My spear and my sword and that fine shield, which guards my skin, are my great wealth. For I plough with this, I reap with this, I tread the sweet wine from the vine with this, I am called master of the serfs with this. But those who dare not hold the spear and sword and that fine shield, to guard their skin, all fall and kiss my knee, calling me master and great lord.
(‘The Song of Hybrias’, about 500 bc: one of
the earliest surviving Cretan Iyric poems)
Corporate personalities are often attributed to ancient civilizations, in much the same way that they are to modern nations. We see the ancient Egyptians as strong, conservative, shrewd, and at the same time devout believers in the immortality of the human soul. We see the classical Greeks as articulate, candid, precise, and beset by a rather cold and pessimistic philosophy that nothing will come right of itself; that in turn is redeemed by their underlying faith in language, ‘the spirit of thought’, and in the human race itself. In his Antigone, Sophocles spoke for the Greeks in general when he wrote,
Many marvels walk through the world,
Terrible, wonderful,
But none more than man.
Yet, side by side with their prevailing rationality, there were contradictory traits in the Greek personality. They were prickly, passionately quarrelsome, and warlike. They were believers in democracy, and yet they kept slaves. The more we find out about a culture, the more internal contradictions and variations we are likely to find, and the more difficult it becomes to define its personality. Indeed, it may only be possible to see a corporate personality when our knowledge is superficial and only a handful of characteristics is perceived. This is apparent in the average modern European’s idea of the Americans or the Chinese, which tends to be a simplified image assembled from impressions of a small sample of American or Chinese people actually seen and a larger number of fictional and sub-fictional characters encountered in books, magazines and television programmes, The way in which this process produces a dangerously cartoon-like image is all too familiar: it can turn the imagined people into contemptible grotesques, figures of fun, butts for jokes, aliens beneath consideration, or even imagined enemies. The risk is no less great when we try to form a mental image of a long-dead people; cultural or temporal chauvinism may cause us to err in making them too barbaric on the one hand, or dissatisfaction with our present civilization may cause us to see them as a noble ideal irretrievably lost on the other. Either of these tendencies is likely to cause us to misrepresent the ancient Egyptians or the ancient Greeks - or the Minoans.
There is nevertheless the possibility that adherence to a particular ideology will give a particular flavour and direction to a culture. A set of ideas, strongly held by a significant proportion of a population can produce a distinctive style of group behaviour, a distinctive way of responding to situations, and a distinctive culture. In this way, we are justified in seeking to identify distinctive qualities in the Minoan culture. The ideology which held the Minoans in its grasp may have been responsible for releasing an archetype, in the way described by Jung in his essays ‘Wotan’ and ‘After the catastrophe’ (1964, pp. 179-93, 194-217). Jung’s view was that in the 1930s and 1940s the German people were possessed by the North European god of storm and war, Wotan, a fundamental attribute of the German collective psyche unleashed by Hitler. Jung had difficulty in deciding whether it was Wotan or Dionysos who had taken control of the German people, but was in no doubt that a communal psychological infection, a furor teutonicus, had thrown the entire German nation into a state of frenzy.
Jung’s Wotan was the rain-water of an ephemeral desert storm, which can find its old river bed at any time, after however long an absence. Jung wrote as a Swiss, and in the midst and the aftermath of the Nazi horror, and he did not write dispassionately or objectively; nevertheless, his interpretation has the ring of truth.
From the east comes Hrym with shield held high;
In giant-wrath does the serpent writhe;
O’er the waves he twists, and the tawny eagle
Gnaws corpses, screaming ‘Naglfar is loose! ’
(Nibelungenlied)
Were the Minoans perhaps also possessed by one of their deities, the powerful archetypes that normally reside, unexpressed, in the unconscious mind? If they were taken over by some euphoria minoica, it could explain the particular and rather discomforting sense of elation which much of the Minoans’ artwork communicates.
It is nevertheless very difficult to reach back into the thought world of the Minoans. There are powerful and suggestive forms and images, but the documentary evidence is elusive. The Homeric sagas contain some of the oldest thoughts and ideas about Crete and the Aegean world in general, yet they were written down about 600 years after the Knossos Labyrinth was abandoned, which is a long enough lapse of time for large-scale changes to have come about. John Chadwick (1976, p. 185) reminds us that there are some very specific ways in which the Mycenean world differed from the Homeric. The titles of officials on the Linear B tablets (hequetas, telestas, lawagetas) are altogether missing from Homer; Homer uses two words for king, whereas the closely related words wanax and guasileus of the tablets signify two distinctly different roles - king and chief. In addition, the Minoans wrote in at least four different scripts - Hieroglyphic, Linear A, Linear B, and the pictograms of the Phaistos Disc - three of which remain undeciphered: the fourth, Linear B, seems to have been used exclusively for accounting, inventories and religious dedications. In spite of the existence of the four scripts, there seems, tantalizingly, to have been no Minoan literature: none, at any rate, that has survived.