go, used
to fall down in a fit and rave out descriptions of the Battle; and a man
in Sligo has told me that it will be so great a battle that the horses
shall go up to their fetlocks in blood, and that their girths, when it
is over, will rot from their bellies for lack of a hand to unbuckle
them. The battle is a mythological battle, and the black pig is one with
the bristleless boar, that killed Dearmod, in November, upon the western
end of Ben Bulben; Misroide MacDatha's sow, whose carving brought on so
great a battle; 'the croppy black sow,' and 'the cutty black sow' of
Welsh November rhymes ('Celtic Heathendom,' pages 509-516); the boar
that killed Adonis; the boar that killed Attis; and the pig embodiment
of Typhon ('Golden Bough,' II. pages 26, 31). The pig seems to have been
originally a genius of the corn, and, seemingly because the too great
power of their divinity makes divine things dangerous to mortals, its
flesh was forbidden to many eastern nations; but as the meaning of the
prohibition was forgotten, abhorrence took the place of reverence, pigs
and boars grew into types of evil, and were described as the enemies of
the very gods they once typified ('Golden Bough,' II. 26-31, 56-57). The
Pig would, therefore, become the Black Pig, a type of cold and of winter
that awake in November, the old beginning of winter, to do battle with
the summer, and with the fruit and leaves, and finally, as I suggest;
and as I believe, for the purposes of poetry; of the darkness that will
at last destroy the gods and the world. The country people say there is
no shape for a spirit to take so dangerous as the shape of a pig; and a
Galway blacksmith--and blacksmiths are thought to be especially
protected--says he would be afraid to meet a pig on the road at night;
and another Galway man tells this story: 'There was a man coming the
road from Gort to Garryland one night, and he had a drop taken; and
before him, on the road, he saw a pig walking; and having a drop in, he
gave a shout, and made a kick at it, and bid it get out of that. And by
the time he got home, his arm was swelled from the shoulder to be as big
as a bag, and he couldn't use his hand with the pain of it. And his wife
brought him, after a few days, to a woman that used to do cures at
Rahasane. And on the road all she could do would hardly keep him from
lying down to sleep on the grass. And when they got to the woman she
knew all that happened; and, says she, it's wel