The ancients
themselves seem to have been aware that there was another side to
the horror with which swine seemed to inspire the Egyptians. For the
Greek astronomer and mathematician Eudoxus, who resided fourteen
months in Egypt and conversed with the priests, was of opinion that
the Egyptians spared the pig, not out of abhorrence, but from a
regard to its utility in agriculture; for, according to him, when
the Nile had subsided, herds of swine were turned loose over the
fields to tread the seed down into the moist earth. But when a being
is thus the object of mixed and implicitly contradictory feelings,
he may be said to occupy a position of unstable equilibrium. In
course of time one of the contradictory feelings is likely to
prevail over the other, and according as the feeling which finally
predominates is that of reverence or abhorrence, the being who is
the object of it will rise into a god or sink into a devil. The
latter, on the whole, was the fate of the pig in Egypt. For in
historical times the fear and horror of the pig seem certainly to
have outweighed the reverence and worship of which he may once have
been the object, and of which, even in his fallen state, he never
quite lost trace.
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