article, part one of two
by Maren Kuether-Ulberg
Artwork throughout is by the author unless otherwise indicated.
In Minoan art, a complex of signs including certain birds in certain contexts represents the renewal of nature and the appearance or implied presence of the divine. Birds, especially doves, are indicated in the artwork as the manifestation of a divine being or epiphany.
In the Cretan hillsides near Paleakastro, on the eastern coast of that vast and ancient island, the sun in high summer has an edge so keen to it that it feels like an endurance ritual to make any hike of distance. Carrying water is life. A favorite hike of mine during the blessed summer seasons that I've worked there draws me down from the village through the red clay hills and olive trees to the edge of the sea, then along an increasingly rocky dirt road that rises to the edge of Mount Petsophas (which certainly lives up to its modern name: the eater of shoes). Here the wind is a wild thing and easily draws your eyes to the vast blue beyond, where gulls wheel and occasionally great drifts of swallows along the cliffs turn arabesques.
The hike soon turns up a narrowing and twisted gorge of great shaggy rocks and low, ankle-ripping thorn brush. Earlier in the summer, wild thyme shows a delicate blue flower and gives a heady scent, complemented by mountain sage. The heat doubles until your head rings with it, but glance around and you may spy a small flit of a wren's pale yellow-brown. At the top of the gorge, the rest of the mountain curves up in a gray, white and red mass of stone and thorn that needs patient maneuvering but rewards you with a stunning view once you reach the top.
The wind scrubs the air here, and the sky is a literally perfect blue. It hurts the eyes with its beauty. When the far-off cut of a hawk glides through it, it can make your heart tremble with awe. Up high, there is nothing so fine as this wind and this space that sweeps out before you to the valley and the sea, and that lone, wonderful bird.
The top of this mountain, Petsophas, was an ancient peak sanctuary for the Minoan people. Four of the most important peak sanctuaries are clustered in the eastern third of the island and formed both one of the earliest and latest forms of religious sites for the Minoans. In the valley below was an important urban center of small industry (ceramics) and trade, which also held courtyards, paved roads and a shrine area that has revealed some of the finest and least-known Late Minoan sacred art. Key among that art are bird images in ceramic and ivory, and a small ivory and gold statue of a kouros, the young god -- here likely a sky-focused god, perhaps the Cretan Zeus Welkanhos, more Orion than All-Father.
I've been told that if I really want to see Crete at its best, I should come in late winter. The heat and the tourism have been replaced with peace, occasional winter storms and moisture enough to call back the migratory birds out of Europe and a brief flush of greenness and flowers. Also, the native Lammergeyer vulture, one of Europe's largest and most rare birds, is on the nest among the high cliffs near Napholi.
I admit to feeling wistful. While you do see birds in summer, they are sparse. What a wonder it must be to be in this land when it is in the full riot of life. The ancients must have thought so too, for they let us know through their art and their religion.
Birds appear within a complex of other motifs in Minoan art -- marsh plants and crocus, dragonflies and butterfly chrysalides, water, fishes, pillars and trees, double axes and horns, gods and priestesses -- to indicate the renewal of nature, the vegetation rites surrounding its observance and ultimately the Goddess herself, in both her aspects of the domestic shrine and the wild world.
As in Egypt, water in Crete was a source of life in a dry land. Marshes were depicted on the great palace and shrine frescoes as a sort of divine paradise -- and thus all things associated with marshes became symbols of life-giving force -- dragonflies, water, marsh birds, fishes, the water-loving papyrus and rushes. The "wilder" aspect of the Minoan Great Goddess is found among these things, as her symbols. She is often called the Mistress of the Beasts, which reflects the very elemental and immediate face of life in the Mediterranean, our place within this mystery and a metaphysical symbol of the unconscious mind. With her snake-entwined arms or crowned with doves, she manifests as the domestic goddess among the pillars of a palace shrine.
Water has a "season" in Crete, as in Egypt. The assurance of life in Egypt returned around summer solstice, when Sothis, or Sirius, followed the rising of the constellation of Orion (Osiris) in the sky. It was time for summer rains in the mountains deep to the south, and soon after, the rising and flooding of the Nile. Around November, the great flood began to recede and the rich soil that was left behind was made ready for planting. This was the equivalent of a northern European spring, and for neighboring Crete, the time for autumn crocuses and lilies in the mountains. (The Cretan "autumn", the harvest season, falls around June 21, our summer solstice.)
The blooming of the saffron crocus and lily in Crete coincided perfectly with nesting season -- a theme borne out with joyous vigor in the "Spring Frescoes" on the island of Thera (Santorini) at Akrotiri. Archaeologist Spyros Marinatos made note of the artist's intent to portray the return of life in spring in the publication Thera IV, page 50: "It wants to express the advanced spring season when the swallows... are restless from mating fever and are feverishly preparing their nests."
It is yet unknown if the Cretan Great Goddess, undoubtedly the prime focus of religious devotion, was one goddess with many aspects or manifestations (divergence), or many local and specific goddesses with their concomitant attributes that we have only attempted to group together. Chief among her symbols were the dove and the pillar, the snake and the labrys, the votive horns, cave and sacred tree. Oftentimes, we cannot even make the distinction in the artwork whether or not we are observing a priestess in her office or the goddess herself.
As Professor Oliver Reverdon states in Crete and Its Treasures (Viking Press, 1961): "This could [also] be a straightforward matter of metamorphosis -- one single divine power in various personifications. But it is also possible that the differentiations were carried so far that they did in fact become separate divinities, or at least divinities who were vouchsafed individual identities for certain rites at certain times."
Within polytheistic cultures, the convergence of divine aspects over time is a more common phenomenon than divergence. Like the Egyptians again, with dozens of local Ras, Hathors and Isises that amalgamated each into the developed forms found in cult centers such as Heliopolis and Thebes, many towns in Greece had their native "Athenes" -- which over time the Greeks alloyed into the classical shield- and helmet-bearing goddess of Athens. Common in this convergence is that the names of the gods were often titles first.
We have so very few and so very tenuously written names for the Cretan gods in Linear B. The name "Potnia" or "po-ti-ni-ja," "The Lady," has survived inscribed on tablets at Knossos, along with the epithet "a-ta-na," which is very likely an early version of the titular Athene. It is possible that this name was associated with the domestic goddess, for despite the typical classical view of Athene as a warrior divinity, she was such in defense of the city. She was a weaving goddess, a goddess of the temple flame and of inventions that benefited civilization. The word "a-ta-na" has also been postulated to mean "hearth pan." The Athene who bears the owl, snake and figure-eight shield of the Minoans is very likely one form of the early Minoan Great Goddess.
Another name that has survived is "Potnia of the Labyrinth," or "da-pu-ri-to-jo po-ti-ni-ja." A Knossos tablet describes an offering of honey to her, assuring us that she had a sanctuary dedicated to her in some part of the Labyrinth at Knossos. Only this particular temple was referred to in antiquity as the Labyrinth. Goddesses with the names "Britomartis" (or "Sweet Virgin") and "Diktynna" were related to each other in ways much like the later Kore and Demeter, and the name "Eleuthia" was used by the 14th century BCE for a goddess of caves. She may be an antecedent to Rhea, and certainly is one of the true Earth Mothers, as Rodney Castleden writes in Minoans: Life in Bronze Age Crete (1990).
She is the one and the many. What we see in all of her manifestations is the use of specific natural symbols to indicate a divine epiphany, and a set of cult practices designed around the natural processes of life.
Part two will further discuss imagery of the season of renewal.