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.
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