A second embassy is sent to him by Balak, to change his mind, and this time Yahweh allows Balaam to go, but orders him to do ‘nothing except what I tell you’. The wizard saddles his ass and on the way – this is the famous episode, for which he and his she-donkey have remained part of Christian storytelling – an angel with drawn sword bars the way forward. Balaam cannot see the angel, in spite of his spiritual powers. But his donkey can, and she runs away from the road. Balaam beats her until she returns to the path. The angel again bars the road, this time in a narrow place, so that Balaam grazes his foot as the donkey swerves to avoid the angel. Again she is beaten harshly for her refusal. A third time the angel stands in their way, and this time the donkey lies down, and Balaam takes a stick to her.
Then Yahweh opened the mouth of the donkey, who said to Balaam, ‘What have I done to you? Why beat me three times like this?’
To which Balaam replies, ‘Because you are playing the fool with me.’ If he had a sword, he adds, he would kill the animal (Num. 22: 20–29). The tables are to be turned, of course, on a man who has not the wit to realize that a talking donkey is something out of the ordinary to be reckoned with. For after another bitter exchange, Yahweh vouchsafes the same vision to Balaam, and opens his eyes – the sentence echoes exactly the earlier miracle of the donkey’s powers of speech – and he becomes able to see the angel with the sword barring the way. He falls on his face to worship; the angel tells him, again in a precise echo of Balaam’s earlier threat to his ass, that he would have run Balaam through if the donkey had not stopped in time.
After this encounter, a chastened Balaam, newly alert to human folly, meets the King of Moab and showers blessings on Israel in a series of inspired oracles, spouting at some length and with enthusiasm, to the despair of Balak who had commissioned him rather to lay dreadful curses on the Israelites. Balaam’s prophecies include, ‘A star shall rise out of Jacob …’ (Num. 24:17) This was interpreted later to refer to the birth of Christ and connected to the portent which drew the wise men from the East to Bethlehem.
The miraculous donkey who speaks the truth when her master fails to see it represents the possibility that lowly creatures may prove wiser than their learned masters, that the meek shall inherit the earth – a fundamental Christian maxim that remains to be proved. Although the notes to the Jerusalem Bible comment that a she-donkey was considered a princely mount in biblical times, Balaam’s talking ass was received as a symbol of humility, and entered the body of medieval ass-lore. The beast of burden acts as a totem of the most sublime of Christian virtues, humility, and is specially precious to God in consequence.24 The legend of Saint Anthony of Padua relates how scoffers about the real presence of Jesus in the host were taught a lesson by the saint: he presented a hungry donkey with a consecrated host and the beast knelt before it instead of wolfing it down (below).
The alliance between the prophets and Balaam’s ass has been perpetuated by the sculpture programmes of twelfth- and thirteenth-century churches in Europe; but it was also made in a most significant fashion with regard to popular storytelling, in the more ephemeral form, liturgical drama – with lasting effects. The Ordo prophetarum, or Play of the Prophets, was performed at Matins at Christmas time; the earliest dramatic versions date from the eleventh century, but it was inspired by a sermon, which was written four or five hundred years before, and also chanted as a lesson at Christmas. Entitled ‘Against Jews, Pagans and Arians’, it was attributed to Augustine, whose august name added credibility to the sermon’s bigotry. It upbraided all those who do not recognize the truth of Christ, by invoking the seers who did, in the usual unpleasant manner of the Sibylline oracles. The Jews are denounced by their own Old Testament prophets like Isaiah and Daniel and Moses, while famous pagans like the Sibyl join in the attack. Venerable old men and women from the New Testament who just preceded Christ and were able to recognize him, like Simeon who was present at the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, then add their voices to the chorus.25
The donkey knows better than his master: according to the legend of St Anthony of Padua, while its owner insisted on denying the miracle of transubstantiation the animal knelt before the true host rather than eat it. (Taddeo Crivelli and Guglielmo Giraldi, The Gualenghi-d’Este Hours, Ferrara, c. 1470.)
The Fool, with his grotesque bauble, in his coxcomb with ass’s ears, peeping through parted fingers, sees very well. (Anon. Dutch, Fool Laughing at Folly, c. 1500.)
This Lectio, or reading, was adapted in verse and set to music; the entry of each new prophet was greeted by a salvo of imprecations against those who had failed to acknowledge the true Saviour. In the thirteenth-century Laon version, the Sibyl preceded Simeon, ‘in a woman’s dress, bare-headed, garlanded with ivy and most like someone crazed’.26 She then sang her song, ‘Judgement’s Sign’, with its prophetic acrostic, JESUS SOTER, as we saw in Chapter Five.
Bringing up the rear of this procession was Balaam, the fool turned wise, who was to be bearded, astride his ass, holding a palm frond and spurring on the animal. This was performed, not merely described: the manuscript provides that the ‘puer sub asino’ (the boy under the donkey) should now give the reason he cannot go forward, that he sees an angel standing in his way with a drawn sword27.
Later versions of the Ordo prophetarum swelled the number of seers to as many as twenty-eight, and the ritual was sometimes performed after Christmas, on 1 January, the Circumcision, a feast which of its nature splices the Old Covenant with the New, since it presents Jesus accepting the law of the Jews while at the same time inaugurating a new era in which that law will no longer obtain. The similarity grows between this solemn Christmas rite and the carnivalesque Festum asinorum, or Feast of Donkeys, which was celebrated in other French churches like Rouen Cathedral in the same period. A King of Fools, riding an ass, was crowned while the congregation made merry. Karl Young, in his Drama of the Medieval Church, suggests that Balaam’s ass was borrowed from the Feast of Fools, not vice versa, but does not really pursue the questions raised by introducing the magical ass with the power of speech into the presumably serious rite of the Ordo prophetarum. The Festum asinorum was rollicking and licentious in tone, in the tradition of the pagan Hilaria festival, and drew on classical associations with Dionysiac revelry – Silenus, Bacchus’ lewd companion, was mounted on an ass who sometimes threw him, much to everyone’s delight. Balaam’s ass, impersonated by a puer, turned the solemnities upside down, made fools of the preceding prophets, including the Sibyl and her ilk, opened up the possibility of laughter. This too is the function of the grotesque, be it the bray of a wise ass in church, or the riddles of an ass-footed queen or a web-footed siren.
Donkeys were the jester’s symbolic beast. The jester’s cap bears ass’s ears: in a splendidly lively, anonymous Dutch painting, A Fool Laughing, of around 1500, from the Wellesley Museum, his head-dress shows its origins in an asshide quite clearly (left); in Quentin Massys’s Allegory of Folly of 1510, the fool’s cap includes a crowing rooster and other emblems of rampant sex, as well as long, suggestively flaccid donkey ears.
The atmosphere of the thirteenth-century cathedral ritual cannot really be known; what can be uncovered are some illuminating connections between popular texts, like riddles and fairy tales, and medieval donkey-lore, and they deepen the relation between the genre and figures like women and geese, proverbially foolish creatures. In eighteenth-century riddle books, the riddles are sometimes put to an interlocutor labelled ‘Balaam’s Ass’. ‘I answer,’ the animal says, standing in as mouthpiece for the compiler, and then provides the solutions.28
IV
Balaam’s ass makes a mock of pomposity, and defends the right of the ignorant to knowledge. Talking animals in general could be considered a more reliable denominator of folklore than fairies themselves, especially the donkey, who features as hero, star and victim in hundreds of fables, by Aesop and Phaedrus as well as the comic romances and the Milesian farces. Charles Perrault, comparing the tone of h
is work favourably to the classics, was again having it both ways: enjoying the reproduction of classical levity and daring, and dressing it up as a moral apprenticeship to life for young people.
The wits of seventeenth-century Paris were indeed uneasy in their relations with the popular material which inspired the fairy tales they had espoused as an improving instrument of civilité in the ruelles. At the same time, however, they relished the tradition’s naughtiness and the escape from the pompous euphemisms of the Académie Française that it offered. The donkey, like the goose, was a key actor in this comedy of wisdom and folly: the creature is the most popular hero – or heroine – of fable and fairy tale. Lucius in The Golden Ass is turned by mistake into a donkey by a witch, caught and put to work as a pack animal, and then witnesses all the events of the novel in that dumb, long-suffering shape, including the storytelling scene in which ‘Cupid and Psyche’ is related (here).
Lucius consults a renowned witch of Thessaly when he wants to fly like her; but she gives him the wrong ointment and he turns into a donkey. (Anon., engraving in Lucian, The Ass, translated Perrot d’Ablancourt, Amsterdam, 1709.)
Apuleius’ romance draws its inspiration from the Greek comic genius Lucianus of Samosata, who had been translated into French and was still inspiring versions during the period fairy tales were beginning to be written down. Perrot d’Ablancourt, scholarly scourge of piety and platitude, translated a selection of Lucian’s works, including his Lucius, or the Ass. The relationship between this bawdy tale, earlier, lost Greek texts, and Apuleius’ much more elaborate romance The Golden Ass is complicated, and classicists are still reviewing it.29 The interest here lies however in the contents of The Ass, which closely resembles Apuleius’ book; both books are of consequence in the formation of fairy tale.30
In The Ass, Lucius the hero goes to stay in Thessaly, a province famous for the magic powers of its women, and asks the maidservant in the household to let him peep at his hostess while she casts her spells. As he watches, she smears an ointment over her body and turns into a bird, sprouting feathers and flying out through the window. Lucius begs the maid to steal the same ointment for him, but she picks out the wrong box, and when he anoints himself he turns into an ass (here). He then has to undergo terrible ordeals, until at last he is fed on roses – flowers sacred to Venus – the only food that can restore him to human shape.
Witchhunters’ fantasies placed the donkey in the devil’s crew; here three witches fly off to the Sabbath on their beast familiars. (Woodcut in Ulrich Molitor, De Lamiis et phitonicis mulieribus, (On Lamias and Witches), Constance, 1489.)
The tone of The Ass is joyously lewd, and unremitting in its satire of human savagery and self-interest. After heroic sexual adventures with the maid, the hero enjoys even more strenuous entertainment with a woman who loves him precisely because he is an ass for obvious, pornographic reasons, and discards him when he is turned back into a man. Terrible tortures are plotted by the robbers; nobody behaves well: nothing is for the best in the worst of all possible worlds.
Perrot d’Ablancourt also translated, in 1658, Lucian’s True History. This comic fiction is a natural predecessor of Baron Münchhausen’s extravagant tales, and other, later hyperbolic raconteurs, down to Salman Rushdie and his novels today: the narrator vows to tell the truth and nothing but the truth and then proceeds to improvise the most farfetched and fantastical adventures. The hero’s short romp includes a journey to the moon as well as a descent into the underworld, and brazenly parodies many of the most cherished epics of the classics – the wanderings of Odysseus, Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War – and sends them up in a truly postmodern spirit of pastiche, plagiarism and irreverence. In Hell, for instance, the voyaging hero becomes aware that ‘Liars were especially tormented, and also those who had imposed on posterity with their fabulist writings, like Ctesias and Herodotus …’ But this ‘gave me some consolation. There’s no vice of which I am less guilty.’31
The exaggerations, marvels, dislocations of time and space, the supernatural forces and irrational sequence of events relate Perrot d’Ablancourt’s work to the fairytale fashion in France which followed some thirty or so years later – the publication of his translation took place during its time of continuing popularity, in 1709. But Perrot’s work is symptomatic of the interests of littérateurs exploring new registers of tone. His translation’s ironic blitheness looks forward to Voltaire, and influences the literary fairy tale in its early printed form. The True History, for instance, even includes a pumpkin metamorphosis:
On the third day we were attacked by barbarians who navigated on great pumpkins six yards long, for, when they are dry, they hollow them out, using seeds instead of stones in the fighting and leaves instead of sails, with a reed for a mast.32
Perrot d’Ablancourt’s translation of Lucian was illustrated with engravings, including one showing the metamorphosis of the hero (here). The juxtaposition of the conjuring sorceress with the man sprouting a donkey’s head condenses vividly the underlying assumption that makes witches and donkeys natural allies (bedfellows): forbidden knowledge, specifically of an erotic character. The donkey belongs firmly in the bestiary of witchcraft: a woodcut from a tract on demonology printed in 1489 shows a witch with an ass’s head riding on a broomstick with a devil beast pillion behind (here). In one of Hans Baldungs ferocious drawings and engravings of witches at their covens, dated 1510, there appear the remains of a donkey: its skull lies in the foreground. The coven has probably distilled the famed potency of an ass for the potion the witch on the right flourishes against the curdled and bloody sky: an elixir of sexual enchantment, no doubt. The ass transgresses human society’s norms by aggressive wantonness, and witches were suspected of the same polluting disregard of appropriate, moderate sexuality. In that most famous of fairy plays, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom the weaver, when ‘translated into an ass’, finds himself rapturously wooed by Titania, Queen of the Fairies, who has herself been cast under a spell by her husband after a domestic quarrel (see jacket).33 All is topsy-turvy as Oberon, with Puck his messenger, makes mischief. All is merry, too, and will be set to rights.
Lucius’ misadventures as an ass had been passed on, with divergences and accretions, in Latin manuscripts of both Lucian’s work and Apuleius’. Interestingly, Apuleius, who was born around AD 124 in that part of north Africa which is now Algeria, was accused by his wife’s relatives of obtaining her love by witchcraft (she was rich, and a widow). He stood trial in Alexandria but was, it would appear, acquitted.
The lineaments and motifs of the story, if not its tone, went on shaping popular variations of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, long after A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as we shall see in Chapter Seventeen. The Brothers Grimm edited and translated a version of The Ass in the early nineteenth century, when they were working on their folktale collection. They did not, however, include it in Kinder- und Hausmärchen, not just because it was bawdy, but because it was classical, and they were aiming at a purely German anthology.
Ludicrous compared to the other witch’s familiar, the cat, associated with lubriciousness rather than seduction, the donkey also inspires pathos. The beast symbolizes Christ’s humility and became the totem of Franciscan poverty, as Perrault himself discussed in his arguments against Cartesian views of animals. Descartes had argued that animals had no souls, and in consequence no consciousness, but were like machines. Perrault vigorously defended animals’ powers of imaginative understanding by quoting Isaiah’s messianic prophecy (Isa. 1:3): ‘The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib’.34
The braying of the beast could be used to convey anguish at its condition rather than brute ignorance: the anonymous lady who replied in high indignation to Richard de Fournival’s thirteenth-century misogynist commentary on love, Bestiaire d’amour, wrote that he had provoked her so that she felt like the wild ass who cries out only when hunger makes him rage: ‘O, by my faith, I should cry out indeed!’35 The ass cou
ld perform this empathetic role for a woman because it was the least of the beasts. To be a beast is to be dumb; to be a donkey is to be the dumbest beast of all: in French, bête means foolish, stupid as well as animal. But to be a donkey is also to possess a voice: a voice of a certain sort, like the cat and the rooster, the bray of an ass speaks for the passion of the creature without language: in numerous folk tales, as well as in bestiaries both ancient and medieval, the donkey is distinguished by the proud brutishness of its heehaw heehaw. In spite of the loudness and persistence of its cry, it is an animal that cannot communicate: the very intensity of the bray conveys that condition of powerlessness, of exile from human congress.
If lovers of stories could create a memory palace of narrative literature in order to remember what are its forms, its changes, its developments, the room that would represent fairy tales would lie between romance and fable, jokes and riddles, and its tenants would not only be the fairytale beauties, princes and princesses so often associated with the genre, but would include a donkey, a goose, a stranger queen with an anomalous foot, and an old woman, laughing. As the fairy tale became established as a literary form, directed at children, this last figure became, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the narrator’s most important and visible mask, for male authors as well as female.
From the Beast to the Blonde Page 18