4/25/13 Minoan Honey : The Bull, The Mushroom And The Mistress Of The Dance

www.biroz.net/words/minoan4.htm 1/2

Home :: Visions :: Sacred Art :: Projects :: About :: SHOP :: Words :: Contact

:: Minoan Honey : The Bull, The Mushroom And The Mistress Of The Dance ::

previous next

:: the spatial structure of minoan religion ::

Amongst the profusion of Minoan sites across Crete and the surrounding islands of the Cyclades, a casual glance demonstrates theabsence of much in the way or purpose built temple-like structures. This, again, is in stark contrast to most civilisations contemporarywith or later than the Minoans: in most hieratic city states of the Middle East, for example, the temple and palace formed the centreof urban life. But among the Minoans only one purpose built temple has been found: at Anemospilia at the base of Mount Yiouchtasnear Archanes, consisting of three small dark rooms, one of which contained wooden cult statues and two other rooms which mayhave presented evidence for bull and human sacrifice, suggesting a specialist use for this purpose-built mountain-based site. c

Rather than temples, the Minoans appear to have tended towards three or four other types of site, and it is in a study of the locationsof these sites that an understanding of the spatial structure of Minoan ritual life can be gained. This will be relevant in providingcontext and insight into the mandala we will be uncovering later. It should be noted that none of the main Minoan ritual location typeswe are about to discuss can be termed as purpose-built in the proper sense; rather they were adapted out of pre-existing naturalspaces or areas reserved for ritual usage in larger (more functional) urban spaces or building structures. Again, then, we have here thesuggestion of the survival among the Minoans of the kind of ritual practices – shrines, sacred groves, threshing floors and so on – thatwere anciently current throughout Neolithic Europe.

The first major religious space to consider, then, is the household shrine. Such shrines are found everywhere throughout the ruins ofMinoan towns and villages in Crete, from the grander rooms within the palace at Knossos, for example, to more humble shrines with asimple raised platform or dais found in a hilltop village far from the urban centres.

The Goddess of Myrtos, from the Pre-Palatial settlement of Phournou Koryphi on the south coast of Crete, was found in what appearsto have been a shrine of an ordinary one-storey house which also functioned as a dwelling.36 Later, at Gournia, a small shrine to asnake goddess was found on a small hill just to the north of the villa37 which may have been a household shrine or a slightly morepublic shrine. Whilst it had steps leading up from a main corridor, suggesting a slightly separated existence for the shrine rather thanincorporation into a dwelling, it nonetheless remained indivisible from the neighbourhood it sanctified.

But there were also shrines far removed from urban spaces, at the top of high mountains. These so-called peak sanctuaries form thesecond major religious space for the Minoans and were found throughout Crete, dating from just before the Old Palace Period onwardsand persisting in Eastern Crete until very late, suggesting that after the Mycenaean and Dorian invasions, the ancestral Minoanpopulations took to the hills in that area to preserve their way of life.

One of the most important peak sanctuaries was found at the top of Mt Yiouchtas in north-central Crete, between the two majorurban centres of Knossos and Archanes38. Enclosed by a large wall which appeared to create a large space to the north of the shrinebuildings themselves, possibly for the gathering of congregations or pilgrims, the shrine contains a large altar 4.7 metres long whichwas flanked on both sides by deep natural fissures into the rock. These fissures have yielded numerous finds, as have the buildingsthemselves.

The excavator of the site concluded from the palatial-style architecture of some of the buildings, especially in later period, that it wasintimately connected with Knossos, probably functioning as a pilgrimage site or even a place of public worship for the citizens of thecity, but a road also joined the site to the town of Archanes on the southern flanks of the mountain.

Numerous figurines were found across the site, including human and animal forms given as offerings and images of worshippers whichhistorians presume functioned as a kind of surrogate for the pilgrim, continuing to offer prayers and worship after the visitor had leftthe site. Bronze double-axes were also found throughout the site, as well as stone and clay bull-horns and Linear A texts on many ofwhich seem to be written a standard set of words called the libation formula.

Most notably, however, are the profusion of female figurines of varying quality and preservation found at Yiouchtas, demonstratingbodily postures such as salutes, arms-raised or crossed, and hands-on-hips which could have represented a possible technique ordance to reach a trance state39, and the hands-on-hips posture in particularly has been interpreted as the goddess appearing in akind of epiphany40. Many of the figurines also have their feet pointing downwards, which Dimopoulo and Rethemiotakis haveinterpreted in both sculpture and ring-seals to represent the goddess descending from on high41, again suggestive of an epiphanysituation:

“...the placing of the figure on high [on the Ring of Minos ring seal] indicates she is hovering. Her downward movement is denotedconventionally by the fact that her hair waves in the air, and by the downward slope of her feet. Iconographic elements like these,suggesting a vision of the epiphany, are to be found in four more finger rings [including one] from Isopata, Knossos, where thehovering figure of the [female] deity is depicted in the background amidst a choir of female adorants… ”42

Here, then, we have the correlation of the goddess upon high with a trance state and an epiphany vision, as well as with some kind ofpublic ceremony with ‘a choir of adorants’, and it seems that this was a central function of the peak sanctuaries, of which MtYiouchtas appears to be the earliest example. That they were also sites of pilgrimage is also clear from the numerous finds andofferings, and this mountain-based ritual or cult seems to have spread rapidly throughout Crete in the Old Palace Period. One mighteven suggest that the apparent suddenness of its spread suggests that the fashion of adding buildings to pre-existing, natural peaksanctuaries was what in fact was happening.

What is also interesting is that some of the peak sanctuaries are found atop mountains that bore names in Classical times that wererelated to eyes or seeing, which again resonates with the epiphany theme. Mt Yiouchtas and Mt Ida43 in central Crete are notablehere. Marija Gimbutas speaks of the Eye Goddess as an ancient Old European mandala44 and it is likely that this aspect of her naturewas revealed on these mountain sanctuaries.

Interesting also are the Neolithic remains of a village found under the western plaza at the palace of Knossos, dating to the earliesteras of settlement on Crete (7000BC onwards), and which appear to be aligned with the form of Mt Yiouchtas 12km away45. The topof the mountain can be seen to peek (pun intended) over the summits of lower hills in the foreground in a topological arrangement thatJulian Cope has termed ‘the eye game’46. This visual phenomenon, in which sacred mountains or hills appear framed or raised up by

4/25/13 Minoan Honey : The Bull, The Mushroom And The Mistress Of The Dance

www.biroz.net/words/minoan4.htm 2/2

foreground hills when viewed from certain ruins or ancient pathways, is found across Europe particularly occurring with mountainswhose names are connected with local words for eyes or seeing, and which can be clearly viewed with Mt Yiouchtas from anywhere

on the Knossos site.

Upon the mountains, then, there were likely pilgrimage sites dedicated to the bright eyes of the goddess of the epiphanies.

Much darker, however, are the numerous caves and underworld sanctuaries which form the third major religious space of Minoan rituallife. Some of these caves have continued in sacred use right up to the present day, and some 120 caves on Crete are recognisedtoday as Christian churches, even ones which have sourced Minoan and Neolithic artefacts. Here, then, is evidence of an ancientsurvival into the present day, and one which strongly suggests the sacred ‘pull’ of caves on Cretan religious life through the ages.

Three caves on Crete were particularly famous in Classical times: the Idaean cave on the slopes of Mt. Ida was held to be thebirthplace of Zeus in one tradition, and in another it was the Dictaean Cave on Lasithi Plateau where Zeus was at least raised orhidden from his father Cronos. Some have also told that Dionysus was born in the latter of these caves. The Cave of Eilithyia nearAmnisos on the north coast was also held to be sacred, being the location where Hera gave birth to Eilithyia, the goddess of childbirth,and so was especially sacred to pregnant women.

But in Minoan times, these caves were much more likely to have been a kind of underworld, or an entrance point to such a domain.Classical literature abounds with such caves being entries into Hades, and the mandala is by no means unique to the ancientMediterranean. There is some evidence that human sacrifice may have taken place in some of these caves, and the sacrifice of themale youth at the temple of Anemospilia may signify the ‘underworld’ nature of this purpose-built shrine. The myth of the Minotaur mayalso be relevant in this regard, being a story of human sacrifice taking place ‘beneath’ Knossos, suggestive possibly of a cave ortemple-tomb like structure within the town itself.

Finally the fourth Minoan space is the plaza. Every Minoan and pre-Minoan settlement, from the most humble to the palaces, had atleast one plaza and curiously in many of the settlements, these plazas lay on the western side47. Minoan towns were decidedlycrowded, with narrow winding corridors and stairways which linked houses and which were barely wide enough for two people to passeach other. Houses were dark with relatively small rooms, although they were often two or three storeys high, and this may havecontributed to the claustrophobia of urban life.

But the plazas were wide-open to the sky and the centre of all public life. Doubtless the markets took place here, bringing trade andtravellers into the settlements, and it appears likely that public religious rites were conducted here also; frescoes from Knossosdepicting dancers and bull-leapers must surely have shown such plaza-based public spectacles.

It might be easy to consider the plaza as simply a public functional space, whether religious or economic, and with the more sacredshrines located in private spaces at home. But this would be missing an important point: it’s also likely that these smooth-surfacedopen plazas were used as threshing floors. At harvest time, the barley and wheat grain would have been brought into the village andthreshed to remove the edible germ from the chaff by throwing it in the air sieves, thus blowing away the inedible parts.

In many modern villages where the technology remains at a Neolithic level, harvest is a time of great celebration, of dancing and ofreligious rites, and it must have been for the Minoans too. Robert Graves, in his seminal work, ‘The White Goddess’ speaks of a Cretanpartridge dance that took place on the threshing floor at Knossos, and remembers the Homeric line:

“Daedalus in Knossos once contrivedA dancing-floor for fair haired Ariadne”48

which he suggests was for a dance honouring the moon goddess Pasiphae, and James G. Frazer49 makes numerous references to thethreshing floor being the site of a sacrifice of a corn spirit, or indeed to a corn deity of some kind. In the Bible50, during the episode ofthe death of Jacob now called Israel, the sons of Jacob made a pilgrimage to Atad in Canaan and held a seven-day ceremony ofmourning on the threshing floor. Modern day Dogon people also hold numerous religious ceremonies on their threshing floors.

Thus there is a case to be made for the threshing floor or dance plaza as being one of the major public sacred spaces from Neolithictimes onwards, and we have a clear line from the Neolithic threshing floor to the Minoan plaza as a place of public religious life.Considering also the role of the threshing floor in what is known of the Eleusinian Mysteries (themselves anciently held to haveoriginated in Crete), I daresay the Neolithic threshing floor can be held to be the ancestor of our modern village squares and townplazas, as well as the theatre stages, and if they were sometimes used as a place of public discourse, then our modern parliament andsenate houses too…

Thus we have here in this brief summary of Minoan religious spaces a structure in three levels: the mountain peak, the urban spaceand the underworld cave. We might also argue for two dimensions: public, in the peak pilgrimage sites and the urban plaza, andprivate, in the dark caves and household shrines. It is notable also that in exploring this spatial structure, we may have already haveuncovered the first parts of the fragments of a Minoan mandala: the Eye Goddess of the Mountain, who brings epiphanies through adance-related trance or altered consciousness of some kind. Indeed, the profusion of statuettes from early Neolithic times onwardsattests to the fact that she was probably ancient even in Minoan times .

But for now we need to leave the context of the sacred space among the Minoans and begin to explore some of the mythology thathas come down to us. The archaeological evidence – more specifically, the lack of male authority visible in Minoan art – suggests thatwhatever Minos was, there was no king, and a careful reading of the Cretan mythology that has come down to us might reveal anidentity more in keeping with what the archaeology speaks of. Not a silent king, but perhaps an underworld deity?

previous next

'Minoan Honey: The Bull, The Mushroom & The Mistress of the Dance'Bruce Rimell, January 2009

Copyright (c) 2002-2013 Bruce Rimell : All images, artwork, and words on this siteare copyrighted to Bruce Rimell and may not be reproduced in any form unless stated otherwise.