The Good Good Pig by Sy Montgomery

Marvin Harris argues that pigs were once popular meat animals in the Middle East (and in fact new data suggest that one of two subspecies of wild pigs from which all farm pigs arose was first domesticated there). But the Israel of Leviticus was no place for swine. By then, human overpopulation had destroyed Israel’s Neolithic forests of oak and beech to make way for planted crops, especially olive groves. Without free forage, pigs were too expensive to raise—especially since, unlike sheep, goats, and cows, pigs can’t provide their people with wool or milk. So Jewish lawmakers said, quite literally, to hell with them.
    Graham and I have continued this conversation about religious taboos on pigs for fifteen years now. Recently he suggested yet another possibility. Perhaps pigs reminded the ancient Jews too much of ourselves. “Pigs are so close to humans,” he said. “They’re quite intelligent. Their hearts are so like ours that we use their valves in medicine. Their flesh even tastes like ours—or so I’ve heard.” (I had, too. This fact inspired certain Polynesian cannibals to coin a term for Westerners who literally came for dinner: “long pig.”)
    â€œThat may name our uneasiness with pigs,” Graham said. “There’s a sense that they’re too close to home, as though we are eating an element of ourselves.”
    Shortly after this talk I read a passage suggesting the Jewish prohibition against pigs was paradoxical. In his classic
The Golden Bough,
James George Frazer writes that pigs may have been originally
venerated
by the Jews. Until the time of Isaiah, he suggests, Jews considered both mice and pigs divine, their flesh eaten during sacramental ceremonies, in the spirit that Christians eat the Eucharist, the body of Christ, today. The very fact that pigs are now so reviled suggests they were once revered, and that overturning the old order required vehement injunctions.
    This could well be. For many cultures have—wisely, in my view—embraced the pig as a potent symbol of divinity.
    For their strength and cunning, wild pigs were emulated by warriors, invoked by wizards, consulted by soothsayers. In pre-Christian Europe, fortune-tellers looked into the fresh livers of pigs to see the future, for it was said their organs reflected the divine rays sent down by the gods. In Mycenaean Greece, the brave and ferocious wild boar was sacred to Ares, the god of war. Throughout Europe and Asia, gods were often associated with boars; in many myths, gods are slain by boars, as people surely were. Sows were revered for their fecundity. A white sow was the symbol of the Welsh goddess Cerridwen, a lunar deity worshiped as the Great Mother. Wild pigs were the favorite animals of the fertility god Freyr and his sister, Freyja, to whom Norsemen and Anglo-Saxons made solemn sacrifices. As a baby, Zeus, the future chief of the Olympian gods, was suckled by a sow.
    The Chinese consider the pig lucky, a symbol of both fertility and wealth. Even today, children collect their savings in ceramic piggy banks, perhaps a nod to the wisdom of a culture whose sterling accomplishments include domesticating pigs nine thousand years ago (a separate strain from the Middle Eastern stock) and inventing ceramics. In China, it is said that the Heavenly Jade Emperor himself named the twelfth year of the lunar calendar after the pig, for this was the twelfth creature to cross the finish line in a divinely inspired race to which all the animals were invited. People who are born in the Year of the Pig are believed to be blessed with the porcine qualities of sincerity, honesty, and kindness. (Consulting the place mat in a Chinese restaurant, I was disappointed to see that, unlike such lucky souls as Albert Schweitzer, Julie Andrews, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, neither Howard nor I—nor Christopher!—was born in a Pig year.)
    Elsewhere in Asia, pigs are widely admired. A Hindu creation