has a great part in the ritual of Demeter.
Pigs of pottery were found by Sir Charles Newton on her sacred ground.
The initiate in the Mysteries brought pigs to Eleusis, and bathed with
them in the sea. The pig was sacrificed to her; in fact (though not in
our Hymn) she was closely associated with pigs. "We may now ask . . .
may not the pig be nothing but the Goddess herself in animal form?" {64a}
She would later become anthropomorphic: a lovely Goddess, whose hair, as
in the Hymn, is "yellow as ripe corn." But the prior pig could not be
shaken off. At the Attic Thesmophoria the women celebrated the Descent
and Ascent of Persephone,--a "double" of Demeter. In this rite pigs and
other things were thrown into certain caverns. Later, the cold remains
of pig were recovered and placed on the altar. Fragments were scattered
for luck on the fields with the seed-corn. A myth explained that a flock
of pigs were swallowed by Earth when Persephone was ravished by Hades to
the lower world, of which matter the Hymn says nothing. "In short, the
pigs were Proserpine." {64b} The eating of pigs at the Thesmophoria was
"a partaking of the body of the God," though the partakers, one thinks,
must have been totally unconscious of the circumstance. We must presume
that (if this theory be correct) a very considerable time was needed for
the evolution of a pig into the Demeter of the Hymn, and the change is
quite successfully complete; a testimony to the transfiguring power of
the Greek genius.

We may be inclined to doubt, however, whether the task before the genius
of Greece, the task of making Proserpine out of a porker, was really so
colossal. The primitive mind is notoriously capable of entertaining,
simultaneously, the most contradictory notions. Thus, in the Australian
"Legend of Eerin," the mourners implore Byamee to accept the soul of the
faithful Eerin into his Paradise, Bullimah. No doubt Byamee heard, yet
Eerin is now a little owl of plaintive voice, which ratters warning cries
in time of peril. {65} No incongruity of this kind is felt to be a
difficulty by the childlike narrators. Now I conceive that, starting
with the relatively high idea of a Spirit of the Grain, early man was
quite capable of envisaging it both spiritually and in zoomorphic form
(accidentally conditioned here into horse, there into goat, pig, or what
not). But these views of his need not exclude his simultaneous belief in
the Corn Spirit as a be