Minoan Crete

In 1903, in two stone-lined pits under the floor of the palace at Knossos, Arthur Evans's workmen found the broken pieces of several small figures in faience, a glazed quartz paste. Two of them were put back together in the months that followed. One was a woman in a flounced skirt and an open bodice, holding a snake in each outstretched hand; a small cat sat on her head. The other had snakes coiled over her arms and round her tall hat. Evans called the pits the Temple Repositories, and the figures a "Snake Goddess" and her votary. They became the most famous images of a religion that has left no readable scripture, no names of gods, no myths in its own words. They are also a good place to begin, because the missing head, the left arm and the cat of the best-known figure were supplied by Evans's restorers. Much of what the world believes about the religion of Bronze Age Crete was built the same way: from real fragments, joined by confident guesses.

A civilization without a readable scripture

The people now called Minoans (Evans's name, from the mythical King Minos) built a palace civilization on Crete from about 1950 BCE. Archaeologists divide it into the Protopalatial period (the first palaces at Knossos, Phaistos and Malia, c. 1950–1700), and the Neopalatial (rebuilt, grander palaces, c. 1700–1450), when Minoan art and influence reached across the Aegean. Around 1450 BCE most sites on the island were destroyed or abandoned; afterwards Knossos was run by Greek-speaking Mycenaeans, whose tablets in the Linear B script record the palace's last administration.

The Minoans wrote. They used a hieroglyphic script on seals, and then Linear A, known from more than a thousand inscriptions, mostly clay accounting tablets. Linear A is not deciphered. Because Linear B was adapted from it, the sound values of many signs can be guessed, so Linear A can be pronounced after a fashion; but the language behind it is unknown, and no proposed identification (Greek, Luwian, Semitic, Indo-Iranian and others) has won acceptance. The famous Phaistos Disc (see the Vault, V56) is in yet another script, and unreadable.

So Minoan religion has to be reconstructed almost entirely from places, objects and images: where people left offerings, what they left, and what their artists showed. That is a real limit, and this chapter keeps returning to it.

Mountains and caves

The earliest clear Minoan cult places are in the open country.

Peak sanctuaries. From about 2000 BCE people climbed to hilltops and mountain summits within sight of their settlements to light fires and leave offerings. The first to be identified was Petsofas, above Palaikastro in the east; the greatest was Mount Iouktas (Juktas), the mountain south of Knossos whose profile looks, from the palace, like a face lying on its back. The offerings are humble and numerous: thousands of small clay figurines of men and women with raised or folded arms, of cattle, sheep and beetles, and of separate human limbs, arms, legs and heads, some apparently diseased, pierced to be hung up. They have been read as prayers for healing, much like the ex-votos of later Greek and Christian shrines, though what the worshippers asked for is inferred, not recorded. In the Neopalatial period the palaces seem to have taken over some peak sanctuaries: the richest, Iouktas, received stone libation tables inscribed in Linear A.

Sacred caves. Crete's limestone is full of caves, and many received offerings over centuries. The Kamares cave high on Mount Ida gave its name to the fine painted pottery found there, apparently offered by the palace of Phaistos far below. The cave of Psychro in the Lasithi plateau, which most scholars identify with the Dictaean Cave of Greek myth, has offerings from the Early Minoan period to the Archaic age: figurines, double axes of bronze and gold, weapons, jewellery and seal stones pushed into the cracks of its stalactites. The Idaean cave and the cave of Amnisos, which Linear B names as a place of the birth goddess Eleuthia, were also sacred. Later Greeks remembered Crete as the island where Zeus was born and hidden in a cave; whether that memory preserves anything of a Minoan divine child is a hypothesis, not a finding.

Palaces, shrines and water

The palaces themselves were full of rooms that look ritual, though few can be proved so.

• The central court. Each palace was built round a great rectangular court, usually aligned roughly north–south. Many scholars think the courts were the stage for public ceremonies, including the bull games (below).
• Pillar crypts. Dark basement rooms with a central square pillar, sometimes carved with the double-axe sign and set beside stone vats or pits, are often read as shrines.
• Lustral basins. Small sunken rooms reached by a short flight of steps, characteristic of Neopalatial elite buildings. Evans took them for places of ritual purification ("lustral"); most have no drain, so they were not ordinary baths. Whether they served for anointing, initiation or something else is debated.
• Bench sanctuaries and repositories. Small rooms with a bench for cult images, and cists for storing sacred equipment, like the Temple Repositories where the faience figures were found.

The palaces are hard to separate from their cult. Evans spoke of "priest-kings"; many archaeologists now doubt there was a single king at all, and think the palaces may have been run by elites whose authority was bound up with ritual.

The goddesses Evans found, and made

Evans was sure that the Minoans worshipped one Great Mother Goddess in many forms, with a young male god, her son or consort, at her side. The idea came partly from the finds and partly from the scholarship of his day: James Frazer's Golden Bough, and a nineteenth-century belief in an age of mother-right before patriarchy. By the time he wrote The Palace of Minos (1921–1935), Evans read nearly every female figure as the Goddess.

Modern scholars are more cautious. The images show many female figures with different attributes: with snakes, with birds, among lilies, on mountaintops, beside trees, seated beneath them. Whether these are one goddess, several goddesses, priestesses acting as goddesses, or worshippers is usually impossible to tell. The "Snake Goddess" may be a goddess, a priestess, or a household protector; snakes guarded houses in later Greek belief, and that is one possible reading, not the only one.

Evans's vision also made a market. From the 1910s a stream of "Minoan" ivory and gold goddesses appeared on the antiquities market without find spots, bought by great museums: the Boston Snake Goddess (Museum of Fine Arts, acquired 1914), the Royal Ontario Museum's "Our Lady of the Sports", and others. In Mysteries of the Snake Goddess (2002) the art historian Kenneth Lapatin argued that the Boston figure is almost certainly a twentieth-century forgery, and that the fourteen or so unprovenanced "Minoan goddesses" in collections are all modern, made by Cretan craftsmen who had worked for Evans's restorers and knew what he hoped to find. The ROM itself now presents its goddess as a probable fake. Such pieces then fed back into the scholarship as "evidence" for the Goddess. The lesson for anyone reading about Minoan religion is simple: ask where an object was found.

Epiphany in gold

The richest source for Minoan religious scenes is not large art but the tiny engraved bezels of gold signet rings and the clay sealings they stamped.

• On the Isopata ring from a tomb near Knossos, four women in flounced skirts move among lilies with arms raised; a much smaller figure seems to float down from the sky. It is often read as a goddess's epiphany summoned by ecstatic dance. A 2001 study in the American Journal of Archaeology showed how ambiguous the scene is: which figure is divine, and whether anything "descends" at all, depends on the viewer's assumptions.
• The "Mother of the Mountains" is known from many clay impressions of one lost ring found in the Central Sanctuary at Knossos. A woman stands on a peak holding out a staff or spear, flanked by lions, before a shrine crowned with horns; a young man faces her in salute.
• Many rings show a man or woman shaking a tree or embracing a stone (a baetyl), sometimes weeping, sometimes in rapture. They have been read as a vegetation cult of dying and returning life; that reading owes a good deal to Frazer.

Rings are small, precious and easy to fake, and several of the most famous are questioned. The "Ring of Nestor", said to come from a tomb at Pylos, is widely suspected. The "Ring of Minos", reported found near Knossos around 1928 and lost to scholarship for decades, came to the Heraklion Museum in 2002, when an expert committee declared it genuine; some specialists still doubt it.

Among the finest objects with a secure find spot is the Palaikastro Kouros, a statuette about 50 cm tall of a young man in serpentine, hippopotamus ivory and gold, excavated in 1987–1990 in eastern Crete, found broken and burnt in a destruction layer. It is often identified with a young god. On the same site, in 1904, excavators found the Hymn of the Kouretes, a Greek hymn composed in the Hellenistic period and carved on stone in the third century CE, which calls on Zeus of Dikte as "greatest Kouros" to come for the new year and leap into the flocks and the fields. The hymn and the statuette are more than a thousand years apart; the link between them is suggestive, not proven.

Bulls

No animal mattered more in Minoan imagery than the bull.

• Bull-leaping. Frescoes at Knossos, carved stone vessels, ivory figures and seals show youths grasping a charging bull's horns and vaulting over its back. The leapers' pale and dark skins were once read as women and men, following the Egyptian colour convention; that reading is now disputed. Most scholars think the games were ritual as well as spectacle, perhaps held in the central courts, perhaps a rite of passage for elite youths. Whether the leap as shown was physically possible has been doubted by modern bull handlers.
• Sacrifice. On the painted limestone Hagia Triada sarcophagus (c. 1400 BCE, from a tomb near Phaistos), a bull lies trussed on an altar table while its blood drains into a vessel; women carry offerings, a man plays a lyre, and on the other side men bring animals and a model boat to a figure standing before a tomb, perhaps the dead man himself. The sarcophagus dates from the time of Mycenaean control, and mixes Minoan and mainland traditions.
• Horns of consecration. The stylized pair of horns, in stone or plaster, that crowned shrines and palace roofs, which Evans named, is usually read as a sign of the sacred derived from the bull's horns.

The later Greek myths of Crete are full of bulls: Zeus carrying Europa to the island as a white bull; the bull from the sea that Poseidon sent to Minos; the queen's union with it; the Minotaur in the Labyrinth, fed with Athenian youths until Theseus killed it. These are Greek stories, told centuries after the palaces fell. They may keep a distant memory of Knossos, its maze of rooms and its bull rites, but they cannot be read back as Minoan belief.

Blood on Mount Iouktas: Anemospilia

In 1979 the archaeologists Yannis and Efi Sakellarakis excavated a small three-roomed building at Anemospilia, on the north slope of Iouktas, destroyed by an earthquake and fire around 1700 BCE. In the western room lay the skeleton of a young man of about eighteen on a low platform, his legs bent as if bound, and a bronze blade about 40 cm long among his bones. Beside him lay a man and a woman, killed as the building fell; a fourth person died in the corridor. The excavators argued that the earthquake had interrupted a human sacrifice, made perhaps in a last attempt to stop the tremors.

The case is contested. The sacrifice reading is accepted by many Aegean archaeologists, including Peter Warren. Others, notably the historian of Greek sacrifice Dennis Hughes, argue that the platform is not clearly an altar, the "knife" is a spearhead that may have fallen from a shelf, the binding is inferred from the position of the legs, and the room could have been used to prepare a corpse. At Knossos itself, a basement in the North House held the bones of at least four healthy children, many with fine knife cuts of the kind left by removing flesh, among the bones of slaughtered sheep. Peter Warren read them as evidence of sacrifice and ritual eating; others propose a mortuary practice of defleshing the dead. The archive records the debate without settling it.

After the palaces: Mycenaean Knossos and Greek memory

The Linear B tablets of Mycenaean Knossos give the first readable religious names on the island, and they are Greek. They record offerings of oil, honey and other goods to di-we (Zeus), to pa-si-te-o-i ("all the gods"), to e-re-u-ti-ja (Eleuthia, at Amnisos), and on tablet KN V 52 to a-ta-na-po-ti-ni-ja ("the Lady of Atana", perhaps Athena), e-nu-wa-ri-jo (Enyalios), pa-ja-wo (Paiawon, later Paean) and po-se-da-o (Poseidon). Tablet KN Gg 702 sends a jar of honey to da-pu₂-ri-to-jo po-ti-ni-ja, usually read "the Mistress of the Labyrinth". Whether da-pu₂-ri-to really is the Labyrinth, and whether "labyrinth" really comes from labrys, the Lydian word Plutarch gives for the double axe, are both debated.

These are the gods of the Greek-speaking rulers of Knossos around 1400 BCE. How much they inherited from the Minoans, and how much they brought with them, cannot be decided while Linear A remains unread. The same goes for the eruption of Thera (Santorini), the greatest volcanic event of the Aegean Bronze Age. It was once blamed for the fall of the palaces, and even linked to the legend of Atlantis. Radiocarbon now dates it to about 1600 BCE or a little earlier, roughly 150 years before the destructions of about 1450, so it cannot be their direct cause. Its effect on Minoan belief, if any, is unknown.

The believer's lens

No community has practised Minoan religion for more than three thousand years, and no Minoan text tells us how its worshippers understood it. What can be said from the inside is limited to what the images seem to value: a sacred landscape of summits, caves, springs and trees; divine presence imagined as appearing, in epiphany, to dancers and worshippers; female figures at the centre of cult as goddesses, priestesses or both; the bull as the great animal of power and sacrifice; and offerings of the whole body, limb by limb, for healing.

Since the 1970s Minoan Crete has also had a second life in modern religion. Goddess spirituality and parts of the feminist spirituality movement, drawing on Marija Gimbutas's idea of a peaceful, goddess-centred "Old Europe", have treated Minoan Crete as a surviving example of that world, and some contemporary pagans practise a reconstructed Minoan devotion. For them the snake goddess and the dancers of Isopata are living symbols. The archive reports that devotion as belief; the historical question is taken up in the next section.

The skeptical lens

The historian's first point is that almost every statement about Minoan religion is an interpretation of images, made without texts, and that the founding interpretation was Evans's. His Great Goddess, his priest-king and his peaceful, flower-loving Minoans owed as much to Edwardian scholarship and hopes as to the ground; his restorers rebuilt frescoes and figures from fragments, and his confidence created a market for forgeries that then confirmed his theories. Much modern work has consisted of taking that edifice apart.

The second point is that the "peaceful matriarchy" is not supported. Minoan sites have weapons, fortification walls at some sites, scenes of combat on seals and vessels, and the contested evidence from Anemospilia and Knossos. Female figures are prominent in cult imagery, but prominence in ritual does not tell us who held political power.

The third point is that the later Greek myths of Crete, however vivid, are not Minoan sources. They were told by Greeks about a past they did not know at first hand.

What does survive without interpretation is substantial: the sanctuaries, the offerings and their dates, the palace architecture, the Linear B offering lists, the ancient DNA showing that Minoans descended mainly from the Neolithic farmers of Anatolia and the Aegean, and the dates of Thera and of the palace destructions.

Symbology and sacred encoding

• The double axe (labrys). The commonest Minoan sacred sign: carved on pillars and blocks in pillar crypts, set up on stands between horns of consecration, offered in bronze, gold and silver in caves. It is shown in the hands of women on seals, and on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus stands on poles topped by birds beside the altar. It may have been a sacrificial tool made emblem, but its meaning is inferred; the claim that it was the "sign of the Goddess" is Evans's.
• Horns of consecration. A stylized pair of horns marking a place, altar or roof as sacred, usually thought to derive from the bull.
• The snake. On the faience figures and elsewhere; read as underworld, household protector or renewal (the shed skin). Several readings are possible.
• The sacred knot and the figure-of-eight shield. Recurring signs in frescoes and seals, possibly emblems of sanctity or of a deity; meaning unknown.
• The Minoan Genius. A hybrid creature with a lion's or hippopotamus's head and a dorsal "skin", carrying jugs to water sacred plants or altars. It derives from the Egyptian goddess Taweret, protector of childbirth, adopted around 1800–1700 BCE and transformed: a well-documented case of a sacred image crossing cultures.
• The griffin. Painted flanking the throne in the Throne Room at Knossos (in its final, Mycenaean-era form), and beside goddesses on seals: a guardian of the sacred.
• Linear A on libation tables. A recurring sequence, the so-called libation formula, appears on stone offering tables from peak sanctuaries and caves, with forms such as a-sa-sa-ra-me / ja-sa-sa-ra-me. It is widely thought to be a dedicatory formula, perhaps with a divine name or title. Proposals that (j)a-sa-sa-ra names a goddess, or means "this dedication", or is an Indo-Iranian loan word, are unproven. This is writing whose sacred use is clear and whose content is not.
• The Labyrinth. Classical Knossian coins show a square or round maze pattern, and "labyrinth" has been derived from labrys. The Greek identification of the palace with the Labyrinth is later myth; the etymology is contested.

Connections

Minoan religion sits between the great civilizations of Egypt (ch02), whose Taweret became the Minoan Genius and whose faience technique Crete adopted, and the Near East, and it passed much to the Mycenaean Greeks described in Early Greece (ch08). Its mountain and cave cults and its bull imagery echo Neolithic Anatolia (ch42), where bull horns were set in the walls of Çatalhöyük houses, and the Hittite storm-god on his bull (ch57). Its female figures stand at the heart of the debates in The Great Goddess (ch48), and its bull sacrifice and the Anemospilia controversy belong with Sacrifice & the Scapegoat (ch51). The birth of Zeus in a Cretan cave feeds into the classical religion of Classical Greece (ch15). In the Vault, the Phaistos Disc (V56) is the island's most famous unread text.

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch67.html · a comparative library of the sacred.