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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.


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