Seven Commandments

The Seven Commandments were inscribed on the tarred end wall of the big barn in great white letters by Snowball, who climbed a ladder while Squealer held the paint-pot, within days of the Rebellion. They represented the reduction of the principles of Animalism into an unalterable law that all animals on Animal Farm must live by for ever after. Snowball read them aloud, and the cleverer animals began to learn them by heart; the spelling included a mistake in "freind" and a reversed "S," but the words were otherwise correct.

The original seven decrees forbade any commerce with humanity and established a clear boundary: whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy; whatever goes upon four legs or has wings is a friend. No animal might wear clothes, sleep in a bed, drink alcohol, kill any other animal, and all animals were declared equal. These commandments echoed the prohibitions Old Major had laid down in his final speech—against living in a house, sleeping in a bed, wearing clothes, drinking alcohol, engaging in trade, and above all against tyranny over one's own kind. The Commandments thus became the sacred constitution of the new society.

But the text on the wall proved to be malleable. When the pigs moved into the farmhouse and began sleeping in the beds, Clover discovered that the Fourth Commandment had been altered: it now read "No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets." Later, after the executions of the traitors, Muriel found that the Sixth Commandment had acquired the qualification "without cause." And when the pigs drank whisky, the Fifth Commandment silently became "No animal shall drink alcohol to excess." Each change was discovered only after the fact, and the animals could not remember the original wording. A mysterious incident—a broken ladder, a spilled paint-pot, and Squealer sprawling at the foot of the wall—hinted at the physical mechanism behind these revisions.

In the final years, the wall bore only a single maxim: "ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS." The original seven had been erased, and the pigs now walked on their hind legs, carried whips, wore clothes, and drank alcohol, becoming indistinguishable from the human beings they had overthrown. The Commandments, once a promise of liberation, had been transformed into the ideological justification of a new hierarchy. The animals' memory of the original laws faded, and only old Benjamin, who had seen it all, remained silent.