Animals, Gods and Humans - Chapter 11 pptx

We will focus especially on the ways in which a new Christian iden-tity was created in symbolic and mythological language by the Christians themselves and by their adversaries, and how a

Animals as boundary markers

In this chapter, we will look into how animals marked boundaries between different religions and how they were used internally to indicate distance from one’s neighbours, from those one lived closest to and shared belief with – those who to external observers looked pretty much the same as oneself We will focus especially on the ways in which a new Christian iden-tity was created in symbolic and mythological language by the Christians themselves and by their adversaries, and how animals were used as symbolic elements in these identities

When Artemidorus in his Oneirocritica, “The Interpretation of Dreams”,

comments on customs that are peculiar to some groups (1.8), he mentions six examples Some groups are characterized by their tattoos; the Mossynes have sexual intercourse with their wives in public just like dogs; all men eat fish except for the Syrians, who worship Astarte; the Egyptians alone venerate animals; Italians do not kill vultures; and, finally, only Ephesians, Athenian youths and the most noble of the inhabitants of Larissa in Thessaly take part in bullfights

Most striking in this list is the fact that five out of six customs in one way or another refer to animals It is strange, but also typical In traditional societies, animals usually describe what is peculiar and thus function as boundary markers How people treat animals, which animals they do not eat and in what ways they compare other people to animals and liken their way

of living to bestial behaviour constitute such boundaries Sometimes an animal functions as an identity symbol for a group or an area The fish and the vultures in Artemidorus’ examples probably functioned in this way Metaphorical animals were used to make and maintain cultural bound-aries and to label categories of people and cultural systems In his recent

book, Racism in Antiquity, Benjamin Isaac connects the animal comparison

with imperialism:

Comparisons and metaphors identifying people with animals are common in ancient literature There is a rich and varied literary

T H E C R U C I F I E D D O N K E Y- M A N ,

T H E L E O N T O C E P H A L U S A N D T H E

C H A L L E N G E O F B E A S T S

tradition that uses animals as literary devices However, not all literary passages that represent people as animals should be interpreted as comparisons or metaphors Some of them seem to be intended quite literally Thus Aristotle says that those who yield to unnatural inclina-tions are not natural, but bestial or diseased He applies this also to entire peoples Like the theory of natural slavery and related attitudes towards foreigners, the animal comparison was part of an attitude of mind, a way of thinking about oneself as distinct from a foreigner, which formed the framework in which imperialism could flourish unfettered by moral inhibitions or restraints

(Isaac 2004: 506) The animal comparison was one of the imageries that determined ancient ideas about foreigners When people are called animals, their humanity is denied Especially faraway peoples were described in this way However, these descriptions do not necessarily have so much to add to our under-standing of the different species Isaac poignantly observes “that the Greek and Romans often refer to animals and their behaviour without actually

looking at them” (ibid.: 250).

Wild animals were used to describe barbarians – that which was conceived of as strange, antagonistic and dangerous to civilization Plutarch, for instance, characterizes barbarians as beastly and savage (Nikolaidis and Rethymnon 1986) Historian Ammianus Marcellinus says in connection with Julian’s treatment of the Christian bishops that “no wild beasts are such enemies to mankind as are most Christians in their deadly hatred of one another” (22.4.4) Ammianus Marcellinus took his animal metaphors from the Roman arenas and from the life of wild and dangerous animals such as vipers, birds of prey and lions T.E.J Wiedemann has pointed out that “Ammianus chooses parallels taken from his own experience as an offi-cial from an urban, curial background, rather than metaphors involving agricultural beasts as was usual in classical literature” (Wiedemann 1986:

198, note 63) According to Wiedemann, all the animals in Ammianus’

metaphors illustrate negative qualities (ibid.: 201) A similar point is

stressed by Timothy D Barnes who, besides noting that there is “a certain repetitiveness about these comparisons to animals” (Barnes 1998: 108), also points out that “Ammianus’ animal comparisons usually have a highly

nega-tive connotation” (ibid.: 109; cf Smith 1998: 93).

The Christian Prudentius, who wrote a reply to the pagan Symmachus, likens barbarians to animals For even if animals drink the same water as humans and breathe the same air: “Yet what is Roman and what is barbarian are as different from each other as the four-footed creature is distinct from the two-footed or the dumb from the speaking; and no less apart are they who loyally obey God’s commands from senseless cults and their supersti-tions” (2.816–19)

An animal comparison may also be used to establish internal hierarchy.

The Christian Cassian (c 360–433 CE) comments on a pair of monks who interpreted the saying “take up your cross” (Luke 9:23, 14:27; Matthew 10:38) literally, and staggering under their crosses, became objects of ridicule for their brethren Cassian characterizes these simple-minded monks

as “cattle”, although he adds, with reference to Psalm 36:6, that the Lord

saves “both man and beast” (Conlationes, 8.3; in Clark 1999: 85) In this way,

Cassian makes an elitist opposition between himself and his inferiors, because of their stupidity, but he does not make them into barbarians, as he would have done if he had characterized them as some species of wild animal

Religion was definitively marked out by animals during the Roman Empire Egypt was unique in its cultic use of huge numbers of animals, in the great variety of species involved and in the fact that some of these animals were considered divine in their own right (see Chapter 5) In Egypt, animal cults were not only used to signal the specifically Egyptian but also

to mark boundaries between the different Egyptian regions Conflicts between towns and regions often started because the sacred animal of one area had been killed by people from another area Plutarch describes how the Cynopolitans ate the sacred fish of Oxyrhynchus, and the Oxyrhynchites offered the sacred dog of Cynopolis in sacrifice and devoured it The

resulting war was eventually stopped by the Romans (Isis and Osiris, 72).

Such sacred animals – be they dogs, crocodiles or fish – worked as uniting symbols in one area They were local symbols, not necessarily seen as sacred

in all Egypt (Frankfurter 1998: 66–7)

An overwhelming presence of animals, real or metaphorical, is typical of several of the religions that flourished during the empire At the same time, one of the most devastating accusations that could be made against a religion and its adherents was that its cult object was an animal As we have seen, there were different patterns for how animals should be applied

in religions, differences in how various groups regarded “sacred” animals and differences in how people thought these animals should be interpreted Animals were used flexibly and functioned as markers of cultural bound-aries – of what was sacred as well as what was regarded as strange or barbarian

While the Egyptians stressed their uniqueness by extended use of animals and animal symbols, the Jews and the Christians accentuated their unique-ness exactly by trying as best they could to keep animals out of their religions Not least the Israelites’ dance around the golden calf had made it difficult to embrace anything like sacred animals in these religions Like the Jews, who no longer sacrificed animals after the temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed in 70 CE, Christians did not sacrifice animals Like the Egyptians, Jews and Christians used animals as religious and cultural boundary markers, but in a negative way

Tertium genus

The development of Christian identity in antiquity was among other things

a question of redefinition Christians in the second and third century had a sort of double identity, belonging to pagan culture on the one hand and to Christianity with its strong roots in Judaism on the other, and they had to define those affiliations In short, they had to define their relationship to Jews and pagans in a language of similarities and differences

Many of the Christians were converts In the words of Tertullian from Carthage, who wrote about 200 CE, “Christians are made, not born”

(Apologeticus, 18.4) Their pagan background and culture were reflected in the

philosophical and rhetorical competence of the Christian intellectual elite Christianity started as a Jewish sect The close connection to Judaism can

be seen in the way Jewish texts were used in the Christian canon and in the conception of Christianity as a reinterpretation of Jewish religion, in fact as its true interpretation The two religions used similar exegetical methods, but the Christians saw the Jewish texts in the Bible as a prefiguration of their own texts

In these centuries, when Christianity was growing, Christians gradually integrated the plural culture of the empire into it In a way, they sucked it

up and swallowed it, and what they could not digest, they spat out They used something, but not everything, and eventually gave the Roman Empire the only language in which religion could afterwards be expressed This language is described by the specialist in late antiquity and Byzantine studies, Averil Cameron, as “the rhetoric of empire” (Cameron 1994) In these centuries, a profound change was made in the traditional structures of religion As we have seen, one of the things that characterized the ideal Christian was that they did not participate in the Roman sacrificial cult Instead, communication between God and humans took place with the human body as a medium God took a human form in Christ, the belief in the resurrection of the body was established, the body and blood of Christ were consumed in the Eucharist, and gradually a cult of the martyrs devel-oped It was a change from the use of animals as key symbols and from interpreting animal intestines to using a human being and his death as a key symbol and interpreting human souls This change of key symbol also implied a change in the way identity was marked out

In the Roman Empire during the centuries when Christianity grew from

a minority religion to become the religion of the state, there was a process of devaluation of animals and a parallel process working towards an apotheosis

of man The development of human identity in this period took place among other things within the context of these processes

Christian authors sometimes described the Christians as tertium genus, a

third race, in relation to Greeks and Romans on the one hand and Jews on

the other This expression is found for instance in Tertullian (Ad Nationes,

1.8) and Clement of Alexandria (Stromateis, 5.4), as well as in Eusebius (Preparation to the Gospel, 2.1).

For the Christians themselves, to be of a third race implied having a heav-enly citizenship and belonging to a religious elite For the Greeks and Romans, as well as the Jews, it implied that the Christians set themselves apart from traditional Roman society and from Jewish traditions Tertullian asks ironically whether his opponents think that this third race is dog-eyed

(cynopae) or shadow-footed (sciapodes)? In short, do they think Christians are freaks? The designation tertium genus catches something significant about

Christian identity in the second to fourth century CE, namely that it was established in interplay with and opposition to Graeco-Roman religion on the one hand and Judaism on the other The designation also shows that the Christian identity was considered as new in relation to traditional identities And, as is well known, to be conceived of as new and no part of an established cultural and religious tradition was no advantage in the Graeco-Roman world (Warmind 1989) Translated into the language of symbols, the new identity was that of a hybrid between beast and man Two examples will illustrate how this alleged hybrid identity was elaborated upon

In the first example, the Christian god was depicted with an ass’s head This caricature seems to have been created by pagans or Jews but was used

in Christian apologies for internal Christian purposes when the authors of

these apologies wanted to show who the real animals were According to

them, the real animals were not the Christians but the pagans The hybrid ass marks the boundary between Christianity and paganism as well as the boundary between Christianity and Judaism It is an external boundary between religions

According to the second example, taken from Christian gnostic texts, the Jewish god is a hybrid monster, partly man, partly lion, partly snake However, the superior god is truly human and designated Man This lion-headed god was used as a marker of internal boundaries by groups that challenged the Christian mainstream

The crucified donkey-man

At the heart of the Roman Empire, in the Paedagogium of the imperial palace on the Palatine, was found a graffito of a crucified man with the head

of an ass in 1856 On the left side of the picture stands another man with his arm raised The drawing has an inscription in Greek: “Alexamenos, pray(s) to god!” The crucified donkey-man is obviously intended as a crude joke refer-ring to Alexamenos, and the unknown joker has put some effort into his joke Who was this god? The drawing, now exhibited in the museum on the Palatine, is usually interpreted as a caricature of Christ and one of his worshippers It was probably made in the second or third century CE and may be an early example of Christianity taken in a broader social context

However, the equine head is not necessarily that of an ass It could as well be

a horse If this is the case, the drawing may be a depiction of a man worship-ping a “race demon” In tombs on the Via Appia, magical papyri have been found with drawings of hybrids with the head of a horse and a human body They were part of spells meant to ensure victory for one’s own team and mishaps for other competitors Perhaps Alexamenos was no Christian but a man who was crazy about horse races? Remember, downhill from the Palatine lay the Circus Maximus

But even if this caricature was not intended to be Christ and one of his worshippers, two Christian apologists mention similar pictures In this case, the drawings were undoubtedly intended as a mockery of Christianity The

apologists are Tertullian in his two related works, Apologeticus and Ad

Nationes, and Minucius Felix in Octavius All three works were written in the

late second or early third century CE(Price 1999)

You have “dreamed”, writes Tertullian in Apologeticus, “that our God is an

ass’s head” (16.1) Then Tertullian proceeds to discuss something that had

happened “quite recently” and “in this town [in ista proxime civitate]”,

prob-ably Carthage A criminal who was hired to tease and frustrate the animals

in the arena had exhibited a picture with an inscription usually read as “The

God of the Christians, ass-begotten [DEUS CHRISTIANORUM onoikoites]”

(16.12) The figure had the ears of an ass, one foot was a hoof, it carried a book and wore a toga “We laughed at both the name and the form”, writes Tertullian, who continues by using one of his standard techniques, namely

to turn the accusers’ allegations against themselves and blame the pagans for worshipping animals (16.12–13; cf 16.5)

In Ad Nationes, the criminal is said to be a Jew who earns his money by

hiring himself to the arena In this way, Tertullian blames the Jews for the slander but adds that the rumour has a weak position because it started with

a criminal Jew

In Octavius by Minucius Felix, we are in the vicinity of Rome, to be more

specific, in Ostia The Christian Octavius discusses the value of Christianity and paganism, respectively, with the pagan Caecilius The accusation that the Christians are worshipping the head of an ass is accompanied by accusa-tions that they worship the genitals of their priest and participate in orgies

of child murder and incest (9, 28.7) These accusations are also mentioned

by Tertullian (Apologeticus, 7, 8) and were probably well-known slanders

about the Christians, for Minucius Felix writes:

We too were once in the same case as you, blindly and stupidly sharing your ideas, and supposing that the Christians worshipped monsters, devoured infants, and joined incestuous feasts; we did not understand that the demons were for ever setting fables afloat without either investigation or proof

(Octavius, 28.2)

Such severe accusations are not known from non-Christian authors who wrote about the Christians, for instance Pliny, Galen and Celsus The lack of similar allegations in pagan texts does not mean that Tertullian and Minucius Felix were not repeating actual rumours about Christians, but the fact that such accusations were repeated as standard themes in Christian texts at the turn of the second century, must imply that in addition to their pagan and Jewish use, these rumours also had some internal Christian signif-icance and that the refutation of them served an edifying purpose

In the texts of Tertullian and Minucius Felix (and perhaps in the graffito from the Palatine), the ass is portrayed as an object of worship This divine ass has a past, which is evoked by Tertullian, who refers to the well-known idea that it was an ass or the head of the ass that the Jews worshipped in the

temple in Jerusalem Tacitus (The Annals, 5.4), Josephus (Against Appion, 2.112–14, 80, 9) and Plutarch (On Isis and Osiris, 31 363D) mention this

idea Misconceptions about Jewish worship could easily have been trans-ferred to the Christians, probably because Christianity was usually seen as a branch of Judaism, a fact also remarked upon by Tertullian

Tertullian connects the story about the ass with the Jews in two ways, both because he states that Tacitus located the ass in the temple in Jerusalem and because it was a Jew who created the caricature Tertullian also blames

the Jews in general for making up stories about the Christians (Ad Nationes,

1.14) When Tertullian states in this way that the story of the divine ass originally referred to the Jews and in this particular case was also connected with a Jew who had tried to transfer it to the Christians, he manages to place the responsibility for the animal on the Jews

The image of the crucified ass must be connected to a strong tendency in these centuries to degrade gods in animal form and to mock people who worshipped them As we have seen, animals – be they serpents, bulls or asses – were used in a negative way in the creation of religious identity This campaign was specially aimed at the Egyptians, who had animal cults and with whom the Romans had an ambiguous relationship – they both imported Egyptian cults and mocked Egyptian religion As put by the satir-ical author Lucian: “All sort of animals are stuffed into heaven from Egypt”

(The Assembly of the Gods, 10) But other groups were also affected by the

aversion to theriomorphic gods The intellectual elite of the non-Egyptian inhabitants of the Graeco-Roman world regarded animal worship as an infe-rior form of religion This general tendency is clearly reflected in our texts and in the caricature from the Palatine

Why was an ass chosen? It could have been because of the connection with the stories about the Jews and the alleged veneration of the ass in the temple in Jerusalem referred to above To label the Jews as ass-worshippers was in fact one of the standard ways of slandering them This slander seems

to have originated in Egypt in the third century BCE(Bar-Kochva 1996; van Henten and Abusch 1996; Frankfurter 1998: 206–8, but against

Bickermann 1927) In Egypt, such stories could further have been linked to the mythological fight between the Egyptian god Horus and his evil oppo-nent Seth-Typhon In this fight, Horus was interpreted as the symbol of the Egyptians, while Seth-Typhon was generally associated with foreigners and with people who threatened Egypt These enemies of the Egyptians were sometimes identified with the Jews, who were said to be worshipping Seth-Typhon Standard ways of depicting this god were as an ass, with the head of

an ass or connected to an ass (van Henten and Abusch 1996; Bar-Kochva 1996)

However, the use of an ass in such caricatures as those referred to by Tertullian and Minucius Felix could also be connected with more general conceptions of this animal in Mediterranean societies, where it was a beast of burden and a riding animal and was ranked low in the hierarchy of animals Philo, although he praises the hearing of the ass, writes that it was “thought

to be the stupidest of the beasts” (On the Posterity of Cain, 161) Plutarch observes that the ass is the most stupid of the tame animals (On Isis and

Osiris, 50 371C) Minucius Felix describes it as “the meanest of all beasts”

(Octavius, 9.3) Artemidorus states that if a man dreams that he “has the head

of a dog, horse, ass, or any four-legged creature instead of his own, it

signi-fies slavery and misery” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1.37) In the

physiognomic tradition, the ass is characterized by its sexual excitement and

foolishness (Aristotle, Physiognomics, 808b 35, 811a 26), while in the

anony-mous Latin physiognomic treatise that sums up the catalogue of faults of the

ass, the animal is described as lazy (iners), dull (frigidum), unteachable (indocile), slow (tardum), insolent (insolens) and with an unpleasant voice (vocis

ingratae) (119).

However, the fact that the ass appears together with an ox at the manger

of Jesus in sarcophagi from the third century, referring to Isaiah 1.3 and to the prophecy that the ox and the ass will recognize their master (cf Justin

Martyr, Apology, 1.63), shows that the ass sometimes also had a positive

meaning in Christian interpretations, although this positive interpretation certainly does not surface in the interpretation of the ass hybrid.1

Animals, anthropocentrism and cultural change

Christianity and Judaism share anthropomorphic ideas about God In these religions, both humans and animals were created by God, but only humans were made in God’s image Adam gives names to the animals and is appointed master over them God became human in Christ, and Christ’s sacrifice on the cross replaced the pagan institution of sacrifice The ultimate religious goal was the salvation of the human soul Animals had no part in salvation In Greek and Roman religions, too, an anthropomorphic concep-tion of the gods is prominent as gods and goddesses were depicted as perfect exemplars of the human form

As already mentioned, the crucified donkey-man on the Palatine and the texts of Tertullian and Minucius Felix must be interpreted as part of more extensive religious processes For centuries, something had been happening

at the social and symbolic boundaries set between animals, humans and gods Anthropocentric processes were accompanied by a social redefinition of animals in which they were radically devalued The devaluation of animals is seen in the ban on sacrifice, in the flourishing of the arenas and in the fact that philosophers usually denied animals mental capacities similar to humans Animals were driven out of heaven, and man was left alone as the only creature created in God’s image

The caricature of the donkey-man must accordingly be seen as part of a general discourse in which animals were devalued, lost their mystery and were no longer seen as channels to the divine But the caricature of the crucified donkey-man not only tells us something about animals, it also tells

us something more general about the way in which Christian identity was established by the Christians and their opponents What did the mockers really mean by their slander? And why did the Christians repeat such mock-eries and even dwell upon them in their own texts?

The caricature signalled that the Christian attempt to establish a new religion in which anthropocentrism had gone so far that God really became a human being of flesh and blood was rejected by non-Christians Instead, this divine human was recast as a hybrid This specific hybrid form could have been created because the product of a union between the Jewish god, who by outsiders was caricatured as an ass, and a human mother logically became a

mixture between ass and man, an asionocephalus.

The caricature of the donkey-man also has a certain likeness to the Egyptian Anubis, with his human body and jackal’s head This hybrid god was frequently mocked by pagans In the Vatican museum there is a statue

of Anubis, cast as a Roman with a tunic and a chlamys, but instead of the head of a high-nosed Roman male, it has the head of a jackal It is probably

a statue of a priest in the cult of Isis who is wearing the mask of Anubis We also, who are the heirs to this Graeco-Roman culture and are in fact living in the very latest sequel to antiquity, see clearly what Juvenal and others meant when they mocked those hybrids with heads of jackals, cats or lions These hybrids have not been easily accepted into Western culture In the case of the caricatures referred to by Tertullian and Minucius Felix, they appeared

even more stupid than the Egyptian cynocephalus – the jackal-headed god –

because the caricature of the Christian god had taken its bestial characteris-tics from the most stupid of all animals, the despised ass

The Christians may have repeated the accusation about worshipping this hybrid because they knew with absolute certainty that it was untrue Therefore, such allegations said more about those who made them than they did about those they were aimed at When Tertullian follows traditional rhetorical practice by turning his opponents’ own arguments against themselves

(retorsio) by blaming them for animal worship, he has no further need to

exaggerate The accusations of Tertullian and Minucius Felix are less over-stated than the rumours about themselves and their fellow believers Their own accusations against the pagans are momentarily recognizable as based

on facts: Epona was worshipped in the empire, horses and mules were

deco-rated in her honour, and hybrids appeared in the iconography – especially in Egypt Consequently, Tertullian and Minucius Felix struck at their adver-saries by using the ass and boosted morale in their own ranks They knew that they did not worship a god with animal characteristics, let alone an ass, while their adversaries apparently worshipped animals Consequently, the Christians had a fully human identity, while pagans, who created gods in the form of beasts, had not

The leontocephalus

The caricature of a hybrid god was not only restricted to mockery aimed at

the Christians and used by them in a sort of rhetorical retorsio – turning their

adversaries’ arguments against themselves A hybrid was also used by some Christians in an attempt to establish their own identity as superior to other Christian groups and to Jews This creature is one of the versions of the gnostic demiurge, the world creator, who has already been introduced (see Chapter 10) He is envisaged as a cross between man and beast, a parody of the Jewish god Yahweh

According to the Apocryphon of John, the lowest entity in the spiritual

world, Sophia, conceived alone without a male and gave birth to a monstrous son This son is described as an abortion His appearance is bestial, with the face of a lion, or both a lion and a snake, and he has fiery eyes The opening line of this figure is “It is I who am God, there is none apart from me” In this he is totally wrong, because the transcendent world

of light exists above him with its host of spiritual powers The readers of the text know of this spiritual world, not least because they read about it in several pages preceding the birth of the demiurge Because the demiurge is ignorant of these things, which the readers know very well, he appears to be stupid This caricature of the Old Testament god is usually called by the enigmatic name Ialdabaoth, but he is also called Saklas (“fool”) and Samael (“the blind god”), which stresses his stupidity He is responsible for the creation of the material world and for human beings He and his demonic powers invent different devices to keep human beings locked in the material world, the most important being sex Through the demiurge, bestial appear-ance and sex are interconnected

This lion-headed god is associated with man as a biological and psychic being belonging to the material world Opposed to him is the real god The fact that the highest god is several times called Man in some gnostic texts also reflects a special formulation of anthropocentrism in this branch of Christianity