Nietzsche’s Ass Festival and Hegel’s Topsy-Turvy World (Part 2)

About this event

When an opposite turns into its contrary, was the contradiction already present from the beginning? In *Beyond Good and Evil*, Nietzsche says: *Adventavit asinus*, (there arrived an ass,) *Pulcher et fortissimus*. (beautiful and very strong,) Here, Nietzsche refers to a curious piece of History. The Feast of the Ass (*Festum Asinorum*) was a medieval Christian festival involving a donkey, parody, laughter, and temporary reversals of ordinary liturgical decorum. The congregation could imitate the donkey's braying, and surviving descriptions of particular versions of the feast report the normal liturgical responses being replaced with forms of “Hee-haw” (*hinham*). These sorts of inversions were not unheard of in medieval times. The Feast of Fools (*Festum Fatuorum* or *Festum Stultorum*) was a medieval Christian celebration in which lower-ranking clergy temporarily assumed roles normally occupied by their superiors. Older histories describe the Feast of Fools as essentially a medieval “anything goes” carnival inside the church—mock bishops, drunken priests, obscene songs, animal costumes, dice played on the altar, foul substances burned as incense, and so forth. Some historians argue that the event was more tame and rather than simply being a parody of Christianity, it was an organized Christian liturgy built around ritual reversal. Medieval society imagined the cosmos as fundamentally ordered and hierarchical. God stood above creation; humans occupied their proper place in relation to angels and animals; kings ruled subjects; clergy possessed religious authority; husbands governed households; reason was supposed to govern appetite, and so forth. A very old tradition that played with this idea was *Mundus Inversus*, the inverted world. A medieval viewer might encounter images of a rabbit hunting a hunter, a mouse attacking a cat, an ox butchering a butcher, animals conducting human ceremonies, or fools and peasants ruling kings. The joke depends upon knowing…