Demeter, the Pig and the Horse
Art Neuendorffer
§ 2. Demeter, the Pig and the Horse
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<<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.>>