Passing next to the corn-goddess Demeter, and remembering that in European folk-lore 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 have been
originally 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, the god is sacrificed to
himself
on the ground that he is his own enemy.
— Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough,
(1890)
digestion/cannibalism
