In Samoa people whose god was a butterfly believed that if they
caught a butterfly it would strike them dead. Again, in Samoa the
reddish-seared leaves of the banana-tree were commonly used as
plates for handing food; but if any member of the Wild Pigeon family
had used banana leaves for this purpose, it was supposed that he
would suffer from rheumatic swellings or an eruption all over the
body like chicken-pox. The Mori clan of the Bhils in Central India
worship the peacock as their totem and make offerings of grain to
it; yet members of the clan believe that were they even to set foot
on the tracks of a peacock they would afterwards suffer from some
disease, and if a woman sees a peacock she must veil her face and
look away. Thus the primitive mind seems to conceive of holiness as
a sort of dangerous virus, which a prudent man will shun as far as
possible, and of which, if he should chance to be infected by it, he
will carefully disinfect himself by some form of ceremonial
purification.
In the light of these parallels the beliefs and customs of the
Egyptians touching the pig are probably to be explained as based
upon an opinion of the extreme sanctity rather than of the extreme
uncleanness of the animal; or rather, to put it more correctly, they
imply that the animal was looked on, not simply as a filthy and
disgusting creature, but as a being endowed with high supernatural
powers, and that as such it was regarded with that primitive
sentiment of religious awe and fear in which the feelings of
reverence and abhorrence are almost equally blended.
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