Feast of the Ass, a Holiday for Donkeys Celebrated by Pagans & Christians

The Feast of the Ass was celebrated by the Roman Pagans during the classical period of Rome to honor their hard-working donkeys. It was continued in the Roman Catholic Church in western Europe as a popular holiday, sometimes accepted by the church authorities and sometimes suppressed.

Roman Pagan Feast of the Ass
Vesta was honored on the 15th of the month in the Roman calendar, which would have coincided with the Ides or Full Moon, originally. Vesta is one of the forms of the Indo-European Goddess *Aeusos) and as the Roman goddess of sacred fire, she was worshiped with offerings of spelt, the most sacred grain of the Romans. The connection between the grain which was used to make bread, the donkeys who were used to grind the grain and the hearth fire which was used to bake the bread, represented what the Romans considered to be minimally necessary for survival, along with wine of course.

The best known Vestalia festival fell on June 9th-15th according to Ovid and other sources. Vesta is the goddess of bakers since she is a manifestation of the hearth fires that were originally used to bake bread. Her holiday in June was a baker's holiday, and the little donkeys were honored for all the work they did for humans, most especially for turning the mills that ground the grain. Ovid describes the Vestalia in detail (see Ovid's Fasti, for June 9-15, Book 6, esp. lines 311-312). As he tells it: "loaves are hung on asses decked with wreaths, and flowery garlands veil the rough millstones."

A fresco in the public market in Pompeii shows little cupids celebrating the Vestalia. The engraving of it was published on p. 111, in Pompeii, Its History, Buildings and Antiquities, ed. by Thomas H. Dyer, George Bell & Sons, London, 1898. The identification of this painting with the Vestalia, or Festival of Vesta is made by Helen Tanzer in The Common People of Pompeii, A Study of the Graffiti and also by J. G. Frazer who prints the picture as plate No. 75 in his translation of Ovid's Fasti. The donkeys are decorated with flower wreaths and one of the hourglass-shaped mills stands in the background. The picture closely matches the description in Ovid.

It is possible that the Feast of the Ass was a somewhat later development in classical Rome. Cato, writing in the second century BCE says: "There is no holiday for mules, horses or donkeys, except the family festivals," in Chapter 138 in De Agri Cultura. But Cato was rather hard-hearted and it may have been that he just didn't celebrate it but other people did at the time. The Romans had a number of celebrations for their animals including the Summer Solstice for the Goddess Diana, when they decorated their hunting hounds with flower garlands and had a general party.

Feast of the Ass in Christianity
The Roman Pagan Feast of the Ass was continued in Christianity literally in the churches. In Latin it is called Festum Asinorum or asinaria festa. The French name by which it known in the 13th century is La Fête de l'âne. In the Middle Ages, in Beauvais, the festival was celebrated on January 14. A young woman carrying a baby and riding on a donkey was lead in procession to the church. The woman and donkey were supposed to represent the Virgin Mary fleeing Bethlehem to go to Egypt after the birth of her child, according to Christian mythology. The donkey and rider were actually lead into the cathedral and the festivities continued inside. The ceremonies at Beauvais are described in the Golden Bough, Vol. 9, pp. 335-336. The Feast of the Ass was celebrated widely in France and also in Germany and England.

The amazing thing is an entire Mass of the Ass was celebrated at Beauvais in the 12th century and we still have a copy of it. This consisted of a mock mass in which the clergy and choir sang the words and the congregation responded at every opportunity by braying like donkeys with "hee haw! hee haw!" The writers of the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913 (quoted on the web) were so appalled by all this that they could hardly write about it. The liturgy, or parts of it, are recorded by the Clemencis Consort on the CD "La Fete de l'Ane." It can be downloaded for free off the internet if you sign up for it. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the mass and associated revelries eventually may have contributed to miracle plays such as the (French) Rouen Play and the (English) Chester Pageant, though that seems like over-reaching.

Orientis Partibus, or the Donkey Carol
One product of the Feast of the Ass was the song Orientis Partibus which celebrated donkeys. This is one of the earlier informal pieces of music which has been written down, though it is considered Christian and not secular. The song may have been composed by Pierre de Corbeil, Bishop of Sens in the 13th century and has 5 verses in Latin. Several English translations are known including one given on Mudcat Cafe and a version of both the words and music are given on Orientis Partibus but this might be missing an F sharp. It begins:

Orientis partibus,
Adventavit asinus
Pulcher et fortissimus,
Sarcinus aptissimus,
Chorus: Hez, Sir Asne, hez!

A really nice version of the song is published in Troubadours edited by Brian Sargent with the English words translated freely by him, pp. 26-29. This translation is nice because the English words can be sung to the original tune. This song is popular at Christmas time even now and has been recorded by several groups including the Christmas Revels (originally directed by John Langstaff) on the "Sing We Now Christmas" CD. A really good performance by the New London Consort (big guys with deep voices) directed by Philip Pickett can be heard for free on YouTube at Orientis Partibus .

The Feast of the Ass was often associated with and may have been a variation of the Feast of Fools which also occurred in some churches in the Middle Ages, and was based on the Roman Pagan Stultorum festa which fell later, on February 14. The Feast of Fools was even more raucous. These festivities were alternately disapproved of by church authorities, or encouraged because they brought people into the churches and also because some of the clergy enjoyed them, too. Some efforts were made to ban the Feast of the Ass in France in 1431 and 1444 but versions have continued ever since. In England the song Orientis Partibus developed into the song of the "Friendly Beasts" which children sing at Christmas time. This is available with both words and music on the Hymns and Carols of Christmas website, but it has been christianized.

References
Troubadours , edited and largely written by Brian Sargent, Cambridge University Press, N.Y. 1974.

Pompeii, Its History, Buildings and Antiquities, ed. by Thomas H. Dyer, George Bell & Sons, London, 1898.

M. P. Cato on Agriculture with English translation by W.D. Hooper, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1936, Loeb Classical Library dual edition. The usual title of the Latin text is Cato's De Agri Cultura.

The Golden Bough by James George Frazer, MacMillan & Co. Ltd., London, 1919-1920 (12 vol. edition).

Oxford Latin Dictionary ed. by P. G. W. Hare, Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1982.

The Calendar of the Roman Republic by Agnes Krisopp Michels, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1967.

Publi Ovidi Nasonis, Fastorum Libri Sex, ed. with translation by J. G. Frazer, MacMillan and Co. Ltd., London, 1929. Ovid's Fasti, as it is usually called, is available on the net, too, in the Loeb Classical Library dual edition.

On Roman Time: The Codex-Calendar of 354, by Michele Renee Salzmann, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1990.

Religio Romana is an excellent (and scholarly!) source for information about Roman Pagan religion on the net.

Muses Realm is a little less scholarly but still has a lot of good information and better insight than a lot of supposedly more scholarly sources.