In ancient Greece pigs were offered to Demeter, the corn-goddess,
for the protection of the crops, and there is good reason to suppose
that the conceptions of Demeter herself and the lovely Proserpine
grew out of the worship of the pig, and that both goddesses were
in the beginning merely the deified pig. The highly instructive
passage in which Sir J. G. Frazer advances this theory is reproduced
almost in full [7]: "Passing next to the corn-goddess Demeter, and
remembering that in European folklore 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 originally have been 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, that 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 Proserpine. The Thesmophoria was an autumn
festival celebrated by women alone in October, and appears to have
represented with mourning rites the descent of Proserpine (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
from an old scholium on Lucian we learn some details about the mode
of celebrating the Thesmophoria, which shed important light on the
part of the festival called the Descent or the Ascent. The scholiast
tells us that it was customary at the Thesmophoria to throw pigs,
cakes of dough, and branches of pine-trees into 'the chasms of Demeter
and Proserpine,' 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 this rude and ancient rite the following legend was
told. At the moment when Pluto carried off Proserpine, 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
Proserpine. 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 Proserpine's descent into the lower world; and
as no image of Proserpine 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
Proserpine. Afterwards, when Proserpine or Demeter (for the two are
equivalent) became anthropomorphic, 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 Proserpine, 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 Proserpine, 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 Proserpine and of Demeter herself. A consciousness of
the intimate connection 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 Proserpine. 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."