328 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia[358] must once have dwelt beneath the earth, and been himself one of
those spirits of darkness whose faces were veiled from the sight
of the living.
Nin-ip, then, must have been one of the Anunna-ki, a spirit
of the earth and the land of Hades, before he assumed the form
of a Semitic Baal, and clothed himself with the attributes of the
sun-god. And the shape in which he appeared to his worshippers
was that of a swine. We are told that Nin-ip was one with Nin-
sakh,“the lord of the swine”^283 and the servant of El-lil, who
was adored at Lagas in Sumerian days, and to whom a temple
was erected even at Erech. That the swine should be connected
with the underground world of the dead, is not surprising. We
find the same connection in Keltic mythology. There, too, the
swine are the cattle of Hades, and it was from the subterranean
fields of Hades that they were transported by Pryderi to the earth
above.^284 The swine turns up the ground in his search for food;
even to-day he is used to hunt for truffles, and primitive man saw
in his action an attempt to communicate with the spirits of the
underworld.^285
From the earth-spirit with the veiled face, who incarnated
himself in the swine, the distance is great to the solar hero and
warrior god of the Semitic age. In fact, the distance is too
great to be spanned by any natural process of evolution. It is a
distance in kind and not in degree. It presupposes fundamentally
different conceptions of religion, animism on the one side and
anthropomorphic gods on the other. If we are to listen to
[359] fashionable theories of the origin of religion, we start in the
one case with the fetish, in the other case with the worship of
(^283) WAI.ii. 57. 39.
(^284) Gwydion induced Pryderi by stratagem to give some of them to him, and
so carried them from Dyved to North Wales; Rhys, Hibbert Lectures onCeltic
Heathendom, pp. 242-244.
(^285) Cf.WAI.ii. 19. 49b,“the spirits of the earth I made grope like swine in the
hollows.”