Baring and Cashford Reading

Introduction

• The people of Crete viewed the great goddess as a dynamic energy present in all of nature

• Goddess is sculpted with serpents around her body while holding a double axe; sometimes she has doves or poppies on her head
• Crete was covered by dense forests of oak, cypress, and fir, unlike today
• There was never difficulty in growing food, and there was never a shortage
• Cretan pottery was painted with every aspect of natural life
• Cretan art ignored the human attempt for timelessness and instead viewed life as movement
• Crete used to be a land of legend in Greek imagination, a sacred place of origin where many goddesses and gods were born

• The palace at Knossos was often the focus of Cretan culture

• Excavations found give great palace complexes broken by two separate earthquakes
• Excavation revealed painted pots, brightly colored mosaics, golden seals with dancing figures, necklaces of bees and butterflies, serpents and spiraling flowers, tiny statues of bulls, large bulls’ horns, and statues of goddesses; all suggesting emphasis on nature
• Evans calls this culture ‘Minoan’ after King Minos of Crete

• Crete and Mycenae established relations around 1600 to 1450 BC

• Mycenaeans were an Indo-European or Aryan people who built Mycenae in Greece
• Mycenaeans brought Linear B to Crete
• Mycenaeans went back and forth between Crete and Mycenae, gradually absorbing and adopting Minoan culture as their own, before settling there due to earthquakes and waves affecting their home place
• Dorians invaded Crete and brought the civilization to an end in 1150 BC

• Crete was the direct inheritor of the Neolithic culture of Old Europe

• Immigrants from south-western Anatolia arrived on Crete in early 6th millennium BC
• Minoans traded with Egypt; Crete was at center of sea routes, connecting to other cultures
• Had the signature of the older Neolithic Moher Goddess
• Griffin, composite image of bird, lion, and snake, embodies the three dimensions of sky, earth, and waters beneath the earth, and were the tree aspects of the Great Goddess

• The Old European Serpent Goddess reappears in Crete

• She holds many snakes, suggesting she was a goddess
• Intertwined snakes on the belly suggests the goddess whose womb gives forth and takes life
• A lion cub sits tame on her head, and is also a guardian as a full-grown lion to the Goddess of the Animals in Anatolia
• Her skirt has seven layers, the number of days of the moon’s four quarters
• The goddess holds two snakes apart, implying she contains the two poles of dualism and prevents them falling apart into the kind of opposition against each other (life and death)

The Goddess of the Double Axe

• In Minoan art, double images poised in a precise balance suggest unity, not duality

• One example is the double-headed axe emerging from its great shaft and the curving horns of the bull

• In Crete, giant bronze double-headed axes stood on either side of the altars of the goddess, where priestesses celebrate her rites

• The double axes held in the goddess’ hands, like the serpents, symbolizes her rulership over the related domains of life and death
• The axe was the ritual instrument that sacrificed the bull, the cult animal who embodied the regenerative power of the goddess
• Sacrifice of the male animal became the focus of fertility, was believed to renew the life-cycle
• Cutting down of the tree was also a focus of fertility, and was an annual ceremony
• The double axe is probably an imitation of the butterfly, particularly the double double-axe
• The butterfly was viewed as the image of the soul in many lands

• Mycenaean absorbed Minoan cultures through various means

• Minoan princesses marrying into the houses of Mycenaean lords
• Minoan architects designing the mainland palaces and Minoan painters adorning them

• The goddess is seated beneath the Tree of Life

• Signifies her nurturing power as a food-giver, emphasized by her hand offering her breast
• She welcomes two priestesses with snake-like head-dresses similar to her own, holding out three poppy pods full of seeds, the fruit of transformation
• Below her are new shoots of vegetation
• Her daughter rises up from the ground

• It is likely that the myth of Demeter and Persephone originated in Crete, as the story took place there

• Parallels with the goddess of the double axe art where the daughter is rising from the ground

The Bee Goddess

• Bee and butterfly are symbols of the ‘Great Goddess of Regeneration’

• Ancient belief was that bees rose out of the carcass of a bull

• Signified that life comes from death

• Ancient people gave the name Melissae (‘bees’) to the priestesses of Demeter, Melitodes to Kore (Persephone), and Melissa to Artemis (moon)

• Bee, bull, and moon are united in the symbolism of renewal

• Tombs at Mycenae were shaped as beehives

• In one piece of art, the bee goddess descends to the earth among snakes and lilies

• Honey was used to embalm and preserve the bodies of the dead

• Another piece of art shows the bee goddess bearing upon her head the bull’s horns with the double axe inside their curve
• Honey played a central part of the New Year rituals of the Minoans

• Cretan New Year began at the summer solstice where heat was greatest
• Rising of the star Sirius rose in conjunction with the sun
• The Minoan temple-palaces in Crete were oriented to this star
• Rising of Sirius ended a forty-day ritual of gather honey
• Honey was then fermented into mead and drunk as liquor for rituals celebrating the return of the daughter of the goddess

• Dionysos originated in Crete and was called the Bull God

• A bull was sacrificed with the rising of the star Sirius and bees were seen as the resurrected form of the deal bull, as well as the souls of the dead

• In Homeric Hymn to Hermes, the god Apollo speaks of three female seers as three bees or bee-maidens, who like himself, practiced divination

• The three maidens and their gift of prophecy was to be Apollo’s gift to Hermes
• Hermes was the only god who could lead the souls of the dead out of life and sometimes back again

The Goddess of the Sacred Root

• A knot of cloth, corn, or hair, at the entrance to shrines or pinned on ceremonial occasions of bull vaulting was the sign of the presence of the goddess and eventually came to stand for the goddess herself

• The symbol found in Crete was similar to the curved reed bundle in the image of goddess Inanna in Sumeria, as well as the resemblance of the knotted headband or necklace of the Egptian goddesses Hathor and Isis
• In Minoa, the priestess carries the knot at the nape of her neck, indicating her role in rites

• Women played active roles in every sphere of Minoan society, with no dominant gender

• Exception was that the priestess presided on behalf of the goddess

• The knot can be drawn on its own to look like the butterfly whose wings are stylized to represent the double ax
• The knot may be a composite symbol, uniting the knot, double axe, and butterfly, and even the figure of the goddess herself where the wing-axes become arms and the vertical knot the body

The Goddess of the Animals

• The Goddess of the Animals is also called the Lady of the Beasts

• Similar to the Goddess of the Hunt in the Paleolithic era
• In Crete, both wild and tamed animals were sacred to the goddess
• Pictured with a large shrine of bulls’ horns tacked one on top of the other
• Two lions rise upwards on either side of the goddess as her guardians

The Bird Goddess

• The Neolithic Bird Goddess re-emerges in Crete as the Minoan and Mycenaean bird goddesses

• Have upraised wing arms and a beaked head to become a human face
• This imagery is inherited by the goddesses of Classical Greece, particularly Athena

• Athena’s association with the owl, snake, olive tree, and shield, point to her descent from the bird, snake, tree, and shield forms of the Minoan great goddess

• Athena manifests herself as a bird in Odyssey

• Since Palaeolithic times, the bird was a messenger of the vast incomprehensible distance

• The raised wings of the Mycenaean bird goddess from Tiryns is still those of a bird, but they become the gesture of the epiphany for any manifestation of the deity.

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