The Seba library treats Hog in 9 passages, across 6 authors (including Hillman, James, Campbell, Joseph, Bly, Robert).
Hogs destined for slaughter had first to be inspected by the local exorcist, following Mark 5: 12 where Jesus drives devils into pigs.
Hillman traces the pig's ritual ambivalence from Islamic abhorrence through Christian demonology, establishing the hog as a receptacle of projected evil in monotheistic cultures while simultaneously noting its deep sacrificial centrality.
, Animal Presences, 2008thesis
The ritual lore and mythology of the pig hold a place of the greatest importance throughout Oceania, not
Campbell situates pig mythology as a primary symbolic system across Oceania, linking Polynesian pig sacrifice to Egyptian, Etruscan, and Babylonian ritual complexes and to the identification of Seth as pig in Osiris's judgment scene.
, The Mythic Image, 1974thesis
The animals led us to this approach, as if they were the essentials of the dreams, perhaps even essences.
Hillman positions the pig, alongside other dream animals, as exemplary of an essentialist approach to imagery in which the animal presents itself as pure psychic essence rather than symbol to be decoded therapeutically.
, Animal Presences, 2008thesis
We reach the bottom when Baba Yaga's hostile boar energy has completely replaced — for a time — the childlike eros which each of us felt when our mother set a breast to our mouth.
Bly deploys boar/hog energy as the psychic force of the negative Great Mother that must fully displace infantile eros before genuine masculine initiation descent can be completed.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990supporting
hog, see Pig, mythology of
Campbell's index explicitly identifies 'hog' as a cross-reference to the pig mythology entries, confirming the term's functional equivalence with 'pig' in comparative mythological analysis and its co-occurrence with Seth, Egyptian religion, and Oceanic symbolism.
, The Mythic Image, 1974supporting
This technical term combines two species (ovis, taurus), which were certainly domesticated, with sūs, and this presumably indicates that this was likewise a domesticated animal.
Benveniste establishes through the suovetaurilia sacrifice that the pig (sus) was a fully domesticated sacrificial animal in Roman ritual, refuting the wild/domestic distinction and grounding the hog's symbolic importance in its formal liturgical status.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973supporting
sūs is the name for the porcine species. We must reread a chapter of the De Agricultura by Cato (141), the famous text which describes the
Benveniste's philological analysis of the suovetaurilia establishes the porcine species' central place in Indo-European sacrificial vocabulary, showing that the pig was defined by its ritual utility rather than by wild or domestic opposition.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973supporting
McDonald (1974) reported bradycardia in the hog-nosed snake during death-feigning.
Porges references the hog-nosed snake's thanatotic response as neurophysiological evidence for vagal bradycardia in death-feigning behavior, the term 'hog' appearing only adjectivally in a zoological context tangential to its symbolic valence.
, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, 2011aside
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet
McGilchrist cites Heinlein's catalogue of human competencies in which butchering a hog appears as one practical skill among many, illustrating the generalist ideal against specialist reduction; the hog here carries no symbolic weight beyond the domestic-practical.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside