(6) The swine.—Most difficult and obscure are the questions connected with the swine. There is good evidence to show that the swine was sacred in the Anatolian religion. In Crete, which was in strong religious sympathy with Asia Minor, the swine was sacred, and played an important part in the Mysteries and the birth of Zeus. At the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were influenced both from Crete and from Asia Minor, the swine con- stituted the most efficacious and purificatory sacri- fice ; the Greek purification for murder or homicide involved the sacrifice of a swine, and the Lydian ceremony is said by Herodotus (i. 35) to have been identical with the Greek (which may be taken as proof that the rite was carried from Anatolia to Greece). In Lycia a swine is represented on the Harpy Tomb, under the chair on which sits the heroized or deified dead. Small pigs of terra-cotta or porcelain have been found in Lydian graves.* The older and general Phrygian custom had at least no horror of swine.t
* Ramsay, Histor. Geog. of Asia Minor, p. 32. t Tb. p. 82.
pectin
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But this Anatolian custom was interfered with by a new influence, namely, the Semitic (or perhaps we ought to say simply the J ewish) and Egyptian abhorrence for the swine.” This ruled, at least in later time, at the Pontic Komana, where a swine might not be brought into the city, much less into the sacred precinct or temple of the goddess.
Here we are brought in view of two opposin and irreconcilable ideas; and our view is, in a such cases, that these contradictory ideas originate from different races (or, in the case of Jewish re- ligion, from the influence of a new step in develop- ment). The attempt has been made to interpret the abhorrence and loathing of the swine as arising naturally out of the extreme awe and fear with which it was regarded on account of its high supernatural powers ; but, on such a prin- ciple, anything can be evolved out of anything. There are two opposite conceptions of the swine.
According to the one, the swine is a sacred and purifying animal; it is in close relation with the Divine nature, and the human worshipper uses it to cleanse himself so that he may be fitted to come into relation with the Deity—sacrificed as the Eleusinian and Eteocretan prelude to initiation or marriage [identical rites, § VIII (1)]; not eaten except after sacrifice (see (8), (9), and Ath. 376).
According to the other conception, the swine must not be brought near the Deity nor permitted even to approach his neighbourhood, any one who has touched a swine is unclean, any one who habitu- ally comes in contact with swine is a permanent outcast. We refuse to consider that these two op- posing views have a common origin: they belong to two irreconcilable modes of thought. The ab- horrence of the swine we explain on grounds of health: in a hot country the flesh of the swine is not wholesome, and in the development of thought and religion in Egypt and in Palestine this was observed and constituted into a religious law for the benefit of man.
It is said that the Egyptians once a year sacri- ficed a swine to the moon and Osiris, and ate its flesh; and in Is 667 we hear of Jews who met secretly to eat the flesh of swine and mice as a religious rite. But these are natural examples of the persistence of the old religious facts in secret or on some exceptional occasion: the new and higher religious idea cannot wholly extirpate the ancient idea: the old superstition has a hold on the souls of men, and usually something is conceded to it. Only, the Hebrew prophets would concede nothing, but insisted on the absolute and utter abolition of the old superstition : that is one of the numberless points of distinction between Hebrew religion and all other ancient religions which competed with it.
The principle laid down in the preceding para- graph is one of great importance in our subject. In the religious history of the Greek tribes we observe numerous cases in which the religious idea of one tribe overpowers that of another when the two tribes come together. But a religious fact rarely, if ever, dies utterly: though the weaker, it produces some effect on the stronger, and one of
-the commonest effects was that a secret and mys- terious performance of the submerged religious ritual was permitted at long intervals. Thus human sacrifice seems to have been allowed to continue in rare acts of ritual, many centuries after the general feeling of the Greek tribes had condemned the idea of sacrificing a human being. Another way in which the submerged religion maintained itself was in the superstitions of the lowest and least educated classes, and in rites
* See Wiedemann, Herodot’s Zweites Buch, p. 85. Origen, c. Cels. v. 49, speaks of the Egyptian priests alone as refraining which implies a relaxation of usage. ;
t See below, § VII (2).
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which were rejected as magical and irreligious by the higher thought of the people.
The rules of impurity connected with the swine are also a subject of great difficulty ; and here again the difficulty seems due to the interlacing and intermixture of different religious ideas, no one of which has made itself absolutely supreme. Thus, for example, the statement is sometimes made that the worshippers of the Lycian and Ana- tolian god Men Tyrannos abstained from swine’s flesh; yet the swine was intimately connected with the Divine power in Lycia (as we have seen).