The Pig: In Poetic, Mythological, and Moral-Historical Perspective

by Oskar Panizza, Erik Butler (Introduction)

"The Pig is the Sun...." So begins Oskar Panizza's outrageously heretical and massively erudite essay on the pig, originally published in 1900 in his journal Zurich Discussions. Moving from the Rig Veda to the Edda to Ovid, from the story of Tristan and Isolde to Nordic celebrations of Christmas, from Grimms' fairytales to Swedish folklore to Judeo-Egyptian dietary restrictions, the author contends, through painstakingly philological argumentation, that the miraculous swine occupies a central, celestial position as the life-giving force animating the entire universe, usurping the place of God as the beginning and end of all things.

Oskar Panizza (1853-1921) was a German psychiatrist turned avant-garde author. In 1894 he published his notorious play The Love Council: "A Heavenly Tragedy in Five Acts" that depicted the spread of syphilis among humanity in 1492 through a senile god, an idiot Christ, a promiscuous Mary and a depraved Pope Alexander VI. Charged with 93 counts of blasphemy, Panizza found his instantaneous literary fame accompanied by a 12-month prison sentence. Moving to Zurich, he published a journal, Zurich Discussions, the majority of which he wrote himself under a series of pen names. After being expelled from Switzerland, he relocated to Paris until his 1899 publication of anti-Germanic verse led to his finances being seized. He spent the last 16 years of his life in a Bavarian mental institution.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

120 pages, Paperback

Published March 26, 2016

About the author

Geboren am 12.11.1853 in Kissingen; gestorben am 28.9.1921 in Bayreuth.

Panizzas Vater war ein überzeugter Katholik, der es vom Kellner zum Besitzer mehrerer Hotels gebracht hatte; seine Mutter, einer Hugenottenfamilie entstammend, verfaßte protestantische Erbauungs- und Eifererschriften und setzte nach dem frühen Tod des Vaters (1855) ihren bigotten Pietismus zielstrebig durch.

Panizza besuchte die Gymnasien in Schweinfurt und München mit geringem Erfolg; erst nach Kaufmannslehre und Militärdienst machte er im Alter von 24 Jahren das Abitur. Anschließend studierte er Medizin, promovierte 1880 summa cum laude und wurde 1881 Assistenzarzt. Während eines beruflichen Aufenthaltes in Paris erweiterte er seine Kenntnisse der französischen Literatur und des Theaters. 1882 trat er die Stelle eines vierten Assistenzarztes an der Oberbayrischen Kreis-Irrenanstalt in München an, kündigte aber schon 1884 wieder, um seinen literarischen Neigungen zu leben. Die Schriftstellerei benutzte er als Therapie gegen seine psychische Labilität. Innerhalb der Münchner Boheme pflegte er vor allem Kontakte zu Michael Georg Conrad. Seit etwa 1890 widmete er sich verstärkt der Prosa und der polemisch zugespitzten kleinen Form. Seine Provokationen von Kirche und Staat erreichten mit der »Himmels-Tragödie« Das Liebeskonzil ihren Höhepunkt, das Stück wurde verboten, Panizza erhielt 1895 eine Gefängnisstrafe von einem Jahr. Nach Verbüßung der Strafe zog er 1896 nach Zürich und gründete dort einen eigenen Verlag zur Veröffentlichung seiner »Zürcher Diskußionen«, bissigen und hämischen Abrechnungen mit Staat, Kirche und Monarchie. 1898 wurde er als unerwünschter Ausländer aus der Schweiz ausgewiesen, er zog wieder nach Paris und veröffentlichte Parisjana. Deutsche Verse aus Paris. Die Schrift enthielt eine fundamentale Abrechnung mit dem deutschen Obrigkeitsstaat und persönliche Schmähungen Kaiser Wilhelm II., sie wurde konfisziert und sein Vermögen beschlagnahmt, so daß er 1901 nach Deutschland zurückkehren und sich der Justiz stellen mußte. Nach einem kurzen Gefängnisaufenthalt wurde er zur Beobachtung in die Psychiatrie eingeliefert, es wurde eine chronische Paranoia diagnostiziert, wodurch er wegen Unzurechnungsfähigkeit zwar keine Strafe erhielt, aber 1905 entmündigt wurde, nachdem er über Paris und Lausanne wieder in München gelandet war. Seit 1905 war er in psychiatrischen Anstalten in Bayreuth untergebracht.

[http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/autor/osk...}

Reviews

[Quiver · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Pig is difficult to classify.

It's non-fiction, erudite but creatively interpreted, with footnotes, lots of footnotes, so many that a page without them is a surprise and a page only of them ought to have been allowed by the publisher. Hebrew slips between two teeth, German and Latin between the other, Greek likes it on the tongue to roll about with French.

The first page has a black and white reproduction of Pornokratès or The Lady with the Pig by Félicien Rops (1878).



Any frivolity you may anticipate will drain from your mind after the first few footnotes; any flagrant immorality or irreligiousness might be flagrant to an astute mind willing to brave said footnotes full of quotes in their original languages—the translator left them wonderfully untouched.

The introductory chapter by the translator is aptly named Porco-Analysis, but is hard to make much of initially. Though you do understand fairly quickly that The Pig is the Sun is the thesis of the book and what follows is a proof by thorough analysis of myth.

You really can't get far without reading the footnotes. Occasionally sentences (All this made the Pig the paragon of Power, Fearsomeness, Courage, and untameable Desire) will confirm the thesis explicitly, then there'll be more footnotes.

In the Taittiriya Brâhmana, the Wild Boar guards the treasure of the demons (the stolen Winter Sun), which is locked away in seven mountains (the months of Winter); Indra slays the Boar and discovers the treasure (the Spring Sun) (ibid., 345.).*

Proof abounds for viewing the Boar as the principle of Fertility, Springtide, and the Venal Sun.

(p. 15)

The excerpts and connections are fun.

There's also a nonstandard version of Cinderella, who instead having to complete the impossible task of sorting lentils before being allowed to go to the ball, must “eat an immeasurable quantity of apples”.

Now, instead of summoning pigeons, she calls on “a veritable legion of Piglets, which consume the apples in her stead” (Gubernatis, 342).

(p. 16)

The Edda naturally gets a looking into: we are reminded that the Boar pulls Freyr’s Sun Chariot and in Skaldic Poetry, Freyr himself occasionally rides upon the Boar. In the Younger Edda, the Boar is vaunted further: he has the ability to run through air and water, unstoppably, and his bristle shine through the thickest darkness. Indeed,

In his Lexicon mythologiae (1828), Finn Magnusen calls him the immediate representative of the Sun: pro solis ipsius idolo sive simulacro.

(p. 35)

You might be scandalised:

One almost wishes to congratulate the Jews on the choice they made. Indeed, because they continue to observe the prohibition of consuming Pork, this spared them from eating their own God.*

(p. 64)

The star at the end of this quote leads to a footnote curious in itself.

*”Would, indeed, anyone be so mad as to declare something his God and, at the same time, eat it?” asked Cicero in De nature deorum, III, 16—hardly suspecting, or course, that one hundred years alter his question would prove altogether timely.

(Marcus Tullius Cicero lived in the first century before Christ.)

In the end, a hundred pages later, it's still an odd book, but one that's enjoyable for its depth and erudition. And if you like pigs, this is the book for you. Pig as solar deity? Well, why not?

[Phinehas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so brilliant and so utterly insane I'm having trouble believing it actually exists.

[W · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF.

If you're a Jungian, you should not read this; there's so much symbology, you will die from continuously orgasming. (Or, if you want to die that way, maybe you should read it. I'm not judging you and I love you.)

There is historical relevance to this, I'm sure; but it's just so very boring. It's exceptionally researched (there are multi-page footnotes that are so long, the page contains a single sentence of text) and broad in scope; however, the point is lost along the way. I wanted to like this, but I didn't.

This is niche literature at its finest, it's just not my niche.

If I saw someone reading this, I would break character, sit down beside that person, and ask what they thought about it. Also, if I did see someone reading this, I would pinch myself, hard, somewhere sensitive. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Panizza, the Pig, or the person reading; it's just something I would do.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

The biggest problem with Panizza's book is it's lack of coherent organizing principle. Too often "The Pig" reads as merely a catalog of quotations from a wide variety of peoples and nations that exemplify Panizza's thesis that pigs have played crucial roles in world religions. The roles have been bad and good (or some form of opposition—often in simultaneous, contradictory ways). Ultimately, "The Pig" ends up as an example of a time when philology held sway in the humanities, an example that is interesting but not compelling.

[Haywan Al-Hashishi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've read this only because author is quoted in the introduction of one chapter of Ray's excellent Malpertuis.
While this obviously impressed edgelords of its age, it is all but irrelevant today and Panizza himself is sadly neither as clever nor as funny as he obviously considers himself to be. Provocation for the sake of provocation.

[George Landau-Pincus · Rating 4 out of 5]

This really grew on me as it went on. The formatting is abysmal and the choice to translate some passages and not others drove me up a wall, but the text is such a beautiful fever dream. This man LOVES pigs! Some of his points are definitely stretches, but I’ll admit - I think I’ve bought into the thesis that pigs are the sun and moon and god and fertility. Deeply fun, silly academia vibes.

[Bryce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating (although a bit scattershot) anthropological (more or less) study of the Pig (vis a vis humans). A bit like Robert Burton but fewer words, a bit like JL Borges but more obsessive on its subject. Informative and entertaining but pig-haters perhaps won't love it.

[Dylan Rock · Rating 4 out of 5]

An ambitious book that sets out to explain the relationship between human culture, especially Europeans and the Boar or Pig. Some extremely interesting ideas on the Christian holidays and their relation to Pagan Festival

[El Rato Pequeño · Rating 2 out of 5]

Deep delving essay into a particular mythological concept involving the porcine as a celestial symbol, recurring time and time again across disparate cultures... but written in such an obtuse way that it's difficult to get much out of it unless you're doing a diploma thesis on the topic. The sheer amount and volume of footnotes (at times squishing the main text into a single line per page) could've been a separate booklet all by itself, and a lot of them should've just been intervowen into the main text from the start. One advantage the book has however is its relative proximity to some of the european folkloric traditions that it describes, rendering it close to a proper historical testimony at times.