Pigs

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PIGS

PIGS . The pig is an animal at once unclean and sacred. Dear to demons, it is used as bait to divert them from tormenting humans, but at the same time it has particular associations with sacrifices of expiation and purification. The pig is strikingly chthonic in nature, for it is usually offered to the divinities and powers of the underworld. When pigs are so bred as to grow tusks that are curved or crescent in shape, they assume the lunar symbolism of the renewal of life or of rebirth after death. Pigs are sometimes believed to be the transformations of certain divine beings.

In ancient Mesopotamia the pig was domesticated in very early times, but its use in the temple cult was extremely rare. As an Assyrian fable puts it, "The pig is not acceptable in the temples, and it is an abomination to the gods." However, it played a very important role in healing rituals and the exorcism of demons. One healing ritual prescribed the immolation of a piglet: The bed of a sick person is rubbed with its blood, the beast is dismembered, and its limbs are applied to the limbs of the sick person. In this way, the piglet substitutes for the sick person. Pigs were especially employed against the demoness Lamashtu, the enemy of pregnant women, young mothers, and their babies. In the rite of exorcism a piglet was immolated and its heart placed at the mouth of a figure of Lamashtu. In Egypt, the pig appeared most notably in connection with the myths and rituals of Seth, the god who killed his brother Osiris and who represented the forces of evil. According to the Book of Going Forth by Day (chap. 112), Seth changed himself into a black pig during his fight with Horus, the son of Osiris. Whenever a pig was sacrificed to Horus and its related divinities, it symbolized the forces of evil.

Pigs were sacrificed in ancient Greece for the purification of the sacred field, the sanctuary, and the house of the priestess; they were sacrificed partly because of their association with dirt, with which evil spirits were often equated, and partly because of their association with fertility. Especially noteworthy is the use of pigs in the festivals connected with the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. In the Eleusinian mysteries, for example, each initiate had to sacrifice a piglet for the specific purpose of purifying himself. Because the piglet was as symbolic of the celebration as were the torch and the kernos (the sacred vessel used in the Eleusinian cult), in a number of works of art it is represented in the arms of the initiates. Small pigs played a part also in the Thesmophoria, the annual fertility festival honoring Demeter and Persephone. Together with wheat cakes in the shape of serpents and human beings, pigs were thrown, probably alive, into underground chambers (megara ), where they were left to rot for a year, while the bones from the year before were brought up aboveground and placed upon an altar.

In the cult of Attis and Adonis as well as in the festivals of Demeter, each worshiper sacrificed a pig as an individual offering. According to mythic tradition, Attis was gored by a wild boar, and likewise Adonis was killed by a wild boar while out hunting. In commemoration of these tragic events boars were sacrificed in the Levant in the domestic rite of mourning, in which the sacrificer acted as if he had been deprived of his own life. The boar sacrifice was a vicarious offering for the life of the worshiper.

For the Jews, the pig is an unclean animal and its flesh may not be eaten nor its carcass touched (see Lv. 11:7, Dt. 14:8). In ancient times, Jews did not hesitate to risk their lives for their devotion to the Torah in this regard (e.g., 2 Mc. 6:18–31); in the middle of the second century bce, they stood against the Seleucid king Antiochus IV when he defiled the Temple of Jerusalem by dedicating it to Olympian Zeus, immolating pigs and other unclean animals and offering them in sacrifice. His religious policy was dictated by his concern to unify the beliefs and practices of his empire (1 Mc. 1:41–42), and the cult of Zeus seemed to him an appropriate focus for the religious allegiance of all his subjects. In order to break down the resistance, the king directly attacked the things that expressed Jewish faith: the Torah and its prescriptions, circumcision, the Sabbath, the ritual of sacrifices, and finally the prohibition against immolating and eating pigs.

The dietary prohibition of the Torah is pre-Israelite in origin, for abstinence from the meat of the pig was a widespread, religiously motivated custom that is well attested among the Phoenicians, the Cypriots, the Syrians, the Arabs, and in fact among all Semitic peoples with the exception of the Babylonians. Although its religious origins have sunk into oblivion, the custom has been preserved: Jews and Muslims of today abstain from eating pork in accordance with its strict prohibition by the Torah and the Qurʾān.

In the Hindu tradition, the boar appears again as an avatar of the god Viṣṇu. When a demon, Hiraṇyākṣa, cast the earth into the depths of the cosmic ocean, Viṣṇu assumed the form of an enormous boar, killed the demon, and retrieved the earth with his tusk. This mythic scenario probably developed through a primitive non-Aryan cult of the sacred pig.

The pig continues to play a highly significant role in the myths and rituals of Southeast Asia and Melanesia. Among the Ngaju of South Borneo, when cosmic order has been destroyed by violation of the divine commandments, by incest, for example, the guilty parties must slaughter a pig as a vicarious sacrifice. The entire village community in which they live (the people, houses, fields, animals, plants, and so on) is smeared with the blood of the pig, and then a "tree of life" is erected at the center of the village square before cosmic order is restored. According to the aborigines of the Melanesian island Malekula, the journey to the land of the dead starts with the offering of a pig to the female divinity who guards the cavernous entrance to the otherworld. The pig can be no ordinary one; it must have been raised by the sacrificer's own hands and ritually consecrated time and again. Especially important is the shape of its tusks: They should be curved or crescent, symbolizing the waxing and waning moon. While the pig's black body, consumed by the divinity, corresponds to the new, or "black," invisible moon, its crescent-shaped tusks symbolize the continuance of life after death, rebirth, or resurrection. The killing of pigs is understood by the Ceramese in New Guinea as a reenactment of their ancestors' murder of the maiden divinity Hainuwele, which occurred at the mythical time of beginning. Hainuwele was killed, but her dismembered body was miraculously transformed into tuberous plants (such as coconuts, bananas, and yams) and into pigs, neither of which had previously existed. Pigs are thus Hainuwele in disguise.

Bibliography

The best single study of the pig in the ancient Near East is Roland de Vaux's "Les sacrifices de porcs en Palestine et dans l'ancien Orient," in Von Ugarit nach Qumran, 2d ed., edited by W. F. Albright et al. (Berlin, 1961), pp. 250–265, which is now translated by Damian McHugh in de Vaux's The Bible and the Ancient Near East (London, 1972), pp. 252–269. See also Noel Robertson's "The Ritual Background of the Dying God in Cyprus and Syro-Palestine," Harvard Theological Review 75 (1982): 313–359. On pigs in the myths, symbols, and rituals of Southeast Asia and Melanesia, see Hans Schärer's classic study, Die Gottesidee der Ngadju Dajak in Süd-Borneo (Leiden, 1946), translated by Rodney Needham as Ngaju Religion: The Conception of God among a South Borneo People (1946; reprint, The Hague, 1963); John Layard's Stone Men of Malekula (London, 1942); and Adolf E. Jensen's Die getötete Gottheit: Weltbild einer frühen Kultur (Stuttgart, 1966).

New Sources

Hendel, Ronald S. "Of Sacred Leopards and Abominable Pigs: How Common Practice Becomes Ritual Law." Bible Review 16, no. 5 (2000): 8.

Hesse, Brian, and Paula Wapnish. "Pig Use and Abuse in the Ancient Levant: Ethnoreligious Boundary-building with Swine." In Ancestors for the Pigs: Pigs in Prehistory, edited by Sarah M. Nelson, pp. 123–135. Philadelphia, 1998.

Landau, Paul S. "The Spirit of God, Pigs and Demons: The 'Samuelites' of Southern Africa." Journal of Religion in Africa 29, no. 3 (1999): 313–340.

Nihom, Max. "On Buffalos, Pigs, Camels, and Crows." Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens und Archiv für indische Philosophie 31 (1987): 75–109.