ubstitution of an animal
for a human being some confusion seems to have arisen as to the ritual
meaning of the new procedure. If Moret's account of the Egyptian
Mysteries[431] is correct--and without a knowledge of Egyptian philology
I am not competent to express an opinion upon this matter--the attempt
was made to identify the animal victim of sacrifice with the human being
whose place it had taken. In the procession a human being wore the skin
of an animal; and, according to Moret, there was a ceremony of passing a
human being through the skin as a ritual procedure for transforming the
mock victim into the animal which was to be sacrificed in his place. If
there is any truth in this interpretation, such a ceremony must have
been prompted by a misunderstanding of the meaning of the sacrifice,
unless the identification of the sacrificial animal with the goddess was
merely a secondary rationalization of the substitution which had been
made for ethical or some other reasons.

We know that the dead were often buried in the skins of sacrificial
animals, and so identified with the life-giving deities and given
rebirth. We know also that in certain ceremonies the appropriate skins
were worn by those who were impersonating particular gods or goddesses.
The wearing of these skins of divine animals seems to have been prompted
not so much by the idea of a reincarnation in animal form as by the
desire for identification and communion with the particular deity which
the animal represented. The whole question, however, is one of great
complexity, which can only be settled by a critical study of the texts
by some scholar who keeps clearly before his mind the real issues, and
refuses to take refuge in the stereotyped evasions of conventional
methods of interpretation.

The sacrifice of the sow to Demeter is merely a late variant of Hathor's
sacrifice of a human being to rejuvenate the king Re. How the real
meaning of the story became distorted I have already explained in
Chapter II ("Dragons and Rain Gods"). The killing of the sow to obtain a
good harvest is homologous with the sacrifice of a maiden to obtain a
good inundation of the river. The sow is the surrogate of the beautiful
princess of the fairy tale. Instead of the maiden being slain, in one
case, as Andromeda, she is rescued by the hero, in the other her place
is taken by a sow. These late rationalizations are merely glosses of the
deep motives which more than fifty centuri