3. Religion

The Cretan may be brutal, but he is certainly religious, with a thoroughly human mixture of fetishism and superstition, idealism and reverence. He worships mountains, caves, stones, the number 3, trees and pillars, sun and moon, goats and snakes, doves and bulls; hardly anything escapes his theology. He conceives the air as filled with spirits genial or devilish, and hands down to Greece a sylvan-ethereal population of dryads, sileni, and nymphs. He does not directly adore the phallic emblem, but he venerates with awe the generative vitality of the bull and the snake.²⁸ Since his death rate is high he pays devout homage to fertility, and when he rises to the notion, of a human divinity he pictures a mother goddess with generous mammae and sublime flanks, with reptiles creeping up around her arms and breasts, coiled in her hair, or rearing themselves proudly from her head. He sees in her the basic fact of nature—that man’s greatest enemy, death, is overcome by woman’s mysterious power, reproduction; and he identifies this power with deity. The mother goddess represents for him the source of all life, in plants and animals as well as in men; if he surrounds her image with fauna and flora it is because these exist through her creative fertility, and therefore serve as her symbols and her emanations. Occasionally she appears holding in her arms her divine child Velchanos, whom she has borne in a mountain cave.²⁹ Contemplating this ancient image, we see through it Isis and Horus, Ishtar and Tammuz, Cybele and Attis, Aphrodite and Adonis, and feel the unity of prehistoric culture, and the continuity of religious ideas and symbols, in the Mediterranean world.

The Cretan Zeus, as the Greeks call Velchanos, is subordinate to his mother in the affections of the Cretans. But he grows in importance. He becomes the personification of the fertilizing rain, of the moisture that in this religion, as in the philosophy of Thales, underlies all things. He dies, and his sepulcher is shown from generation to generation on Mt. Iouktas, where the majestic profile of his face can still be seen by the imaginative traveler; he rises from the grave as a symbol of reviving vegetation, and the Kouretes priests celebrate with dances and clashing shields his glorious resurrection.³⁰ Sometimes, as a god of fertility, he is conceived as incarnate in the sacred bull; it is as a bull that he mates in Cretan myth with Minos’ wife Pasiphaë, and begets by her the monstrous Minos-bull, or Minotaur.

To appease these deities the Cretan uses a lavish rite of prayer and sacrifice, symbol and ceremony, administered usually by women priests, sometimes by officials of the state. To ward off demons he burns incense; to arouse a negligent divinity he sounds the conch, plays the flute or the lyre, and sings, in chorus, hymns of adoration. To promote the growth of orchards and the fields, he waters trees and plants in solemn ritual; or his priestesses in nude frenzy shake down the ripe burden of the trees; or his women in festal procession carry fruits and flowers as hints and tribute to the goddess, who is borne in state in a palanquin. He has apparently no temple, but raises altars in the palace court, in sacred groves or grottoes, and on mountaintops. He adorns these sanctuaries with tables of libation and sacrifice, a medley of idols, and “horns of consecration” perhaps representative of the sacred bull. He is profuse with holy symbols, which he seems to worship along with the gods whom they signify: first the shield, presumably as the emblem of his goddess in her warrior form; then the cross—in both its Greek and its Roman shapes, and as the swastika—cut upon the forehead of a bull or the thigh of a goddess, or carved upon seals, or raised in marble in the palace of the king; above all, the double ax, as an instrument of sacrifice magically enriched with the virtue of the blood that it sheds, or as a holy weapon unerringly guided by the god, or even as a sign of Zeus the Thunderer cleaving the sky with his bolts.”³¹

Finally he offers a modest care and worship to his dead. He buries them in clay coffins or massive jars, for if they are unburied they may return. To keep them content below the ground he deposits with them modest portions of food, articles for their toilette, and clay figurines of women to tend or console them through all eternity. Sometimes, with the sly economy of an incipient skeptic, he substitutes clay animals in the grave in place of actual food. If he buries a king or a noble or a rich trader he surrenders to the corpse a part of the precious plate or jewelry that it once possessed; with touching sympathy he buries a set of chess with a good player, a clay orchestra with a musician, a boat with one who loved the sea. Periodically he returns to the grave to offer a sustaining sacrifice of food to the dead. He hopes that in some secret Elysium, or Islands of the Blest, the just god Rhadamanthus, son of Zeus Velchanos, will receive the purified soul, and give it the happiness and the peace that slip so elusively through the fingers in this earthly quest.