Pigs
March 16
I was driving to work this morning, thinking about fantasy. Specifically, I was thinking of the way objects and animals and events are sometimes imbued with a symbolic power. I was thinking of totems, and magical items, and animal-gods, and personal mythology-- trying to figure out how this stuff will work in Rangergirl, and in my next-next book, White Buffalo, and in my poetry.
As I rounded a curve, I had to brake sharply, because three huge black pigs came trotting across the road. I work up in the hills, where it's all dirt and redwoods, and the pigs came out of the woods on one side and went into the woods on the other, disappearing like bits of coal dropped down a dry well.
Three black pigs crossed my path. I got to thinking about the possible significance of that, what kind of omen it might be (if any), what it might portend.
Things that occurred to me:
Pigs eat their young. So did Chronos, and so did Tantalus-- one a cannibal for greed, the other for spite.
Pig flesh is considered "unclean" by More Major Religions. Pigs are generally perceived to be filthy animals, and if wallowing in mud to cool off because you can't sweat constitutes being filthy, then they are. There's the whole rooting-in-shit thing, too, of course.
Pigs find truffles-- it's odd that there haven't been more pig-based quest fantasies, since they're like bloodhounds for the rare and delicious.
I have vague childhood memories of my grandfather's hog farm, specifically of the sounds the pigs made when they were held up by their hind legs and castrated. I remember that my grandfather's horde of innumerable small dogs ate the severed testicles. But they were little, pink pigs, not black monsters like these-- anyone who tried to castrate these three black pigs might well find themselves castrated.
Pigs are very intelligent-- far smarter than most dogs.
Pigs are generally considered greedy, but they really aren't. A dog will overeat and make itself sick, but a pig won't.
Pigs are sometimes associated with the devil. I think of the Steinbeck story "St. Katy the Virgin" about a mean-tempered pig who is converted to Christianity and becomes a saint.
The story of the Three Little Pigs is an obvious connection… but these three pigs would have been more than a match for a single wolf. These pigs wouldn't have bothered to build houses, either-- they'd just run wild under the black sky. They wouldn't need the security of a house.
Then there's the whole fact that there were three of them. Three is often a number of great significance. The three questions asked by St. Peter outside the pearly gates in all those jokes. Three wishes. The three Magi. Three brothers and three sisters in all those fairy tales. The many threefold powers in mythology: the Fates, the Furies, the Trinity, the Graces, the Mother, Maiden, Crone group. The rule of Three (what you do comes back to you threefold).
And the crossing-my-path. A black cat crossing your path is bad luck, so what does is mean when three black pigs do it?
All this thinking led me to the conclusion that the three black pigs crossing my path could be an omen for just about anything I want. The mythic associations are so broad and rich that I could tailor them to suit anything (which is often the problem with omens). If I studied pigs in Chinese folklore, I would probably come up with all kinds of additional, tangential associations, too.
It's the same way with blackbirds. In some cultures they're harbingers of doom, or agents of the devil, or witches in disguise, or witch's familiars, or trickster figures, or the gods who brought the sun. It's the same way with serpents. Are they tools of the devil, or symbols of the feminine principle, or bringers of wisdom, or essentially alien creatures like the loa Dhamballa?
What is it that makes people do this, invest animals and objects with such extraordinary, contradictory significance? Like spiders: They're artists. They're poison. They create the world. They move in two worlds. They're symbols of fate.
This whole process, this myth-making based on the real and the concrete, it fascinates me. It shows up in my writing all the time, it occupies my thoughts.
Because there's some kind of magic there. Really. If enough people believe that an animal or an object or an event (like a comet in the sky, or an eclipse) has some specific significance, then it attains that significance, at least briefly, at least for those people. They change their lives in accordance with what they believe, they alter the course of their lives accordingly. It's a strange superimposition of human thought on top of the "real" world, it's the process of creating the world.
It's really remarkable.
But for me, for now… I think they were just some pigs crossing the road. If something remarkable happens today, maybe the pigs will attain significance in my memory. Maybe they'll become an omen I ignored.
If you're so inclined, send me mail.
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