Graves’ Golden Ass

 

The focus of this essay will be on the sources used by Robert Graves for the passages of the novel King Jesus dealing directly with "the golden ass-mask of Dora" (also called "the mask of Nimrod"). The purpose of this narrow focus is to elucidate Grave’s sources concerning ancient Judaism and early Christianity, a bibliography toward which Graves himself only gestures. The focus is not on ancient anti-Judaism, which is where the legend originates,  nor on King Jesus considered as a novel. The enormous scope of the literature of anti-Judaism is copiously indicated by Bori’s bibliography and his notes which annotate it. Bickerman’s magisterial essay covers everything, and Barclay’s subsequent edition of Josephus supplements it. (See the Bibliography at the end of this essay.) I will also ignore the famous instance of The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, which Augustine of Hippo referred to as “the Golden Ass” (Asinus aureus), as it has nothing to do with anti-Judaism but is rather the produce of a vivid poetic imagination working on folk tales.

In particular, I am concerned with two important passages from King Jesus--the brilliant image of the ass, as Graves describes it, and his "Historical Commentary" appended at the end of the book. The problem then is, on the basis of Graves’ reference to the single basic source mentioned in the appendix, to find the others, or to find the source for the images. I would like to make readily available answers to the questions of the general reader, who may not have time to pursue the obscure sources and commentaries. To end any suspense, I can answer now the question of Graves' source for the visually striking image of the ass. There is none for the simple reason that the golden ass, or its mask, never existed except in Graves' mythopoetic imagination. 

Here is the primary descriptive evocation, which occurs in a conversation between Joachim (high-court judge and Pharisee, husband of Hannah) and Cleopas (the brother of Joseph, husband of the Virgin Mary). Joachim asks Cleopas, “Do you recollect the story of the golden fetish of Dora?”  

     Cleopas smiled. This trophy had been taken from the Edomites by King Alexander Jannaeus in the wars, the hollow head of an onager, or wild-ass, made of pure gold, with red jewels for eyes and teeth of ivory: it was thought to be of ancient Egyptian workmanship. Alexander Jannaeus had captured it from the Edomites of Dora or Adoraim, a city close to Hebron, for while the Jews were in Captivity, the Edomites had reconquered their ancient territories in Southern Judaea. They set great story by this fetish, which they called the Mask of Nimrod. (40)

The dramatic (as opposed to the descriptive) evocation comes thirty pages later in a chapter called “The Apparition” and must also be cited here.

On his day of ministration at the Altar of Incense, Zacharias (an elder priest in the Temple service and father-to-be of John the Baptizer) hears his name called from the Holy of Holies. When he answers, he is told that his preparation of the incense is completely mistaken, and he hears the sound of steps approaching him. He faints.

When he came to himself a few minutes later, he could not for a while recall where he was or what had happened . . . Fear surged back to his mind. He groaned and raised his eyes slowly toward the Sacred Curtain, as if to reassure himself that God did not hate him.

Worse was yet to come. Between the Curtain and the wall stood a tremendous figure clothed in robes shimmering like moonlight on a troubled pool. O horror! The head was that of a wild-ass with glaring red eye-balls and ivory-white teeth, and it was with gold-shod hooves that the figure hugged to its breast the sceptre and dog of monarchy. (73)

The reader, curiosity aroused, turns to the appended “Historical Commentary” and finds this: 

A detailed commentary written to justify the unorthodox views contained in this book would be two or three times as long as the book itself, and would take years to complete; I beg to be excused the task. Take, for example, the incident in Chapter Six of the terrifying apparition which appeared in the Sanctuary to Zacharias the Priest. It would not be enough to quote Epiphanius on the lost Gnostic Gospel The Descent of Mary (“in which are horrible and deadly things”) as my authority for a story which nobody has hitherto taken seriously and which is usually connected with Tacitus’s ill-informed account of a secret Levite ass-cult. Nor would it help to quote Apion, who is my sole authority for the story of Zabidus the Edomite and the golden ass-mask of Dora, because nobody has questioned Josephus’s good faith in rejecting it as unhistorical, despite his dishonest denial that any such place as Dora existed in Edom. (419-20)

Further down the page, Graves states, “I have taken more than ordinary pains to verify my historical background” (420), and there is no reason to doubt him. In excusing himself from the task of a detailed commentary, Graves nonetheless provides his basic sources for the golden ass-mask: Epiphanius on The Descent of Mary, Tacitus’s history, and Josephus’s Against Apion. These we may call the classical sources. Other sources reflect the Biblical scholarship of his day, which we may called the anthropological sources (Cambridge school). Chief among these is the four-volume Encyclopedia Biblica (1899-1903) by Thomas Kelly Cheyne, though the one referred to in the Appendix to King Jesus is M. R. James’s Apocryphal New Testament (1924).  

The reader should also bear in mind the background presence of James Frazer and The Golden Bough. Though Frazer is not mentioned in King Jesus, Graves would have known his Folk-lore in the Old Testament (1918). (In 1965 with Raphael Patai, Graves would produce his own  Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis.) Additional evidence of Frazer’s presence in the background is that Graves received his first awakening to the matriarchal theme from William Rivers, the psychologist who helped him in his recovery from shell shock during and after WWI (Davis ix). Rivers had previously conducted fieldwork into tribal societies in India and the Solomon Islands. These studies underly his entry on “mother right” in the 1915 volume of James Hastings’ monumental Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (1908-1926), America’s supplement to and updating of The Golden Bough. If Frazer is absent from the foreground of King Jesus, it is surely due to the fact that, despite his personal dislike of Christian doctrine, Victorian and Edwardian sentiment precluded any large-scale exposition of the mythological structure of the New Testament. Also, Graves for his part did not want to seem dependent on Frazer or Rivers. The longest reference to Frazer comes in The White Goddess, when Graves remarks, “Frazer was able to keep his beautiful rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, until his death by carefully and methodically sailing all round his dangerous subject . . . without actually committing himself to a declaration that it existed” (242).

To return now to the primary question of Graves’ sources in King Jesus, the short answer is that most of them are cited in the other books he worked on concurrently, three of which carry copious documentation: The White Goddess, Greek Myths, and The Nazarene Gospel.  A large overlap exists in the sequence of the writing of these four books. In 1943 the first 70,000 word draft of The White Goddess was interrupted by the writing of King Jesus, which continued into 1944. In the summer of 1943 Graves began working with the Hebrew scholar Joshua Podro, and “their ‘reconciled edition’ of King Jesus eventually became The Nazarene Gospel Restored” (Presley xiv-xiv), which first appeared in 1953. The Greek Myths, completed in 1955, comprises a summation of the textual excavation of the preceding twelve years (Seymour-Smith 386). 

As if to mark this last work as the crowing phase of his mythopoetic tetralogy, the opening pages provide Graves’s clearest summary of the matriarchal thesis developed over the past twelve years:

Ancient Europe had no gods. The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless, and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought. She took lovers, but for pleasure, not to provide her children with a father. Men feared, adored, and obeyed the matriarch; the hearth, which she tended in a cave or hut being their earliest social centre, and motherhood their prime mystery. (13)

Graves provides an alternative way to define the creative rush of these twelve years when he states in a letter that he went to work on the Jesus book with “a key which unlocks a succession of doors in Roman and Greek religion and (because the Jewish religion was a Semite one grafted on a Celtic stock) also unlocks the most obstinate door of all--the story of the Nativity and Crucifixion” (cited in Presley xiii).

Outline of subsequent parts of this unfinished essay:

1. The intertwined sequence of Graves’ books from The Golden Fleece to The Nazarene Gospel Restored answering the question of documentation. Done.

2. Agabus

3. The Descent of Mary 

4. Tacitus

5. Josephus’s Against Apion (and Zabidus)

6. Nimrod

7. Moses

8. The appendix of images. Done.

 

8. Appendix: Images

1. Pazuzu: Besides the top of this essay, images can be seen at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pazuzu

2. Dendera: images at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendera

3. The Messiah’s glAss: Izhar Patkin’s monumental glass sculpture, The Messiah’s glAss, was produced over a period of five years at the Centre International de Recherche Sur le Verre et les Arts Plastiques (CIRVA), Marseille, France, and is presented inside You Tell Us What to Do Act III, a painting for four walls on pleated illusion (tulle) veils, which envelops the gallery like a continuous, ethereally translucent mural. From the Jewish Museum, New York City.

4. Nimrod and Samarimis: 

5. Donkey/Ass. One of thousands of such images in ancient Egypt:

Bibliography

Bickerman, E. J. “Ritual Murder and the Worship of an Ass: A contribution to the study of ancient political propaganda.“ Studies in Jewish and Christian History. 2 vols. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2007, I.496-527. 

Bori, Pier Cesare. The Golden Calf and the Origins of anti-Jewish Controversy. Tr. David Ward. Atlanta GA: Scholars Press, 1990.

Cheyne, T. K., and J. Sutherland Black. Encyclopaedia Biblica : A Critical Dictionary of the Literary, Political and Religious History, the Archaeology, Geography, and Natural History of the Bible. 4 volumes. New York, Macmillan, 1899-1903.

Daniel, J. L. “Anti-semitism in the Hellenistic-Roman Period.” Journal of Biblical Literature 98 (1979) 45-65. In OPAC.

Davis, Robert A. Introduction to King Jesus. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2006.

Feldman, Louis H. “Pro-Jewish Intimations in Anti-Jewish Remarks Cited in Josephus' ‘Against Apion’." The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series 78, No. 3/4 (1988), 187-251. 

Gager, J. G. Moses in Greco-Roman Paganism. Nashville-New York: 1972. Searchable at GoogleBooks and partially viewable at Amazon.

Goldman, Shalom. “White Goddess, Hebrew Goddess: The Bible, the Jews, and Poetic Myth in the Work of Robert Graves.” Modern Judaism 23, No. 1 (Feb., 2003), pp. 32-50.

Graves, Robert. King Jesus. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1946.

_____. King Jesus and My Head! My Head! Ed. Robert A. Davis. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2006.

_____ and Joshua Podro. The Nazarene Gospel Restored. Edited John W. Presley. 1953; Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2010.  

_____ and Raphael Patai. Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis. London: Cassell, 1964.

_____ with Peter Buckman and William Fifield. “The Art of Poetry No. 11.” Paris Review 47 (1969). http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4178/the-art-of-poetry-no-11-robert-graves. Accessed February 2, 2016.

Josephus, Flavius. Against Apion. Tr. and ed. by John M. G. Barclay. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2007.

Paul, Robert A. “Freud, Sellin and the Death of Moses.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 75 (1994) 825-37.

Presley, John Woodrow. Introduction to The Nazarene Gospel Restored. 1953; Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2010.  

_____. “Narrative Structure in Graves’ Historical Fiction.” Gravesiana: The Journal of the Robert Graves Society 1.3 (1997) 292-304.

Seymour-Smith, Martin. Robert Graves: Life and Works. London: Hutchinson, 1982.

Sterns, M. (ed.) Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism. Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1970ff. Ritsumeikan University Main Library 56-1 Tojiin-Kitamachi, Kitaku, Kyoto 603-8577 URL:http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/acd/mr/lib/index.html

Te Velde, H. Seth, God of Confusion: A Study of His Role in Egyptian Mythology and Religion. Leiden: Brill, 1967. In two Todai libraries and viewable online, with some images.

Vickery, John B. “The White Goddess and King Jesus.” In Robert Graves: Modern Critical Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, pp. 91-110.