effigies
of the sun, the moon, the cow and the hog, with an imprecation on
whoever should revoke the edict. [8] Colonel Tod says that the pig
was included as being execrated by all classes, but this seems very
doubtful. It would scarcely occur to any Hindu nowadays to associate
the image of the impure pig with those of the sun, moon and cow,
the representations of three of his greatest deities. Rather it
gives some reason for supposing that the pig was once worshipped,
and the Rajputs still do not hold the wild boar impure, as they hunt
it and eat its flesh. Moreover, Vishnu in his fourth incarnation was
a boar. The Gonds regularly offer pigs to their great god Bura Deo,
and though they now offer goats as well, this seems to be a later
innovation. The principal sacrifice of the early Romans was the
Suovetaurilia or the sacrifice of a pig, a ram and a bull. The order
of the words, M. Reinach remarks, [9] is significant as showing the
importance formerly attached to the pig or boar. Since the pig was
the principal sacrificial animal of the primitive tribes, the Gonds
and Baigas, its connection with the ritual of an alien and at one
time hostile religion may have strengthened the feeling of aversion
for it among the Hindus, which would naturally be engendered by its
own dirty habits.

9. The buffalo as a corn-god

It seems possible then that the Hindus reverenced the wild boar in
the past as one of the strongest and fiercest animals of the forest
and also as a destroyer of the crops. And they still make sacrifices
of the pig to guard their fields from his ravages. These sacrifices,
however, are not offered to any deity who can represent a deified
pig but to Bhainsasur, the deified buffalo. The explanation seems
to be that in former times, when forests extended over most of
the country, the cultivator had in the wild buffalo a direr foe
than the wild pig. And one can well understand how the peasant,
winning a scanty subsistence from his poor fields near the forest,
and seeing his harvest destroyed in a night by the trampling of a herd
of these great brutes against whom his puny weapons were powerless,
looked on them as terrible and malignant deities. The sacrifice of a
buffalo would be beyond the means of a single man, and the animal is
now more or less sacred as one of the cow tribe. But the annual joint
sacrifice of one or more buffaloes is a regular feature of the Dasahra
festival and extends over a great part