The Beast So Terrible the Only Thing Comparable Was the Church!

What do you get when you put the head of an ass on a dragon scaled body of a woman, add one giant bird foot, replace the tail with the head and neck of a horned fowl, make one of the hands human, make the remaining two extremities cloven and somewhere on the upper left leg you plop the face of a bearded man? Well we know this much it was called the Pope’s Donkey and we know it supposedly washed up on the shores of the Tiber river in Italy in the 16th century…

Now whether there was ever a real deformed beast that started the tale we’ll probably never know. But what we do know is that it’s entertaining image became the fodder for some unique protestant propaganda that rocketed some common rotten river detritus to a beast of Catholic Church defaming stardom.

In the hands of some artisinal myth craftsman the legend grew, it was no longer had just a horribly misshapen beast. Each aspect of its deformity now represented an arm of the church, with a stupid ass at its head (read the pope), a human hand to give the appearance of charitable work while the other hand (the hoof of an elephant) was busily crushing the weak. The Cloven foot of the Ox represented the strong foundation already in support of the beasts tyranny and the clawed foot of a griffin representing the ties to the aristocracy vs that of the common man…

I had an out on the town work function last eve (technically on the lake) and whilst we cruised about the shores of lake michigan, we turned our dining table into a beast judging committee, including two time judge Lauren Mitchell, her boy Jason, Judge Drop Bear, Mr Jim Thaxton, his partner Pat, myself and my wife… the following are the results!