Moses-Sugarcandy Mountain myth

Moses, the tame raven who had been Mr. Jones's especial pet, was a spy and a tale-bearer, but also a clever talker. He claimed to know of a mysterious country called Sugarcandy Mountain, to which all animals went when they died. Situated somewhere up in the sky, a little distance beyond the clouds, it was a place where it was Sunday seven days a week, clover was in season all the year round, and lump sugar and linseed cake grew on the hedges. During the secret meetings in the barn after Old Major's speech, the pigs had to argue very hard to persuade the animals that such a place did not exist, contending with a belief that offered a comforting escape from the miseries of their laborious lives under Mr. Jones. Some animals, despite their hatred for Moses because he told tales and did no work, were drawn to the promise of a better world beyond the grave.

After the Rebellion, Moses vanished from the farm for several years. In the middle of the summer, however, he suddenly reappeared, quite unchanged, still doing no work and talking in the same strain about Sugarcandy Mountain. Perching on a stump and flapping his black wings, he would tell anyone who would listen that up there, just on the other side of the dark cloud, lay that happy country where poor animals would rest forever from their labours. He even claimed to have been there on one of his higher flights and to have seen the everlasting fields of clover and the linseed cake and lump sugar growing on the hedges. Many of the animals believed him, reasoning that their lives were now hungry and laborious, and that it was only right and just that a better world should exist somewhere else.

The pigs' attitude toward Moses was difficult to determine. They declared contemptuously that his stories about Sugarcandy Mountain were lies, yet they allowed him to remain on the farm, not working, and even granted him an allowance of a gill of beer a day. This tolerance contrasted sharply with the pigs' earlier efforts to discredit the myth, and it came at a time when the regime of Napoleon was consolidating its own ideology. The pigs had reduced the principles of Animalism to the single maxim "Four legs good, two legs bad" and had inscribed the Seven Commandments on the barn wall. But the Commandments were gradually altered to suit the pigs' interests, and the revolutionary song "Beasts of England"—which had once stirred the animals with the vision of a golden future—was abolished by decree, replaced by a hymn praising Napoleon. The animals, however, continued to hum the tune secretly, and the belief that the Republic of the Animals foretold by Old Major would someday come was never entirely abandoned.

The Sugarcandy Mountain myth functioned as a religious consolation without any revolutionary demand. It promised a perfect afterlife without requiring any struggle or change in the present. The pigs, who had built a secular ideology around the overthrow of humans and the self-rule of animals, eventually came to behave like the very humans they had denounced. They walked on their hind legs, carried whips, wore clothes, and even smoked pipes. In the end, it became impossible to tell pig from man. The myth of an otherworldly paradise, meanwhile, remained a harmless fantasy that the pigs could tolerate, as it posed no threat to their power. The contrast between the static, escapist hope of Sugarcandy Mountain and the dynamic, corrupted vision of Animal Farm highlights the fate of revolutionary ideals: the utopian dream of the animals was betrayed by the pigs who became indistinguishable from the human oppressors, while the religious myth of a perfect afterlife persisted unchanged, offering comfort without agency.