He makes, perhaps, a more plausible case for his reduction of dread
Persephone to a Pig. The process is curious. Early agricultural man
believed in a Corn Spirit, a spiritual essence animating the grain (in
itself no very unworthy conception). But because, as the field is mown,
animals in the corn are driven into the last unshorn nook, and then into
the open, the beast which rushed out of the last patch was identified
with the Corn Spirit in some animal shape, perhaps that of a pig; many
other animals occur. The pig 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.