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]
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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] It is first attested in the second century BCE, [4] and was used against Christians extensively in the first and second centuries CE before disappearing almost entirely in the third. [5] The accusation against the Christians is discussed by Tertullian and Minucius Felix, among other early Christian apologists. [6] A famous example of this is the Alexamenos graffito, showing a crucified man with the head of a donkey. [7]
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. [8] His interpretation was challenged at the time by Andrew Lang in Longman's Magazine. [9]
