Golden Bough (1922 Abridged Edition) — Chapter XLIX part 1

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 _hy¯s,_ "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.