Minoan civilization: Encyclopedia II - Minoan civilization - Religion

Minoan civilization - Religion

The Minoans worshipped goddesses, (see Rodney Castleden, Minoans, 1994; Goodison and Morris, Ancient Goddesses, 1998; Nanno Marinatos, Minoan Religion, 1993; etc.). Although there is some indication of male gods, depictions of Minoan goddesses vastly outnumber depictions of anything that could be considered a Minoan god. There seem to be several goddesses including a Mother Goddess of fertility, a Mistress of the Animals, a protectress of cities, the household, the harvest, and the underworld, and more. Some would argue that these are all aspects of a single goddess. They are often represented by serpents, birds, poppies, and a somewhat vague shape of an animal on the head. Some suggest the goddess was linked to the "Earthshaker", a male represented by the bull and the sun, who would die each autumn and be reborn each spring. Though the notorious bull-headed Minotaur is a purely Greek depiction, seals and seal-impressions reveal bird-headed or masked deities.

Walter Burkert warns "To what extent one can and must differentiate between Minoan and Mycenaean religion is a question which has not yet found a conclusive answer." (Burkert 1985 p 21) and suggests that useful parallels will prove to be found in the relations between Etruscan and Archaic Greek culture and religion, or Roman and Hellenistic. Minoan religion has not been transmitted in its own language, and the uses literate Greeks later made of surviving Cretan mythemes, after centuries of purely oral transmission, have transformed the meager sources: consider the point-of-view of the Theseus legend. A few Cretan names are preserved in Greek mythology, but there is no way to connect a name with an existing Minoan icon, such as the familiar serpent-goddess. Retrieval of metal and clay votive figures— double axes, miniature vessels, models of artifacts, animals, human figures—has identified sites of cult: here were numerous small shrines in Minoan Crete, and mountain peaks and very numerous sacred caves— over 300 have been explored (Kerenyi 1976 p 18; Burkert 1985 p 24f)— were the centers for some cult, but temples as the Greeks developed them were unknown (Burkert 1985). Within the palace complex, no central rooms devoted to cult have been recognized, other than the center court where youths of both sexes would practice the bull-leaping ritual.

Minoan sacred symbols include the bull and its horns of consecration, the labrys (double-headed axe), the pillar, the serpent, the sun-disk, and the tree. It was assumed for many years that the Minoans were a non-violent and peaceful people. Recently, however, archaeologists have uncovered evidence which raises doubts about many of the long held conceptions of Minoan Crete. Recent finds, for example, uncovered at a temple structure near one of the palaces suggest to some that the Minoans might have engaged in human sacrifice. Although not all agree that this was human sacrifice. The highly esteemed archaeologist Nanno Marinatos, for example, says the man supposedly sacrificed actually died in the earthquake that hit at the time he died. She notes that this earthquake decimated the building he was found in, and also killed the two Minoans who supposedly sacrificed him.^[2] This is not a widely held interpretation, as the young man was trussed up much like the bull in the sacrifice scene on the Agia Triadha sarcophagus. Additionally, a dagger was found among his bones and the discoloration of the bones on one side of his body suggests he died of blood loss. It is not the only evidence suggestive of human sacrifice. As Geraldine Gesell notes in "The Place of The Goddess In Minoan Society", fragments of a human skull were found in the same room as a small hearth, cooking-hole and cooking-equipment in the sactuary-complex of Fournou Korifi. In Knossos, the bones of at least four children (who had been in good health) were found which bore signs that "they were butchered in the same way the Minoans slaughtered their sheep and goats, suggesting that they had been sacrificed and eaten. The senior Cretan archaeologist Nicolas Platon was so horrified at this suggestion that he insisted the bones must be those of apes, not humans." (Joseph Alexander MacGillivray, "Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth" 2000)....

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Religion", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki