Onolatry

Onolatry is the supposed worship of the donkey during antiquity. In Imperial Rome, the charge of onolatry was used as a polemic against Jews and Jewish Christians.^[1] The association of Jews with donkeys was a common feature of Hellenic as well as Latin ethnographic and historical writings, and included accusations of worshipping a golden donkey head and even sacrificing foreigners to it at intervals.^[2]

The charge was likely first used against Jews in Egypt, where donkeys were at some points associated with Set, the murderer of Osiris who is in turn destroyed by Isis.^[3] The Egyptian and Greek Alexandrians would equate the Judahite deity Yahweh as being Set/Typhon, a chaotic god of the deserts, storms and violence.^[4][5] It is first attested in the second century BCE,^[5] and was used against Christians extensively in the first and second centuries CE before disappearing almost entirely in the third.^[6] The accusation against the Jews is discussed by Josephus in his Against Apion II.7.^[7] As well as those targeted at Christians being addressed by Tertullian and Minucius Felix, among other early Christian apologists.^[8] A famous example of this is the Alexamenos graffito, showing a crucified man with the head of a donkey.^[9]

Arthur Bernard Cook, in an 1894 article, argued that there had been an ancient Mycenaean cult practising onolatry, citing a fresco depicting donkey-headed figures found near a sacrificial pit and several carved gems apparently showing people wearing donkeys' heads and skins holding sacrificial objects, and further describing the diverse roles asses played in Ancient Greek mythology.^[10] His interpretation was challenged at the time by Andrew Lang in Longman's Magazine.^[11]