Single is the race, single,
Of men and gods;
From a single mother we both draw breath.
But a difference of power in everything Keeps us apart.
(Pindar, Nemean Odes, VI, 1, about 450 bc)
What ultimately gives a culture its character is its thought, and that - in a prehistoric context - is the most elusive characteristic of all. Nevertheless, the Minoans left thousands of clues to guide us. To begin with, a very large number of the objects recovered from archaeological sites had a ritual function, and many of the images carved on sealstones and painted on wall plaster and pottery show religious symbols, rituals, or mythic events. It is becoming clear now, from such studies as those of Nanno Marinatos (1984) at Akrotiri on Thera and of Mark Cameron (1987) at Knossos, that even some of the apparently purely decorative schemes on Minoan walls are actually religious in intention.
What emerges from the archaeology is a culture steeped in religion. When the largest and most ambitious building projects, the so-called ‘ palaces’, are interpreted as temples, that preoccupation with religion is thrown into even higher relief.
The Minoan belief-system was extremely complex and we can, in the absence of detailed, first-hand, documentary evidence, only make inferences about it. What is clear is that it evolved out of the neolithic Cretan religion and that the religion of the classical Greeks at least in part grew out of it. Some of the names of pre-Hellenic deities are mentioned by Greek and Latin authors: Diktynna and Britomartis, for instance, were Minoan goddesses. It seems to have been a religion that was in transition, which may explain some startling contradictions or apparent contradictions. There are some identifiable developed deities; there are some incongruously primitive daemons too, which may look back towards an earlier period of religious feeling; there are also some images of divinities which seem to be relatively poorly assimilated foreign imports. We also have to recognize that the Minoans’ view of their gods may have changed significantly during two millennia of worship and religious experience. As Nilsson (1949) says, ‘gods also have their history and are subject to change’.
Some scholars have assumed that the Minoans worshipped a Great Goddess, the Mediterranean ‘Magna Mater’, and that they later divided her up into a series of more specialized divinities. But this, as Nilsson says, would be the reverse of religious developments observed in other cultures, where various deities are combined or where one deity is given ever-stronger and more all-inclusive attributes and thus supersedes all the other deities. John Pendlebury’s (1939) view was that the Minoans always tended to combine their goddesses into a single deity. Even so, the starting-point, so far as we can find one, was polytheistic.
The ‘Magna Mater’ goddess is named ‘Potnia’, ‘The Lady’, in the archive tablets, and she had shrines or sanctuaries in many places. She was worshipped, in the later part of the Minoan period at least, on the mainland as well, so perhaps cult practices and deities were among the Minoans’ exports. At Knossos, there are dedications of offerings to ‘The Lady of the Labyrinth’: ‘Potnia’ occurs repeatedly as the main goddess’s name; later on, in the classical period, the term was used as a respectful, honorific title in addressing women of rank, but it originated as the proper name of the principal Minoan goddess.
In her aspect as a domestic goddess, guardian of households and cities, Potnia survived, transformed, in Athena, Rhea and Hera. In fact, there is even one occurrence at Knossos of the name Potnia in conjunction with the epithet ‘a-ta-na’. The incomplete tablet V52+52b+8285 has been reassembled from three fragments and gives a list of dedications, including offerings to the gods Poseidon and Paiawon, who was an early forerunner of Apollo. The dedication to ‘a-ta-na po-ti-ni-ja’ on the same tablet unfortunately breaks off after this momentous invocation. The meaning of the epithet ‘a-ta-na’ is not known, but it suggests that the Minoan goddess was already being addressed, among other things, as ‘Athena’. John Chadwick (1976, p. 87) comments that the word ‘Athena’ has a form suggesting a pre-Greek place-name, so it may be that Athena originated as the Potnia worshipped at a place called Athens or something similar. In classical times, Athena had become the warrior-queen of her city on the mainland. A millennium earlier we can assume that her personality and role were less specifically defined.
The double-axe was probably Potnia’s symbol, and possibly the pillar and the snake were her symbols too. The snake, living in crevices near the hearth, made a natural symbol for the earth-dwelling Earth-mother; the ‘house-snake’ cult survived into modern times and the snake was sometimes known as the Master of the House or House Mother. Tablet Gg 702 from the Knossos archive refers to an offering of honey dedicated to ‘da-pu-ri-to-jo po-ti-ni-ja’, meaning ‘Potnia of the Labyrinth’. This tells us that Potnia had a sanctuary dedicated to her in some part of the Labyrinth at Knossos, since this temple - and only this one - was referred to in antiquity as the Labyrinth, at least as far as Crete was concerned. We can be fairly sure that there were sanctuaries dedicated to Potnia in the other major temples as well, at Kydonia, Phaistos, Mallia and Zakro.
How far the other goddesses in the Minoan pantheon were separate independent deities is very hard to tell. In the first instance, it is probably simpler, and in evolutionary terms truer, to deal with them as separate. One goddess was concerned with fertility and procreation; the dove, proverbially the most amorous of birds, was her symbol. She is often shown with doves perching on her; sometimes birds are shown perched on sacral horns or on a double-axe, as if to suggest the invisible presence of the goddess. Another and possibly separate goddess was concerned with renewal and the central rites of the vegetation cycle.
Since the goddess herself was not permitted to die, the annual death and rebirth were acted out by a young male Year-spirit, a small and inferior deity who took the roles of son and consort, and represented the important principle of discontinuity in nature. In the Minoan period he remained subordinate to his goddess, but at its end, as Zeus, he became much more important; his original Minoan name, Velchanos, seems to have endured into the classical period as one of the titles attributed to Zeus on Crete. Zeus Velchanos was also known on Crete as ‘Kouros’, ‘The Boy ’. Velchanos was always subject to the goddess and always shown in attitudes of adoration. The two ivory ‘Divine Boy’ figurines described by Evans as probably having come from the Labyrinth, may well be representations of Velchanos before and after puberty. The older boy, leaner and more muscular, has shorter hair and a small skull-cap which may conceal a tonsure. It is known that youths grew their hair long in preparation for a ritual offering of a lock of hair to the deity. The older boy appears to have gone through this initiation ritual, but still stands erect with arms raised in a gesture of worship and submission. Professor Stylianos Alexiou reminds us that there were other divine boys who survived from the religion of the pre-Hellenic period - Linos, Plutos, and Dionysos - so not all the young male deities we see depicted in Minoan works of art are necessarily Velchanos.
Jacquetta Hawkes (1968) suggests that perhaps there were once seashore shrines dedicated to a Sea Goddess. If so, they have been washed away by the sea. Nilsson (1949), thinking along the same lines, proposes that there was a Goddess of Navigation. A gold ring from the port of Mochlos shows a goddess sailing on a boat with a shrine apparently built on to the afterdeck behind the goddess. It may be that the goddess in this case is a priestess conveying a portable shrine from one coastal site to another.
Figure 39 The lost Ring of Minos
The lost ‘Ring of Minos’ similarly showed a priestess steering a shrine-laden boat across a bay (Figure 39). On the rocky shore in the background, no less than three separate shrines or temples were shown, one with a presiding goddess indicating the sacral horns on her altar, and two with sacred trees growing out of them. The genuineness of the Ring of Minos has been questioned by Nilsson, but now that it is lost, allegedly buried somewhere in the garden of Nicolaos Pollakis, the priest of Fortetsa, who for a time shortly after its discovery was its owner, the question will probably never be resolved (Warren 1982). The ritual imagery of the Ring of Minos is nevertheless consistent with what we know of Minoan religious practices and it does offer some additional support for the idea of a sea-shore cult involving both fixed shrines built on the land and portable shrines ferried coastwise by priestesses. Perhaps deities were transported in ships to describe a magic circle of divine protection round the whole island. The idea of a sea-journeying goddess may be the origin of the earliest known version of the legend of Ariadne, according to which she was abducted and taken to the offshore island of Dia, where she died.
Willetts (1965, p. 136) believes that leaping into the sea was a feature of some Minoan initiation rituals. Some mythic elements seem to be transformations of this cult practice, for example the episode where the young goddess Britomartis leaps into the sea to escape the clutches of Minos, or the contest at Aptera between Muses and Sirens which ended in the defeat of the Sirens, who then threw themselves into the sea. Willetts detects in these later stories a reminiscence of a Minoan initiation ordeal.
The Mistress of Wild Animals or Queen of Wild Beasts was a chaste and free hunting-goddess, a forerunner of the Artemis and Diana of the classical period. Her province was terrestrial, the mountains and hillsides where wild animals needed her protection for their nurture. It may be that this goddess was worshipped at the peak sanctuaries, where it is known that pyres were lit; the later Artemis cult also involved mountain-top bonfires. This goddess survived little changed into the classical pantheon. Even her Minoan name, Britomartis, or ‘Sweet Virgin’, seems to have survived in a slightly spoonerized form in the later Greek name, Artemis.
Willetts suggests that the cults of the goddesses Britomartis and Diktynna were connected, and that Britomartis and Diktynna were related to each other in much the same way as the later Persephone and Demeter. Diktynna’s name links her with Mount Dikte, and she was portrayed in the classical period as a mountain mother. A major centre of Diktynna-worship in the classical period was the Diktynnaion, a great temple on a peninsula to the west of Kydonia. According to some sources, the death of Apollonius of Tyana took place at the sanctuary of Diktynna. He visited the sanctuary late at night, finding it guarded by Diktynna’s ferocious sacred dogs. Instead of barking and attacking him, though, the dogs greeted him as a friend. The sanctuary attendants arrested Apollonius at once as a magician and a robber, suspecting that he had tamed the dogs with the intention of stealing the sanctuary treasure. But Apollonius freed himself, shouted to the attendants so that they should witness what was about to happen, and ran to the doors of the shrine. The doors flew open to admit him and then closed behind him. From inside, the sound of a female choir could be heard announcing Apollonius’ ascent to heaven (Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, Book 8). The Temple of Diktynna was certainly a celebrated holy place in the classical period; whether the site was a centre of her worship in the Minoan period is not known, but it seems likely.
Britomartis had a male companion, whether son, brother, or consort is unclear, and he is referred to as the Master of Animals. Both Master and Mistress of Animals are shown between pairs of attendant animals or walking accompanied by a lion or lioness. Nilsson believes that the offerings of weapons at some sanctuaries may be fetishes, representing limbs or extensions of the god. As a hunter-god and protector of animals, he was armed with spear and shield - sealstones show him so - and his weapons became religious symbols. We should therefore see shields on their own as aniconic representations of the deity; the shield motif in the frescoes at Knossos is a religious, not a military, symbol. A gem from Kydonia shows the Master of Animals grasping two lions as they apparently sit upright, just as if he was holding a pair of pups by the scruff of the neck; the image speaks clearly of the god’s dominion over wild beasts. The Aegina Pendant, which probably came originally from the tomb of Chrysolakkos at Mallia, again shows the Minoan Master of Animals grasping a pair of creatures by the neck. This time he is holding water-birds against a strange background apparently consisting of snakes (Figure 1).
Figure 40 The Master of Animals
The Minoan Goddess of the Caves was associated with childbirth and the underworld. As a literal Earth-mother, she may have been the prototype of the Rhea of the later myths, but we also know that at least in the fourteenth century BC the Minoans knew her as Eleuthia. She was referred to in the temple archives at Knossos, although as far as we know her nearest sanctuary was the Cave of Eileithyia at Amnisos (Figure 16).
Nilsson suggests that there was a Tree Goddess. There was certainly a tree cult, and it may be that priestesses performing rituals in front of the tree were regarded as epiphanies of the tree deity. Probably different kinds of trees were regarded as sacred. Alexiou (undated, p. 89) believes that he can identify the sacred tree shown on the Agia Triadha sarcophagus (Figure 47, right) as an olive. If so, it would be easy to explain. The olive tree lives to a very great age; it appears to be indestructible, sending out shoots from a distorted, dry, and seemingly lifeless trunk, reviving annually to bring forth its fruit. Alternatively, the Minoans may have singled out particular trees as sacred by the alighting of birds on their branches, since they regarded birds as epiphanies of deities. Possibly there was a link between the tree cult and the sanctity of the pillar. In the Egyptian myth of Osiris, the dead body of a vegetation god was enclosed in a tree trunk; at the palace of Byblos in Syria, a tree trunk allegedly containing the god’s corpse was used as a pillar.
Often Minoan worshippers tore branches or boughs from a sacred tree and venerated them on altars or planted them in the sockets between sacral horns. Sometimes, they built shrines round sacred trees, apparently providing access to them by means of double doors and safeguarding them by means of wooden fences or stone walls. In some ceremonies, an attendant, often male, tore a bough from the shrine-tree to the accompaniment of gestures of lamentation from the priestess and others present; this overwrought scene, shown on several rings, seems to have symbolized the death of the young god and may conceivably have been followed by the sacrifice of the male attendant who represented him. The Mochlos ring shows a sacred tree growing out of the shrine being ferried along on the priestess’s ship.
The Snake Goddess was another of the Minoans’ underworld deities. Snakes living in crevices are easy to understand as symbols of the life within the earth. Two figurines from Knossos show the goddess brandishing her snakes. Sometimes we are given hints that the goddesses blended with one another, adopting each other’s attributes. The Dove Goddess from the Late Dove Goddess Sanctuary at Knossos, for instance, stood on a bench altar strewn with beach pebbles, which suggest dominion over the sea. The Snake Goddess figurines found in a sanctuary at Kannia had snakes wreathing their crowns; one had snakes on her arms as well and a dove on her cheek. If the Minoan deities merged as this evidence suggests, reliable identification is made much more difficult. We may eventually come to think in terms of a Minoan Universal Spirit, which manifested itself in many different transformations, each with a different name, character, and function, and which yet somehow was regarded as a single deity. Certainly the edges were blurred.
Nilsson suggests that there was a Cult of the Heavenly Bodies. Some of the sealstone images and rings show a moon-sickle or a rayed sun-disc: sometimes both. Sometimes there is a curious line of dots curved into an arc shape, which may be taken to represent a rainbow or perhaps the Milky Way. The sun and moon frequently appear in mythic tableaux and they are clearly there in some symbolic role, as epiphanies of one or more deities. On mainland Greece in the Mycenean period the principal god was Poseidon, a name deriving from an earlier (possibly Minoan) form, ‘Poteidan’ or ‘Potidas’. Poseidon’s power was at this early time far greater than that of Velchanos: he received large-scale sacrificial offerings at Pylos, and may well have been a major deity on Minoan Crete too. There is one tablet from Knossos which lists several deities including Potnia and Enualios, a name which later was used as an alternative to Ares, the Greek war-god; it also has the first part of Poseidon’s name, ‘po-se-da-’, but the end is broken off. Probably Poseidon was worshipped in three aspects, with roles in the heavens, on the earth and in the underworld, just as in the later Orphic literature the phases of the moon were viewed: ‘When she is above the earth, she is Selene; when within it, Artemis; when below it, Persephone’ (Servius ad Verg. A.4). The subterranean manifestation of Poseidon was in the form of earthquakes and tsunamis; the terrestrial aspect was seen in the form of a bull; the celestial was the sun and moon. Occasionally the last two aspects are combined. There is a bull’s head rhyton from Mycenae with a gold rosette or sun-burst on its forehead. The bull’s head rhyton from the Bull’s Head Sanctuary at Knossos has a less conspicuous disc-shape carved into the black stone of its forehead: that too may be meant for a sun-disc.
Figure 41 Poseidon-Poteidan commanding the sea from a coastal temple or town
The clay sealing from Kydonia (Figure 41) showing a god dominating a sea-shore temple or city may also combine two or more aspects of Poteidan. There is the human form of the god, shown as the epitome of young Minoan manhood, and there is, floating in the sky behind him, what seems to be the head of a bull. In the foreground, sea waves break at the temple-or city-gates. G. Kopcke (Tzedakis and Hallager 1987) has gone so far as to suggest that the curious high ‘ rock’ formation in the centre of the picture may actually represent the tsunami or tidal wave generated by the great Thera eruption of 1470 bc. If so, the iconographic link with Poteidan, lord of earthquakes and tsunamis, is strengthened. The equally odd banner which the god is holding may also contain a symbolic reference to the god’s domain; the large terminal shape appears to be a stylized fish.
The Bull God was the Sun God, and he was also the Earth-shaker. In the tablets he was called Poteidan, sometimes King Poseidon, Lord of the Earth. He could appear in several different forms and have several identi ties, and it seems that other deities had the same ability. At least one deity manifested in the form of a bird. The Agia Triadha sarcophagus shows birds perched on double-axes, indicating the presence of a deity. The clay model of a priestess in a swing, also from Agia Triadha, shows birds perched on the swing-posts, as if the act of meditative swinging itself had induced the epiphany (Figure 42). Several small terracotta birds were found with goddess idols in a shrine at Agia Triadha. The goddess figurine from the Late Dove Goddess Sanctuary at Knossos shows a bird alighting on the goddess’s head; perhaps what we are being shown is the ecstatic moment in a religious ceremony when the sequence of ritual acts reached its climax, and the priestess herself was transformed into the goddess.
The birds are generally referred to as doves in the modern literature, but as Nilsson points out there is often little evidence of species. The birds on the Agia Triadha sarcophagus have been identified as eagles, black woodpeckers, ravens and even cuckoos by various scholars.
It is possible that there was a connection between the idea of bird epiphanies and the sacred tree cult; birds descending from the heavens as messengers or transformations of deities were seen to alight in trees, which conferred sanctity on the trees as the act suggested that the gods themselves had chosen the trees as their shrines. A clay tree with seven clay birds perching on it is clearly a ritual presentation of the idea. In this way, the Minoans may have seen the enshrined trees as divinely appointed trystingplaces where gods and mortal men and women might meet.
The human epiphanies are rather easier for us to understand. Some religious images show a god or goddess hovering in the air: this may imply a connection with bird epiphanies. A gold ring, now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, shows a priestess dancing and another woman apparently worshipping or dreaming as she reclines in a trance against some boulders.
Figure 42 Priestess in a swing
In the background is a smaller figure, a god with a bow, standing very erect, with one arm stretched high in the air as if waving or saluting. He seems to be holding a dagger. The bow suggests that he might be the Master of Animals or Enualios, the god of war. A disembodied eye and ear, perhaps symbolizing the spirit forms of an all-seeing, all-hearing, prayer-answering deity, float in the air above the worshipping woman. A curious feature of the scene is that the worshipping woman seems to be naked apart from an anklet and what may be a sacral knot tied round her neck. The nakedness itself is unusual. Is she perhaps a sacrificial victim? The god above and behind her seems poised to stab her (Figure 43).
Figure 43 A scene of sacrifice on a gold ring
There are many images of religious ceremonies which show epiphanies of a goddess. Often she is a small figure appearing, as if in the distance, behind or above a group of ecstatically dancing priestesses. Sometimes the goddess appears in the midst of the priestesses, manifesting as one of their number. We should visualize a common form of religious ceremony in which a group of priestesses sang, danced, chanted, and performed sacrifices and other rituals, as a preamble to a climactic event in which the leading priestess - the one Mark Cameron (1987) called the ‘ goddess-impersonator’ - actually became the goddess.
The Minoans also regarded certain inanimate objects as incarnations of a deity. Evans was among the first to recognize that single pillars were treated as idols. There are several images, which are clearly icons, showing isolated pillars with a pair of attendant heraldic beasts. At Mycenae, the pillar is shown attended by griffins, which in Minoan Crete at least were the customary attendants of the goddess Potnia. At Mycenae, too, is the famous Lion Gate, which shows the pillar mounted upon a Minoan-style altar and flanked by protecting lions. In Minoan Crete, Potnia is shown with attendant lions or griffins. It is a short deductive step to equate the pillar with the goddess Potnia or the Mistress of Animals. The same line of reasoning confirms the sun-disc as a manifestation of a deity. There is a gem in the Heraklion Museum showing two rampant lions with their forepaws perched up on an altar: at the centre, in place of a pillar or some other representation of the deity, is an unmistakable rayed sun which, as we have already seen, is one of the manifestations of Poteidan (Figure 44).
The architectural design of the Tripartite Shrine takes on new layers of meaning once the column is seen as an idol or as an actual incarnation of a deity. The shrine’s form, a raised central cella with two flanking cellae a metre or so lower, symbolizes the three realms of the cosmos. The colouring of the cella back walls as shown on the Grandstand Fresco from Knossos indicates that the three cellae represented the underworld (red), earth (yellow ochre), and heavens (blue). Each cella had a corniced roof supported by one or two centrally placed columns, symbolizing the deity’s presence in and dominion over that realm. Whether the Tripartite Shrine was dedicated to a particular deity or was sacred to all the deities of the Minoan pantheon is hard to tell. The fresco fragments at Knossos which seem to show the Tripartite Shrine at the centre of the Knossos Labyrinth have rows of sacral horns along the cornices and two pairs of sacral horns inside each cella. If the Bull God was Poteidan, and the sacral horns are bull horns, there is a prima facie case for believing that the shrine was dedicated to Poteidan. Yet, like the Christian cross, the sacral horns were used in a general symbolic way, and it may be that the Labyrinth was, as a whole, dedicated to Poteidan even though individual sanctuaries and shrines within it were dedicated to other deities, in much the same way that within a cathedral there may be chapels dedicated to a variety of Christian saints.
The sacral horns appear in a great many images of religious significance. They are found painted on larnakes (clay coffins), engraved on bronze tablets, painted on frescoes, depicted on rings and gemstones. They are frequently mounted on altars or on shrine cornices in a way which strongly implies that they were a central, universal religious symbol. But they were also used architecturally, to add interest to the horizontal line of a cornice. Nilsson quotes the carved steatite vessel found at Knossos, showing the stepped balustrade of a ceremonial staircase; the staircase was obviously not itself a shrine, yet the balustrade’s cornice is decorated with sacral horns (Figure 52). In the foreground of the picture, though, is a procession of worshippers carrying offering bowls stretched out in front of them. They are clearly approaching a shrine or altar of some kind, or they would not be behaving in this way; in addition, our new view of the whole of the Knossos Labyrinth as a temple allows us to argue that even a staircase, as part of a temple-complex, might well be in a general sense dedicated to a presiding deity. The many fragments of clay and stone sacral horns found on the site suggest that the Labyrinth at Knossos bristled with sacral horns. Certainly they were decorative and they must have added a barbaric vibrancy to the temple’s complex roof-line, but they also indicate a general dedication of the building to Poteidan.
Figure 44 Two lions attendant on a sun-disc
Fragments found in the southern sector and in the north-west corner of the Knossos Labyrinth belonged to pairs of sacral horns that may originally have been a metre or more high. Horns at Niru Khani were mounted on a stepped base, evidently an altar, at the southern edge of the temple’s large East Court.
Evans was right to assume that the sacral horns represented bull’s horns. A vase from Salamis on Cyprus shows a double-axe alternately between sacral horns of a purely Minoan type and the horns of a realistically rendered bull’s head. Nevertheless, other origins for the sacral horns have been proposed: the raised hands and arms of the goddess, or the sun-disc rising between two mountains, a symbol which in Egypt stood for Elysium. It is likely that the Minoan sacral horns acquired these and possibly additional symbolic meanings, becoming a layered symbol, in much the same way that the Cross of Christ has been transformed in religious art to take on all sorts of new overtones.
The so-called ‘sheep bells’ found at Knossos, Poros, Tylissos and Vorou illustrate this point. These curious drum-shaped clay objects characteristically have two perforations on one side and two or three stalks rising from the top. The two side stalks may be taken to represent bull’s horns, the drum as the bull’s head, the perforations as its eyes. Yet it is also possible to see the form as a stylized if rather primitive representation of the female deity. The central stalk is her head, the longer side stalks are her upraised arms, the drum her body and dress, the perforations in her chest the nipples. In this way, the stylized clay objects may be seen as early forerunners of the more recognizable goddess-idols of the Late Minoan period. They were certainly not bells of any kind. Nevertheless, the situation is made more complicated by variations in the design: several of the objects have four eyes or nipples instead of the expected two, so there is probably some additional layer of symbolic meaning that has yet to be penetrated.
Perhaps the religious symbol most strongly associated with the Minoan culture is the double-axe. The double-axe was an everyday implement, and yet the great maj ority of those that survive were intended for ritual use; some were made of very thin sheet bronze, some were very large, some were very small, some were made of lead or of soft stone. Sometimes the blades were elaborately ornamented. Sometimes the edges were doubled, to turn the emblem into a quadruple-axe, either for artistic emphasis or to symbolize some kind of union or symbiosis. Their earliest known appearance was at Mochlos, around 2500 BC (Early Minoan II), and large numbers of them have been found at later Minoan sites. It may be thought odd that no large bronze double-axes were found at Knossos or Phaistos, but this is probably because the sites were ransacked in antiquity and plundered of their usable and precious metal objects. Any large bronze objects will have been taken and melted down long ago, probably in the fourteenth century bc. Even so, pyramid-shaped stone bases for medium-sized double-axes survive in the Labyrinth, proving that double-axes were scattered about the building, like crucifixes in a church.
From the evidence of a fresco found in the north-west corner of the Knossos Labyrinth, small votive double-axes were stuck into the flanks of wooden columns. Evans argues that this practice was paralleled by that of sticking double-axes into crevices in the stalactite pillars in the lower cave at Psychro (Plate 17). The implications are interesting. The frescoes and furnishings of the Throne Sanctuary were intended to simulate the environment of the peak sanctuary at Juktas; perhaps the treatment of the many pillars supporting the ceilings was intended to symbolize the stalactites of the cave sanctuary at Skotino (Plate 18). The overall intention of the Minoan priestesses seems to have been to house the whole pantheon in the Labyrinth, luring deities from their various shrines and sanctuaries in outlying areas.
The meaning of the double-axe is not known. Possibly it was the weapon used for sacrificing the bulls. On Minoan pottery, the double-axe is sometimes painted over a bull’s head. Later, in the classical period, heifers sacrificed to Dionysos at Tenedos were slaughtered with a double-axe. Alternatively or additionally, the axe may have symbolized the Sky-god or Thunder-god. In Caria in later times there was a Zeus Labrandeus, who was a god wielding a double-axe. contemporary with the Minoan deities was the Hittite Weather-god Teshub, who carried a double-axe in one hand and a thunderbolt in the other. There may have been some generic connection between the Anatolian deity and the Minoan deity whose symbol was also the double-axe. Teshub was a Hurrite god whom the Hittites adopted and developed. Zeus Labrandeus, also worshipped in Anatolia, but at a later date, may have been a further development of the Hurrite-Hittite god. Gods also have their histories.
Figure 45 An elaborate ritual double-axe from the Zakro temple
Perhaps the double-axe was, like the sacral horns, an epiphany or symbol of Poteidan, but on the other hand there are many images of a priestessgoddess wielding a double-axe. Although the Greeks were later to picture both Zeus and Poseidon wielding a double-axe representing a thunderbolt, the weapon was earlier held only by Rhea. According to Robert Graves (1960), in the Minoan and Mycenean cultures the double-axe was forbidden to males, which is certainly consistent with the Minoan iconography. A mould from the Minoan town of Palaikastro shows a priestess or goddess holding a double-axe aloft in each hand. The implication of images such as these is that the double-axe was the symbol of a powerful female deity, probably Potnia.
Another important religious symbol was the sacral knot. This consisted of a strip of patterned cloth with a fringe at each end, a knotted loop in the middle and the two ends hanging down like a modern neck-tie. It appears as a motif in pottery decoration and models of it in ivory or faience were found at Knossos, Zakro and Mycenae. A sacral knot appears in a fresco at the temple of Niru Khani, and also on the so-called ‘Parisienne’ fresco fragment from Knossos (Figure 46). The priestess in question wears the knot at the back of her neck, and it is likely that she is one of the celebrants in a rite of sacred communion: other fragments of this fresco show alternate standing and sitting celebrants, mostly women, some offering, some (the seated ones) accepting the communion chalice.
Mark Cameron (1987) felt that the knot symbolized possession by a man, a token of the collective sacred marriage which all young people had to go through as the culmination of their initiation sequence. Although this is possible, the fresco iconography does not really supply enough evidence to support it. It seems more likely that the knot symbolized the bond between the communicant and the deity, or that it was an attempt to bind the deity by magic, which is much the same thing.
Figure 46 Head of a priestess, showing facial make-up and sacral knot
Shields and helmets, depicted in certain contexts, were also religious symbols. Deities are sometimes shown with sword, spear, or shield; sometimes the objects appear alone, as if standing in for an absent deity. Large figure-of-eight shields were depicted on the walls of the East Wing of the Labyrinth, possibly to indicate that the building was under divine protection; the dappled hides of which the shields were made presumably came from the bull, the sacred beast, and this may have given them additional prophylactic value. Some ritual vessels have shields painted on them. A symbol of lesser importance was the cross and its variants such as the star, wheel and swastika. One of the most startling finds at Knossos was a marble Greek cross found in the Temple Repositories. Probably the cross stood for the sun. A stone mould from Sitia combining the cross, the wheel and the flaring sun-disc all in one symbol tends to confirm this (title illustration, Chapter 1).
The Minoans worshipped many gods and goddesses in a wide variety of forms, both animate and inanimate; they regarded the whole cosmos as animated by deities and spirits. In the religious paraphernalia and artwork of their culture, we see a religion half formed, with elusive nature spirits appearing and disappearing in all kinds of manifestations, now taking on the status of a fully-fledged deity, now evaporating into an atavistic mist. The Minoans gave their gods, goddesses and spirits names, areas of responsibility and probably personalities and personal histories, and yet - to judge from the iconography - the deities were capable of endless overlapping transformations. This should not surprise us, if we remember that, even after another millennium of evolution Zeus was still credited with the ability to transform himself into an infinite number of forms: a bull, a swan, thunder and lightning, and a shower of gold.