wry, which lived in
the sea, and of the Great Mother,[430] who was sprung from the cowry and
hence born of the sea. In the story of the man carrying the pig being
attacked by a sea-monster, perhaps we have an incident of that
widespread story of the shark guarding the pearls. We have already seen
how it was distorted into the fantastic legend of the dog's role in the
digging up of mandrakes. In the version we are now considering the
pearl's place is taken by the pig, both of them surrogates of the cowry.

The object of the ceremony of carrying the pig into the sea was not the
cleansing of "the unclean animal," nor was it _primarily_ a rite of
purification in any sense of the term: it was simply a ritual procedure
for identifying the sacrifice with the goddess by putting it in her own
medium, and so transforming the surrogate of the sea-shell, the
prototype of the sea-born goddess, into the actual Great Mother.

The question naturally arises: what was the real purpose of the
sacrifice of the pig?

In the story of the Destruction of Mankind we have seen that originally
a human victim was slain for the purpose of obtaining the life-giving
human blood to rejuvenate the ageing king. Two circumstances were
responsible for the modification of this procedure. In the first place,
there was the abandonment of human sacrifice and the substitution of
either beer coloured red with ochre to resemble blood (or in other cases
red wine) or the actual blood of an animal sacrifice in place of the
human blood. Secondly, the blood of the Great Mother herself
(personified in the special _avatar_ that was recognized in a particular
locality, the cow in one place, the pig in another, and so on) was
regarded as more potent as a life-giving force than that of a mere
mortal human being. It is possible, perhaps even probable, that this was
the real reason for the abandoning of human sacrifice and the
substitution of an animal for a human being. For it is unlikely that, in
the rude state of society which had become familiarized with and
brutalized by the practice of these bloody rites of homicide, ethical
motives alone would have prompted the abolition of the custom of human
sacrifice, to which such deep significance was attached. The
substitution of the animal was prompted rather by the idea of obtaining
a more potent elixir from the life-blood of the Great Mother herself in
her cow- or sow-forms.

In the transitional stage of the process of s