Europe's inner demons

In the ancient world it was of course not uncommon for a god to be symbolized by a sculptured animal — even apart from the Egyptian gods, there was Graeco-Roman Pan. But few animals were as poorly regarded as the donkey, “that most abject of all animals”, as Minucius Felix calls it; and a cult centred on a donkey-god could only be ridiculous and shameful. That is why Apion told his stories; for Apion was an Alexandrian Greek and the leading anti-Jewish publicist of his day. And for generations after Apion’s time similar tales concerning the Jews continued to circulate in Alexandria. As late as the fourth century Epiphanius knew of a book possessed by Alexandrian Gnostics which treated the theme in a particularly colourful way. It told how Zachariah saw in the Temple a being which was both man and donkey. When he described what he had seen to the Jews, they killed him.^* Those Gnostics maintained that because of this incident it had been decreed that the high priest should wear bells, so that when he entered the Temple to do priestly service, the being who was worshipped there would be warned in time to hide himself and the secret of his donkey-shape would be preserved.⁽¹⁸⁾

The fantasy of the donkey-cult was easily extended from the Jews to the Christians, not only because the Christian religion was long regarded as a mere offshoot of Judaism but because the Christian god presented much the same problem to pagan imagination as did the Jewish god. It was never easy for pagan Greeks and Romans to conceive of a god who was omnipotent and omnipresent and yet invisible. But whereas, so far as we know, Jews were accused of worshipping a donkey-god only in and around Alexandria, when the same charge was brought against the Christians it spread far and wide through the Empire. It was as familiar in the Rome of Minucius Felix as in Tertullian’s Carthage.

Christians were not the first to be accused of ritual murder and cannibalism, either; indeed, the true significance of the charge becomes apparent only when one realizes what other groups were similarly accused. The Roman historian Sallust, writing in the first century B.C., has this to report of the Catiline conspiracy which occurred in his lifetime: “Many say that, when Catiline bound his associates by oath to his criminal deed, he mixed the blood of a man with wine and passed it around in a bowl; when all had uttered the curse and had drunk from the bowl, as is the custom in holy rites, he revealed his plan.”⁽¹⁹⁾ This was mere fiction; otherwise Catiline’s great enemy Cicero would certainly not have omitted it from his Catiline orations. But the story flourished and expanded, until some three centuries after the event another historian, Dio Cassius, could write that Catiline and his associates had killed a boy, sworn an oath over his entrails and then eaten them together in a sacrificial meal.⁽²⁰⁾ Bearing in mind that this story is demonstrably false, we are justified in distrusting the same Dio Cassius when he says that the Egyptians who waged the Bucolic war against Rome in the second century A.D. began by slaughtering a Roman centurian, swearing an oath over his entrails and then devouring them.⁽²¹⁾

If such tales could be woven around well-documented historical events, it is no wonder that they could be woven into the half-legendary material inherited from a more obscure past. This happened when the Greek biographer Plutarch, writing in the second century A.D., came to tell of a conspiracy against the infant Roman Republic, six centuries earlier. After the last king of Rome, Tarquinius, had been expelled, his supporters plotted a restoration. “They decided,” says Plutarch, “that all should swear a powerful and fearful oath, and while doing so they should shed the blood of a murdered man (instead of pouring a libation of wine) and should touch his entrails.”⁽²²⁾ A less celebrated Greek writer of the second century, Polyaenus, has a more gruesome tale to tell about an obscure tyrant, Apollodorus of Cassandreia, who lived some four centuries before his time. When Apollodorus was plotting to seize power he sacrificed a boy, had a meal prepared from his entrails and set before his fellow-countrymen. ‘’When they had eaten, and also drunk the victim’s blood, which was dissolved in dark wine, he showed them the corpse and so, through this shared pollution, ensured their loyalty.”⁽²³⁾