The Ass Festival

The Ass Festival is a comic ceremony in which the Higher Men kneel before The Ass and perform a mock act of worship in Zarathustra’s cave. Its force lies in the reversal: a gathering that had been noisy with laughter becomes solemnly devotional, then is exposed as play. Zarathustra first recoils at the apparent return of piety, but ends by welcoming the guests’ joyful foolishness as a sign of their recovery.

From laughter to ritual

The ceremony begins with an abrupt change in the cave. After its noise and laughter, it falls deathly still; Zarathustra smells sweet vapour and incense, as if pine-cones were burning. Curious, he steals to the entrance to watch his guests without being seen. What he finds is not a private prayer or a solitary act but a gathering: the Higher Men are all kneeling before The Ass.

The group includes The King on the Right, The King on the Left, The Abdicated Pope, The Sorcerer, The Voluntary Beggar, The Shadow, The Prophet, The Conscientious Man of the Spirit, and The Ugliest Man. The scene makes their change of posture conspicuous. These guests, who had been laughing together, now behave like children and credulous old women, and the cave’s incense gives their improvised worship the appearance of a formal religious rite. That incongruity prepares the episode’s comedy: the solemnity is real as a performance, but the object of devotion is an ass.

The litany and its object

The Ugliest Man begins to gurgle and snort as if struggling to utter something unspeakable. When speech finally comes, it takes the form of a pious litany praising The Ass. Its language borrows the elevated cadence of religious praise: “Amen! And praise and honour and wisdom and thanks and glory and strength be to our God for ever and ever!” The Ass answers with a bray, “Ye-a.” The call-and-response makes the creature both the centre of the rite and its irreducibly comic interruption.

The praise also recasts submissiveness as holiness. The litany celebrates a bearer of burdens who has taken the likeness of a slave, is patient, and never says no; it even links love of God with chastisement. The Ass’s appetite supplies another, earthier kind of divine wisdom: it loves she-asses and fresh figs, eats whatever is available, and can find delight in a thistle when hungry. The contrast between exalted devotional language and indiscriminate appetite keeps the ceremony suspended between parody and affection. The guests make a god of a creature whose patient service and bodily needs are precisely what the praise describes.

Zarathustra breaks in

At this point Zarathustra can no longer contain himself. He cries “Ye-a” louder than The Ass and springs into the gathering, pulling the worshippers up from the ground. His first response is alarmed and admonitory: he warns that anyone else who had witnessed the scene would judge them blasphemers or foolish old women. He singles out The Abdicated Pope, asking how he can reconcile worshipping an ass as God with his former religious position.

The Pope answers that, in divine matters, he is more enlightened than Zarathustra, and argues that worshipping God in some shape is better than worshipping no shape at all. The explanation gives the comic rite a serious edge: even the retreating representative of an old faith prefers a tangible object of devotion to the loss of worship altogether. Yet the exchange does not settle into a doctrinal dispute. Zarathustra’s guests answer him roguishly, and one turns his own maxim against him: “One kills, not by anger but by laughter.” Their teasing punctures his attempt to rebuke them as though the scene were merely a relapse into foolish belief.

A festival of recovery

Zarathustra recognizes that the guests are pretending and dissembling before him. Their hearts, he sees, have writhed with joy at becoming like little children again. The worship is therefore not presented as a settled new creed. Its mock piety lets the guests play at religious submission while laughter exposes the performance; their return to childlike foolishness becomes part of the pleasure. When they insist that they do not want the kingdom of heaven but, having become men, want the kingdom of earth, the scene makes its earthly allegiance explicit.

Zarathustra’s response changes from rebuke to welcome. He calls the guests his new friends and says that they please him now that they have become joyful again and blossomed. He imagines that such flowers need new festivals: a little brave nonsense, divine service, an ass festival, and a joyful Zarathustra-fool to blow their souls bright. The language joins the ceremony’s absurdity to its effect. The rite matters not because it establishes a theology, but because its shared foolishness interrupts the guests’ gravity and restores their capacity for joy.

Zarathustra calls the night a good omen and says that only convalescents could have devised such a festival in his home. He asks the Higher Men not to forget it and, if they celebrate it again, to do so out of love for themselves, for him, and in remembrance of him. The Ass Festival thus ends not with a creed or a punishment, but with a proposed recurrence: a remembered occasion that the guests may choose to repeat. Its comic reversal—from laughter to kneeling, and from apparent piety back to joyful play—makes the festival a measure of their renewed liveliness.