Donkeys in love on the roof: a case study of a "strange" custom in a Greek island community

By way of a conclusion

This study has discussed the various identities attributed diachronically to the donkey, namely, a symbol of fertility and sexuality, and has concluded that they are still valid de-spite the fact that the pragmatic material that created them has been put to the oblivion. Nonetheless, all these qualities are human inventions transferring arbitrarily the good and bad aspects of their character on animals. The real qualities of the animal are its endurance, even in very hard conditions, its loyalty, its tenderness, its frugality, its enormous offering to the folk people in the traditional civilization (in both peace and war periods) etc. It is a valuable, benevolent partner of the humans who demands to be recognized as such (see, Bough 2011: 66). In general, let us praise the primitive beauty of all animals and their dy-namism remembering that the civilized people (via knowledge and civilization) have been alienated setting themselves outside the Nature but that the animals have remained within its realm. In this sense, humans have a good opportunity through animals, by sincerely approaching them, to find again the lost thread connecting them to their lost identity. All these views were put to the limelight by Ailianos some centuries ago (170 - 235 AC) in his work On the animals ' qualities: The spiritual qualities of the animal and their behavior, he maintains, are considered worth highlighting to become an example for humans, who, due to the progress of their civilization, have proceeded to a distortion of their naturality- the Nature, and the spontaneous truth and ethics of nature are conserved only in animals.

Endnotes

¹ The narration that includes this proverb is by Timalchio. To him, it is horrible (horribilis in the Latin

text), which sounds as an unbelievable one. It is actually an experiential narration / legend in which the acting subjects are the horrible shrews who transformed the inanimate body of a child to a doll of straw and sent to death a fearless young man from Cappadocia, who dared to hit one of them with his sword, three days later (seeMeraklis 2005; Rose 1922).

² For extensive literature on symbols and their meaning, see Alexakis, Vrachionidou, Oikonomou (eds), 2008.

³ It goes without saying that this is a universally known fertility symbol (Cooper 1992: 362-363).

⁴ We should, however, acknowledge the roots of this in R. Otto (1917), when he viewed the religion as a

mysterium tremendum and mysterium fascinans, and in Emile Durkheim (1912).

⁵ This is a very common motif in ancient Greek and universal mythology. The guilty daughter, for

instance, or her illegal offspring (separately or together) are thrown in the sea, in a sealed urn, which symbolizes the test via water: in essence the human being dares the divine to verify whether the exposed being is worth living or sparing (Adamandiou 1911: 142-144).

⁶ In Modern Greece, the most common name attributed to donkeys in all sorts of legends, narrations, fairy tales etc. is Mentios.

⁷ For similar practices and behaviours of peoples of North Eastern Africa, Egyptians, Indians etc., see

Bulliet 2012: 252-254.

⁸ The modern Greek poet Kostas Varnalis (1884-1974) was inspired for his poem “The sacrifice” by the aforementioned quality: «your peaked cap / Midas, from the hairless peak / get down / and go and fetch from the barn / the two-year donkey, / rutting on heat / whose skin glitters / and no master rides on it/ and its youth passes from its back / upright, its phallus is full of vigor!/ bring it in the middle of the threshing-floor/ and when it reaches the foot of the plane-tree / throw it on the earth,/ it's its turn to / glorify the fertility gods, my offer to be heard! / tonight I am getting married. For this reason / you deserve such a slaughtered animal / robust / defaced Priapus, / you are like the hot donkey yourself».

⁹ Priapia, a collection of 80 love epigrams of the Roman period (the August's time probably), resound

¹⁰ This view has been accessed at http://kyrigma.blogspot.gr/2011/04/20-4-2008.html

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