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In northern Arcadia I also learnt that the flesh of the pig, in respect of which the ordinary Graeculus fully deserves the epithet esuriens, is taboo; and the result of eating it is believed to be leprosy. It might be supposed that this superstition has resulted from contact with Mohammedans; but such an explanation would not account for the confinement of it to one locality—and that a mountainous and unprofitable district where intercourse with the Turks must have been small; and further the Greek would surely have found a malicious pleasure, the most piquant of sauces, in eating that which offended the two peoples whom he most abhors, Turks and Jews. On the other hand, if we suppose this fear of swine’s flesh to be a piece of native tradition, its origin may well be sought in the ritual observances of the old cult of Demeter and her daughter, to whom the pig was sacred and in whose honour it was sacrificed once only in each year, at the festival of the Thesmophoria[154]. There are many instances among different peoples of the belief that skin diseases, especially leprosy, are the punishment visited upon those who eat of the sacred or unclean animal; for the distinction between sacred and unclean is not made until a primitive sense of awe is inclined by conscious reasoning in the direction either of reverence or of abhorrence[155]. Thus in Egypt, the land from which the Pelasgians, if Herodotus[156] might be believed, derived the worship of Demeter, it was held that the drinker of pig’s milk incurred leprosy[157]; and we may reasonably suppose that the same punishment threatened those Egyptians who tasted of pig’s flesh save at their one annual festival when this was enjoined[158]. Now the Thesmophoria resembled this Egyptian festival in that it was an annual occasion for sacrificing pigs and for partaking therefore of their flesh; if then the worshippers of Demeter, like the Egyptians, were forbidden to use the pig for food at other times, and if the penalty for disobedience in Greece too was believed to be leprosy, the present case of taboo in Arcadia—the only one known to me in modern Greece—may be a survival from the ancient cult.