The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV | Page 5

down. Hindus, usually of the lower castes, offer
pigs to Bhainsasur to propitiate him and preserve their crops from his

ravages, but they cannot touch the impure pig themselves. What they
have to do, therefore, is to pay the Kumhar the price of the pig and get
him to offer it to Bhainsasur on their behalf. The Kumhar goes to the
god and sacrifices the pig and then takes the body home and eats it, so
that his trade is a profitable one, while conversely to sacrifice a pig
without partaking of its flesh must necessarily be bitter to the frugal
Hindu mind, and this indicates the importance of the deity who is to be
propitiated by the offering. The first question which arises in
connection with this curious custom is why pigs should be sacrificed
for the preservation of the crops; and the reason appears to be that the
wild pig is the animal which, at present, mainly damages the crops.

7. The goddess Demeter
In ancient Greece pigs were offered to Demeter, the corn-goddess, for
the protection of the crops, and there is good reason to suppose that the
conceptions of Demeter herself and the lovely Proserpine grew out of
the worship of the pig, and that both goddesses were in the beginning
merely the deified pig. The highly instructive passage in which Sir J. G.
Frazer advances this theory is reproduced almost in full [7]: "Passing
next to the corn-goddess Demeter, and remembering that in European
folklore the pig is a common embodiment of the corn-spirit, we may
now ask whether the pig, which was so closely associated with
Demeter, may not originally have been the goddess herself in animal
form? The pig was sacred to her; in art she was portrayed carrying or
accompanied by a pig; and the pig was regularly sacrificed in her
mysteries, the reason assigned being that the pig injures the corn and is
therefore an enemy of the goddess. But after an animal has been
conceived as a god, or a god as an animal, it sometimes happens, as we
have seen, that the god sloughs off his animal form and becomes purely
anthropomorphic; and that then the animal which at first had been slain
in the character of the god, comes to be viewed as a victim offered to
the god on the ground of its hostility to the deity; in short, that the god
is sacrificed to himself on the ground that he is his own enemy. This
happened to Dionysus and it may have happened to Demeter also. And
in fact the rites of one of her festivals, the Thesmophoria, bear out the

view that originally the pig was an embodiment of the corn-goddess
herself, either Demeter or her daughter and double Proserpine. The
Thesmophoria was an autumn festival celebrated by women alone in
October, and appears to have represented with mourning rites the
descent of Proserpine (or Demeter) into the lower world, and with joy
her return from the dead. Hence the name Descent or Ascent variously
applied to the first, and the name Kalligeneia (fair-born) applied to the
third day of the festival. Now from an old scholium on Lucian we learn
some details about the mode of celebrating the Thesmophoria, which
shed important light on the part of the festival called the Descent or the
Ascent. The scholiast tells us that it was customary at the
Thesmophoria to throw pigs, cakes of dough, and branches of
pine-trees into 'the chasms of Demeter and Proserpine,' which appear to
have been sacred caverns or vaults.
"In these caverns or vaults there were said to be serpents, which
guarded the caverns and consumed most of the flesh of the pigs and
dough-cakes which were thrown in. Afterwards--apparently at the next
annual festival--the decayed remains of the pigs, the cakes, and the
pine-branches were fetched by women called 'drawers,' who, after
observing, rules of ceremonial purity for three days, descended into the
caverns, and, frightening away the serpents by clapping their hands,
brought up the remains and placed them on the altar. Whoever got a
piece of the decayed flesh and cakes, and sowed it with the seed-corn in
his field, was believed to be sure of a good crop.
"To explain this rude and ancient rite the following legend was told. At
the moment when Pluto carried off Proserpine, a swineherd called
Eubuleus chanced to be herding his swine on the spot, and his herd was
engulfed in the chasm down which Pluto vanished with Proserpine.
Accordingly, at the Thesmophoria pigs were annually thrown into
caverns to commemorate the disappearance of the swine of Eubuleus. It
follows from this that the casting of the pigs into the vaults at the
Thesmophoria formed part of the dramatic representation of
Proserpine's