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by Melanie Fire Salamander
So far, the high point of my visits to Crete has been the afternoon last summer when I went alone to the dig at Palaikastro, a Minoan site on the eastern shore of the island, which lies south of the Greek mainland. I carried a notebook, pen and water bottle. Golden sunlight rained down on everything. The dust lay thick; olive trees grew scattered. On my way to the dig, I walked through an olive grove, full of a strange fear. The dirt road was a known right-of-way, which I'd traveled before; no one would have barred me. When I ran into people, some of whom perhaps owned the grove, they squinted at me and smiled. Why the fear? Self-consciousness; perhaps some apprehension of the goddess's nearness.
I call the Cretan goddess I know Rhea, because she came to me in a guided meditation and called herself that, wearing her long Cretan flounced skirt and cap-sleeved bodice exposing her breasts. She carries with her more than any other goddess I know what I call the "Picnic at Hanging Rock" feeling. Picnic at Hanging Rock is an early film by Australian director Peter Weir, set a century ago, in which several schoolgirls disappear during a picnic to a famous view spot. In the movie, the children climb among huge round boulders, the sky past their shoulders. You can almost feel the heavy midday heat buzzing with cicadas. The girls search, climbing upward, seeking... what? The movie never tells. That heavy, golden, buzzing heat, ecstatic and frightening, that is for me the feeling of my goddess of Crete.
There at the dig, in the heavy, golden heat buzzing with cicadas, I moved from room to room of House N, dug to the level of the Late Minoan 1B period, which ended in 1450 B.C.E., when most of the palaces and country houses on Crete were destroyed. So too was House N. Palaikastro as a site is remarkable, according to Gerald Cadogan in Palaces of Minoan Crete, for its large, airy town houses, of which House N is one. I was lucky in finding the dig completely empty of tourists, except a couple of German girls, who disappeared, and later an Italian couple. I felt free to sit in the dust and meditate. I basked in the glow of the goddess's presence, repledged my devotion, cried a little, at length collected myself and went away, taking a loose pebble and, from the goddess of my meditation, the sign of the double-axe to use for myself. I moved to the shade of an olive tree, wrote up my notes. Interestingly enough, Cadogan wrote that artifacts taken from House N include two double-axe stands and a miniature set of horns of consecration -- a stylized pair of horns of a type found throughout Minoan architecture. These seem to have fallen from the house's upper floor, indicating the house held a shrine.
After my note-taking, I continued to wander the site. I walked the Minoan road, paved with stone that has lasted three and a half millennia. Roads and stairways feel so evocative in ancient sites because they're recognizable. You know feet have passed over them; you feel the connection with ancient walkers. The site has two standing stones that Palaikastro archaeologists say are batyls, rocks that were held sacred, so designated because their weathering is peculiar, smoothed by human lips and hands. One matte grey stone sat at the intersection of the site's two main roads. I sat with it a while; its presence felt comforting. The other batyl lies in Building 5, by which the site's best-known artifact was found, an ivory and golden statuette of a young man, a kouros. This batyl is of green serpentine. I meditated with it, but got nothing; perhaps too many people had passed by it.
I wandered on, piecing together a chant, which I used later in ritual in amended format:
Lady of honey
Tree of honey
Sky of honey
Earth of honey
Simple, and yet it works for me; it calls up the goddess, shining and gold.
Gold for me is a Cretan theme, though gold was never found on the island; the Minoans probably traded with the Egyptians for theirs. Partly it's just that the light on Crete is golden, especially compared to the blue light of the Northwest. In the corner of another building, in Block G, I envisioned a female statue in the shape of a classic Cretan devotee, with her hands raised above her head. In my image, it was a statue perhaps four feet high, shining with gold leaf. Such an image is not correct to Cretan archaeology, as I understand it; no such large statues have been found, though there is some evidence they existed. Perhaps my statue never existed, but it spoke of the goddess to me.
That house had what site co-director L. Hugh Sackett said has been called the Minoan version of an impluvium. An impluvium, in ancient Rome, was a small courtyard open to the sky, into which rain could fall. Here, Sackett thinks, the small inner courtyard might have been a shelter from the implacable Palaikastro wind.
Palaikastro was a rich seacoast town in Minoan times; the sea has risen, swamping the old harbor, which site archaeologists hope to unearth this coming summer. Palaikastro is neither the best-known nor the largest Minoan site, and it is relatively hard to reach, at the eastern end of the approximately 150-mile-long island, down switchbacking roads. Because Palaikastro is not well-known, it is not well-touristed. Sackett would like it otherwise; he wants to build an archaeological park, to show the public what his team has found and to raise money for continued excavation. That would be great. But because the site is not well-touristed, no crowds jostled me or made me feel self-conscious soaking in the past. (Though, if you're willing to steel yourself and scope a quiet spot, you usually can find a way to remain undisturbed at ancient sites. I managed to stare at the Erechtheum, a temple on the Acropolis of Athens, for a full half-hour my last visit, simply by sitting a little out of the way.)
I was lucky to be well-prepared. Several years ago, my husband Harold came back in contact with Sackett, a teacher of his who has been excavating at Palaikastro since the 1960s. Our friend Maren got a job as an artist at the dig, and she was there when we visited. (We also made a contribution to the dig, not the least of which was Harold's fixing the dig house toilets!) Our friendship and our contribution gained us a guided tour by Hugh, without which the dirt-colored diggings, the low walls outlining the houses, the few posted site maps might not have meant much.
On the other hand, they might have. There is a place for research, for excavation, for explication; there is a different place for revelation. Revelation can be only shown to be true as fact by research, in archaeology by digging. My devotee figure is not objectively a fact -- the only way to prove the statue's existence there is to dig it up. And yet my seeing the statue was important to me emotionally, an upwelling of goddess-feeling. I only found out after I visited House N that it held a shrine; I felt it first. Even if the shrine hadn't been objectively a fact (and archaeological fact is more debatable than, say, a mathematical proof), I felt a connection in that house with a Minoan goddess.
I had tried to connect with her long enough. My search began when I was a child and read Mary Renault's novel The King Must Die, following the legend of Theseus. Minoan Crete was the most vivid thing in that book, though Renault was no particular fan of the Cretans; she favored her shining Mycenean hero. I retained the images of the deep basements of the labyrinth, the huge top-heavy pillars, and when my mother and I went to Greece in 1989 I insisted we go to Crete as part of the trip.
We went to the palace of Knossos, the largest and best-known Minoan site, dug by Sir Arthur Evans beginning in 1900. We found it disappointing. Evans' controversial reconstruction, involving the introduction of painted columns, wall-paintings and lots of poured concrete, proved a bust with us. My mother and I both felt the reconstruction obscured the connection we desired with the past.
In 1998, Harold and I went back to Greece. I felt more possibility of the connection I wanted when we visited the palace of Phaistos, where there are also the remains of a later, Greek temple of Rhea. And still the goddess held off. I did not feel the electric presence I sought.
Then in March 2000, I had a reading from a Voudon practitioner who asked me if I was contemplating a trip. We'd just found out Hugh Sackett was still excavating on Crete. She told me to go and wear on my head a scarf; she described how I should tie it, in a fashion reminiscent of the sacral knot worn by Minoan priestesses. She said if I wore a scarf my goddess would recognize me.
Wearing a scarf turned out to be good advice. In Greece, you want a sunhat in the summer. But at Palaikastro, the wind will blow a straw hat such as I had from your head almost instantly. A tied scarf stays. A scarf also provides a screen from the dust. Still, I felt very strange with my head tied up so the goddess could see me. And yet, I figured, it couldn't hurt, might help.
And the goddess found me. Perhaps it was heatstroke, but I felt like one of the awe-struck worshippers carved on Cretan seal-stones, stones used to imprint one's personal mark in clay. Is my goddess one the Cretans saw -- the Potnia of the archive tablets from Knossos, whose attributes according to Rodney Castleden's popular overview Minoans: Life in Bronze Age Crete survived in Rhea and other goddesses? Who knows? I feel she was. Why would she not survive, somehow, somewhere, in her land?
She is not all gold. When I returned from my solo site visit, I ended up in bed with the flu for a couple of days. Probably a touch of heatstroke knocked my immune system open to a bug. Or perhaps the goddess touched me with the train of her long flounced skirt, just touched me, to remind me I was human.
After light, darkness. Along with the raised-arm figures of devotees in Minoan art pledging their devotion, along with seal-stone figures having visions (judging from the bubbles around their heads), along with goddesses and gods mastering animals and demanding worship, Minoan art shows daemons. Ass-headed men, lion-headed men, strange amalgams of different animals -- "varying and fantastic combinations of heads and limbs of men and animals which seem to be the product of an overheated fever-stricken imagination," as Martin P. Nilsson wrote in his classic work The Minoan-Mycenean Religion and Its Survival in Greek Religion. Castleden found these daemons completely incongruous and imputed them to the Minoans' use of opium. Perhaps. My own imagination was quite literally fever-stricken, and yet it felt right that, the night after my visit to the goddess, I saw dark beings in every corner. I knew they were creations of fear, which rose and fell like dark flames from my imagination. To me, they seemed the after-images of the goddess.
I had gone beyond myself, found a communion with the goddess I'd been looking for a long time. The goddess and I had changed the boundary between us. The body, the mind react to such a thing. Treading new territory invokes fear. But when I appealed to the goddess, she let me know that it was only fear I felt, not her betrayal.
I got better from my flu and climbed with Harold to the peak sanctuary of Petsophas, from which many votive images of worshipful men and women were taken. I found nothing but a wall, a wide blue sky, the wind and many thorn-plants, including wild Cretan thyme, which blooms bright purple. And that's fine. The goddess isn't always there when you look for her; perhaps she is only there when you need her.
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