Crete: in Search of the Pre-Patriarchal Goddess

Folks have been making up shit about the Minoans for 3000 years — My turn :-)

Common Minoan potter design, octopus with seaweed, and a later Greek design, Achilles killing the Amazon Queen Penthesilea. All images Public Domain. Octopus vase: Wikipedia from the Archaeological Museum in Herakleion, photo by Wolfgang Sauber; Greek vase: British Museum, Creative Commons License.

We’re on vacation in Crete, chosen because of a long-term fascination with the Minoan civilization. The attraction: a well-developed pre-patriarchal Goddess-worshiping civilization with fascinating art — art unlike anything that followed in Greece or Rome. Minoan pottery shows few, if any, battles, for example. Greek pottery, beginning shortly after the Minoans, is rife with them.

Of the two designs above, I have a strong preference for the first.

Where we start

As part of our vacation, I’ve been reading relevant archaeology. This has generated layers of questions and puzzles, outstripping any discovered answers. So much so that it will take a series of articles to do it justice.

My initial assumption has held (this is a well-developed pre-patriarchal Goddess-worshiping civilization), but everything else is under dispute.

Is it possible to learn what a pre-patriarchal Goddess was like? I think we can draw some conclusions, but it will require some thought, and all conclusions are provisional.

Issues

The challenge is this: we don’t know the Minoan language or have the ability to translate Minoan Linear A or their pictographs. We’ve got lots of images — frescos, pottery, seal stones — but not the stories they draw from. We do have a trajectory of sorts. European Goddesses slowly shed power over time until we arrive at the present, where Christianity has no Goddess at all and Mary, much-worshipped, is merely the more accessible pathway to a God. Does the arc followed back into an undescribed past point to the opposite?

Untanslated Minoan hieroglyphics and Linear A. All images Public Domain. Phaistos disk, Linear A (Sir Arthur Evans, 1909)

A final challenge: almost all Minoan archaeology comes to us embedded in a suspect interpretive story.

When Arthur Evans first excavated Knossos in 1900, he immediately encountered what he considered to be a throne room with a basin (see below). Based on the Greek stories about Crete, he declared he had found King Minos’s Palace, home of the minotaur’s maze. (The myth in more detail.)

Throne room from Wikipedia

Maybe that’s a throne. But it’s small and tucked into a small dug-in room. And maybe that’s a basin. It has no drainage. Our guide at Knossus, Popi Moudatsaki, said it’s now considered a fire pit. So maybe. Or, the Romans sometimes bathed by coating themselves with olive oil and scraping that off onto a bed of sand. Could it be about that? Maybe the whole room is about purification…like, say, a sweat lodge…where one of the Minoans who represented the Goddess prepared herself before emerging to lead a public celebration.

(News flash: the Archaeological Museum of Chania, visited today, had a reconstruction of a sunken chamber termed the “lustral basin,” which was precisely for ritual preparation! Perhaps I’m not doing too badly making stuff up.)

Further, if the Minoans had a King or Queen, wouldn’t there be images of someone on a throne on frescoes, seal stones, or pots? (Seal stones in particular provide hundreds of images.)

Instead, you have images like this fresco below showing a huge gathering around a court. Minoans colored women white and men red most of the time, so here it’s mostly women on the dais and mostly men in the peanut gallery (probably :-).

Court fresco from Wikipedia

Next, if there wasn’t a King/Queen for much or all of Minoan history, then maybe Knossos Palace isn’t a palace after all. As a result, some recent archaeologists are calling the Palace a Courtyard Complex to avoid language that builds in assumptions.

The Goddess and Her priestesses

There definitely was a Goddess.

Seals stones of the Goddess seated alone and with priestesses. Images public domain. The seal images are from the Corpus der minoischen und mykenischen Siegel / Corpus of Minoan and Mycenaean Seals. Seated goddess seals — Arthur Evans, 1901 & Wikipedia (CMS I №17)

So singular are the Goddesses’ images that Arthur Evans argued that Cretan religion was monotheistic! (Monotheism was considered a benchmark for the highest levels of civilization according to the rubrics of his time.)

We do have stories from roughly the same period from Sumeria, where the text has been translated. Inanna was a supreme Goddess — Goddess of love, sex, fertility, war, and politics (think Women are from Mars and Women are from Venus) — and the patron deity of the main Sumerian city of Uruk. She was paired with Erishkigal, Goddess of the Underworld, and both existed within a pantheon of Gods and Goddesses.

The Minoans had only one goddess, and it is likely that it combined attributes of both. Note that on the seal stones above, you see, at the top, both the new moon and the sun, indicating that this Goddess is of both day and night, of both our daytime world and the underworld.

Or consider the famous statue below, in which a priestess is adorned with both serpents (representing the world below) and a cat (representing the natural and animal worlds). An alternative interpretation is that it’s an owl representing the world above.

Minoan Goddess, excavated by Arthur Evans at Knossus, 1903. Public domain. Snake goddess from Wikipedia.

One last note, the Goddesses’ priestesses quite definitely used some spiritual technology or process to produce ecstatic states in open-air settings. This could dovetail with the lustral basins as the location where one prepares for a ritual.

Various Minoan seal stones showing what looks like ecstatic dance or trance. Public domain. The seal images are from the Corpus der minoischen und mykenischen Siegel / Corpus of Minoan and Mycenaean Seals. Enraptured goddess seals “epiphany series”: CMS II.3 №114 / CMS I №126 / CMS II.3 №51 / CMS I №219

Conclusions (or more precisely, the lack thereof)

This trip has been a launching pad to think more deeply about a number of my ongoing interests. One is myths and their relevance. Inanna is a fascinating contrast to the whole Campbell/Jung hero myths. Others are the relative levels of violence in Stone Age and Bronze Age cultures; was Gimbutas correct about a peaceful Goddess culture and then a patriarchal takeover? Are Kings or Queens and hierarchy a necessary part of cultural advancement? What patterns of social living can we find in the varied currents of the past? What stories have colored our interpretation of the past, and which currently do that as well?

Any one of those questions is worth an article or two, which may or may not actually end with something other than a deeper understanding of the questions. So, this promises to be a fun series to work on! Some prefer certainty to a deepening puzzle. I am not one of those people.

Wrap up: inviting you to imagine yourself in two roles

One: You are Arthur Evans. Your education has been in archaeology. Your career, however, has been as a reporter for the Manchester Guardian, reporting on Bosnia and Herzegovina. You have been horrified by the way the local populations have been treated by first the Ottoman, then the Austrian Empires. You have spoken out and reported events that the various Empires wanted hidden. You have even spent 6 weeks in jail awaiting trial as an insurrectionist for advocating local rule.

All along, you have had a dual career. You’ve helped curate a museum in Britain, turning it into an antiquities museum. You are fascinated by seals, stones, and rings you find in various markets and follow your nose to Crete, where you suspect they were made.

A political shift makes it possible to actually excavate, and in 1900, you begin and immediately hit the Knossos throne room!

An amazing, unique, and almost totally unknown culture emerges!

Crete is the site of ongoing Turkish and Christian atrocities. You’re still horrified.

But you start to uncover and describe an unfortified city with unique art and building styles. Following the Greek myths, you declare you have discovered King Minos palace, and hypothesize a trading empire kept safe by a ‘Pax Minoa’ enforced by Crete’s powerful navy.

It is also non-patriarchal, with women in positions of power and all worshiping a single Goddess. To you, it suggests a blessed alternative to the ongoing squabbles, atrocities, and tensions that ultimately, a decade and a half later, blossom into WWI.

Two: You are a young person waiting for a feast to begin in a courtyard that has been used for that purpose for the last 1000 years. Perhaps you are sitting on a low wall nearly that old. Stories, practices, and recipes have been passed down from generation to generation.

The same courtyard will be used for similar communal gatherings for the next 1500 years.

This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Thanks for reading. I love feedback. Comments, claps, etc. It helps me decide what to do next. Find all my projects at altabor.org.

For more stories about life before patriarchy, follow Fourth Wave. Also, check out our Livestreams and sign up for our Newsletter. Let’s grow our community! Have you got a story or poem that focuses on women or other targeted groups? Submit to the Wave!