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.
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