earth the quickening influence of the
god of vegetation. The resurrection of Dionysus, related in his
myth, may have been enacted in his rites by stuffing and setting up
the slain ox, as was done at the Athenian _bouphonia._
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.
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.
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.
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.
3. Attis, Adonis, and the Pig
PASSING now to Attis and Adonis, we may note a few facts which seem
to show 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. This appears to
indicate that the pig was regarded as an embodiment of Attis. And
the legend that Attis was killed by a boar 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!" 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
_hys,_ "a pig."
In regard to Adonis, his connexion with the boar was not always
explained by the story that he had been killed by the animal.
According to another story, a boar rent with his tusk the bark of
the tree in which the infant Adonis was born. According to yet
another story, he perished at the hands of Hephaestus on Mount
Lebanon while he was hunting wild boars. These variations in the
legend serve to show 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. 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.
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. 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
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. 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 perhaps be said that all so-called unclean animals were
originally sacred; the reason for not eating them was that they were
divine.
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.
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 _capia_ (an animal
like a pig) it would give them leprosy; perhaps the _capia_ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
5. Virbius and the Horse
WE are now in a position to hazard a conjecture as to the meaning of
the tradition that Virbius, the first of the divine Kings of the
Wood at Aricia, had been killed in the character of Hippolytus by
horses. Having found, first, that spirits of the corn are not
infrequently represented in the form of horses; 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 or Hippolytus was said to have been slain
were really embodiments of him as a deity of vegetation. The myth
that he had been killed by horses was probably invented to explain
certain features in his worship, 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 their
exclusion it might be inferred that horses could not be the sacred
animals or embodiments of the god of the grove. But the inference
would be rash. The goat was at one time a sacred animal or
embodiment of Athena, as may be inferred from the practice of
representing the goddess 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 Athena.
So far, therefore, the relation of the goat to Athena 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.
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 Athena
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. Now, if we knew the ritual of the Arician grove
better, we might find that the rule of excluding horses from it,
like the rule of excluding goats from 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 Dionysus, and possibly to
Athena. 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 Athena 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 similar sacrifice of a horse which
took place once a year at Rome. On the fifteenth of October in each
year a chariot-race was run on the Field of Mars. Stabbed with a
spear, the right-hand horse of the victorious team was then
sacrificed to Mars for the purpose of ensuring good crops, and its
head was cut off and adorned with a string of loaves. Thereupon the
inhabitants of two wards--the Sacred Way and the Subura--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 tail was cut off and carried to the king's house with
such speed that the blood dripped on the hearth of the house.
Further, it appears that the blood of the horse was caught and
preserved till the twenty-first of April, when the Vestal Virgins
mixed it 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.
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, seem to indicate that the horse was killed as one of
those animal representatives of the corn-spirit of which we have
found 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. In both the Roman and the
African custom the animal apparently stands for 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.
Again, the practice of fumigating the cattle in spring with the
blood of the horse may be compared with the practice of giving the
Old Wife, the Maiden, or the _clyack_ sheaf as fodder to the horses
in spring or the cattle at Christmas, and giving the Yule Boar to
the ploughing oxen or horses to eat in spring. All these usages aim
at ensuring the blessing of the corn-spirit on the homestead and its
inmates and storing it up for another year.
The Roman sacrifice of the October horse, as it was called, carries
us back to the early days when the Subura, afterwards a low and
squalid quarter of the great metropolis, was still a separate
village, whose inhabitants engaged in a friendly contest on the
harvest-field with their neighbours of Rome, then a little rural
town. The Field of Mars on which the ceremony took place lay beside
the Tiber, and formed part of the king's domain down to the
abolition of the monarchy. For tradition ran that at the time when
the last of the kings was driven from Rome, the corn stood ripe for
the sickle on the crown lands beside the river; but no one would eat
the accursed grain and it was flung into the river in such heaps
that, the water being low with the summer heat, it formed the
nucleus of an island. The horse sacrifice was thus an old autumn
custom observed upon the king's corn-fields at the end of the
harvest. The tail and blood of the horse, as the chief parts of the
corn-spirit's representative, were taken to the king's house and
kept there; just as in Germany the harvest-cock is nailed on the
gable or over the door of the farmhouse; and as the last sheaf, in
the form of the Maiden, is carried home and kept over the fireplace
in the Highlands of Scotland. Thus the blessing of the corn-spirit
was brought to the king's house and hearth and, through them, to the
community of which he was the head. Similarly in the spring and
autumn customs of Northern Europe the May-pole is sometimes set up
in front of the house of the mayor or burgomaster, and the last
sheaf at harvest is brought to him as the head of the village. But
while the tail and blood fell to the king, the neighbouring village
of the Subura, which no doubt once had a similar ceremony of its
own, was gratified by being allowed to compete for the prize of the
horse's head. The Mamilian tower, to which the Suburans nailed the
horse's head when they succeeded in carrying it off, appears to have
been a peel-tower or keep of the old Mamilian family, the magnates
of the village. The ceremony thus performed on the king's fields and
at his house on behalf of the whole town and of the neighbouring
village presupposes a time when each township performed a similar
ceremony on its own fields. In the rural districts of Latium the
villages may have continued to observe the custom, each on its own
land, long after the Roman hamlets had merged their separate
harvest-homes in the common celebration on the king's lands. There
is no intrinsic improbability in the supposition that the sacred
grove of Aricia, like the Field of Mars at Rome, may have been the
scene of a common harvest celebration, at which a horse was
sacrificed with the same rude rites on behalf of the neighbouring
villages. The horse would represent the fructifying spirit both of
the tree and of the corn, for the two ideas melt into each other, as
we see in customs like the Harvest-May.
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