epiphany. Reincarnation, holy madness, rhapsodic self-abandon: these were the aims of every religious rite.
Minoans made no distinction between the secular and sacred in their rites, most of which resembled carnival in Rio. The new year’s festival, the supreme drama of rebirth and transformation, took place when Sirius, the dog star, rose for the summer solstice at the end of the honey harvest. High on fermented honey (mead) and opium, they danced out their religion to music in a state of primal theater.
Costumes rivaled court dress at Versailles in glamour and sophistication. Women wore bright boleros open to expose their breasts, gold belts, embroidered rainbow skirts, and acres of pendants, chains, beads, bracelets, and rings. They had the big hair of a mafioso bride: a whorl of braids and curls on top with ringlets erupting in front of their ears and flowing in long tendrils down their backs. Hyper-groomed and depilated, they painted their eyes and faces with thick powders ground on special palettes.
Instead of the primitive crotch thrusting of earlier peoples, Minoan dancers performed a mystic round dance that imitated the labyrinthine way. To the hypnotic strains of lyre, harp, and double pipe, they wound and unwound in concentric circles, replicating the journey to the goddess and drawing dancers into rapturous contact with her spirit of “indestructible life.” Perhaps the new year’s celebration also included bull dances. At these gymnastic spectacles, men and women—cross-dressed in tribute to the deity’s androgynous powers—somersaulted and vaulted over charging beasts with death-defying bravura.
The festivities proceeded inexorably to the climactic holy mysteries at the altar. After food and honey offerings to the goddess, the bull, symbol of the divinity’s creative power, was killed with the double ax and sacrificed. As before, pain and violence were at the very marrow of the sexual experience. With the ritual bloodletting, the miracle of parousia occurred. The goddess made herself manifest, filled devotees with her transcendent presence, infused land and sea with new life, and resurrected the dead. Images of votaries (some nude) in ecstatic abandon, their long black fusilli curls streaming out at right angles, suggest the kinds of revels that succeeded this divine possession.
Later in Minoan culture, the bull, once an icon of the deity’s androgynous nature, acquired a masculine character. Eventually he became the goddess’s young son/lover, a proto-Dionysus, doomed to annual death and rebirth. Man’s place in the Minoan cosmology was strictly second class. He existed, as the palace frescoes attest, to serve and honor female sexual power. In one low relief a lady of resplendent authority receives a delegation of nearly a hundred handsome tribute bearers. So much for women’s instinctive asexuality and monogamy. A seal shows a man with his arm raised in salute, his eyes shaded against the radiance of the goddess, who stands on a mountaintop, flanked by lions, brandishing a swagger stick.
An heiress of the primeval creatrix, the Snake Goddess continued the divine line of cosmic queenship. She was the almighty “it”—the great unity, melder of sexes and opposites, the all-knower, and a perpetual-motion machine that woke the dead and spun the earth on its axis with her erotic energy. The Cretans played their own riffs on her personality and refined her Seductive Way, but the mythic under-drawing stayed intact: the supreme she-god awhirl in her heaven, men and beasts in adoration at her feet.
The invading Greeks who conquered the Minoans had to construct a myth to put her prepotency to rest. In the story of the Minotaur, Ariadne, a goddess avatar, saves the captive Theseus by leading him out of the labyrinth and follows him to Greece. Like a good Greek patriarch, Theseus ditches her en route and marries a docile child bride in Athens.
But Ariadne and her Snake Goddess archetype couldn’t be
Minoans made no distinction between the secular and sacred in their rites, most of which resembled carnival in Rio. The new year’s festival, the supreme drama of rebirth and transformation, took place when Sirius, the dog star, rose for the summer solstice at the end of the honey harvest. High on fermented honey (mead) and opium, they danced out their religion to music in a state of primal theater.
Costumes rivaled court dress at Versailles in glamour and sophistication. Women wore bright boleros open to expose their breasts, gold belts, embroidered rainbow skirts, and acres of pendants, chains, beads, bracelets, and rings. They had the big hair of a mafioso bride: a whorl of braids and curls on top with ringlets erupting in front of their ears and flowing in long tendrils down their backs. Hyper-groomed and depilated, they painted their eyes and faces with thick powders ground on special palettes.
Instead of the primitive crotch thrusting of earlier peoples, Minoan dancers performed a mystic round dance that imitated the labyrinthine way. To the hypnotic strains of lyre, harp, and double pipe, they wound and unwound in concentric circles, replicating the journey to the goddess and drawing dancers into rapturous contact with her spirit of “indestructible life.” Perhaps the new year’s celebration also included bull dances. At these gymnastic spectacles, men and women—cross-dressed in tribute to the deity’s androgynous powers—somersaulted and vaulted over charging beasts with death-defying bravura.
The festivities proceeded inexorably to the climactic holy mysteries at the altar. After food and honey offerings to the goddess, the bull, symbol of the divinity’s creative power, was killed with the double ax and sacrificed. As before, pain and violence were at the very marrow of the sexual experience. With the ritual bloodletting, the miracle of parousia occurred. The goddess made herself manifest, filled devotees with her transcendent presence, infused land and sea with new life, and resurrected the dead. Images of votaries (some nude) in ecstatic abandon, their long black fusilli curls streaming out at right angles, suggest the kinds of revels that succeeded this divine possession.
Later in Minoan culture, the bull, once an icon of the deity’s androgynous nature, acquired a masculine character. Eventually he became the goddess’s young son/lover, a proto-Dionysus, doomed to annual death and rebirth. Man’s place in the Minoan cosmology was strictly second class. He existed, as the palace frescoes attest, to serve and honor female sexual power. In one low relief a lady of resplendent authority receives a delegation of nearly a hundred handsome tribute bearers. So much for women’s instinctive asexuality and monogamy. A seal shows a man with his arm raised in salute, his eyes shaded against the radiance of the goddess, who stands on a mountaintop, flanked by lions, brandishing a swagger stick.
An heiress of the primeval creatrix, the Snake Goddess continued the divine line of cosmic queenship. She was the almighty “it”—the great unity, melder of sexes and opposites, the all-knower, and a perpetual-motion machine that woke the dead and spun the earth on its axis with her erotic energy. The Cretans played their own riffs on her personality and refined her Seductive Way, but the mythic under-drawing stayed intact: the supreme she-god awhirl in her heaven, men and beasts in adoration at her feet.
The invading Greeks who conquered the Minoans had to construct a myth to put her prepotency to rest. In the story of the Minotaur, Ariadne, a goddess avatar, saves the captive Theseus by leading him out of the labyrinth and follows him to Greece. Like a good Greek patriarch, Theseus ditches her en route and marries a docile child bride in Athens.
But Ariadne and her Snake Goddess archetype couldn’t be
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