Artwork throughout is
by the author
unless otherwise indicated.
This New Year's Day I sat at my table, drinking morning coffee to allay the effects of the previous night's champagne taste-testing and staring out the window. As if in recognition of the season's turning, the scene was aswarm with birds. The lawn was busy with a large flock of starlings at their breakfast, a lovely striped woodpecker occupied itself up and down our old apple tree picking for insects, crows occupied the highest treetops and occasionally took to flight, geese had gone roaring overhead very early in the morning toward the Columbia River, and finally, the sight was capped with the silent grace of a lone gray heron winging its way north, probably to one of the secluded islets along the nearby stretch of the river.
I stood up and watched its flight as long as possible, filled with awe once again by the sublime sight of birds.
"All the birds," I remarked to my friend Harold sitting next to me, "it must be a good sign for the New Year." With that and all the moments that I have felt particularly blessed by the presence of birds, I suppose that I join in some small way with what our ancestors felt when the birds landed among their rituals.
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,
And the vines with the tender grapes give a good smell
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
-- Song of Solomon, ii 10.
The exquisite, dewy loveliness of spring shines out of this passage from the Song of Solomon. It is in this sense of new life, beautiful and vivacious, and certainly with a sigh of relief that the lean months of winter have passed, that rites of renewal are celebrated.
In the previous issue of Widdershins (Yule 2002), part one of my article "Epiphany and Renewal" discussed some of the complex of signs involving the appearance of birds and their relationship to Minoan deities in artwork. Here, I would like to further discuss the themes of epiphany, that is, the manifestation or implied presence of the divine; and renewal, one of the most thematically developed ritual complexes in Minoan art, which focused on the return of the growing season and the mysteries therein.
We can never know the exact meaning of what is left to us in the archaeological record, nor exactly how a culture thought and perceived its world. It is often long-lost, and we will inevitably run the risk of interpreting things through a filter that is our own individual and common cultural world-view. How we observe, relate and classify information may not be the same as how the Minoans comprehended their world. However, iconographic representation is one of the most promising routes toward understanding the Minoan belief system.
Iconographer Livia Morgan and archaeologist Nanno Marinatos are among several scholars of Minoan art who recommend the use of iconographic context and analogy to more adequately interpret images as meaningful signs. "Iconography is a cultural notation, a language through which the culture codifies its responses to the natural world through a system of associations," Morgan writes in her 1985 article on the subject. Hence, if I as a Minoan artist place a water lily, a marsh bird and the symbol for water (undulating lines or zigzags) together on my fresco or pot, I am conveying the meaning of "wetlands" and "life." Analogy draws inference by the comparison of two like things -- in this case between Egyptian or Mesopotamian culture and the Minoan. Many themes are repeated between the artwork of Egypt and Mesopotamia and the artwork of Minoan Crete, and because we have a good deal of hieroglyphic text from Egypt, we can use that to gain insight from cautious comparisons.
Not as static and formulaic as Egyptian art, which placed a high value upon tradition to reflect the ceaseless nature of their cosmology, Minoan art exercised innovation of composition and form within an ideological formula that still emphasized the eternal and recurring. The Minoans' artwork reflected a high value placed on relating society to the natural world and hence, the divine. Marinatos relates in Art and Religion in Thera: "All subjects revolve around festivals, rituals and nature scenes. There is a limited repertoire, within the framework of which, however, some variety of rendition was possible.... A comparison with oral poetry is instructive. Just as the poets and bards of the Homeric age had to compose traditional epics using formulaic language, so the artists and their patrons could create new compositions using traditional pictorial formulae. The application of this formulaic pictorial language gave them a solid framework in which to work without stifling their originality. There is little doubt that the formulae were dictated by the religious ideology of the Minoans."
All that said, what we are left with is a legacy of signs the ancients have given us, an incredible treasury of language that we, with sufficient study, meditation and caution against self-fulfilling fancy, can reach back and read, rejoicing in what they noticed, what the gods had to say and what we can learn even now. As modern pagans, is it not important and fascinating to look to our ancestors and listen?
Of all living creatures, birds have longest kept their sanctity. They inhabit all the zones of our existence -- traveling freely from Gaian earth to Ouranian sky, from the gleaming wetlands and ocean to the realms of the gods, our myths, our otherworlds and our dreams.
A Crazy Quilt of Bird Sherds
My relationship with Minoan bird art began quite simply one summer with a small handful of delicate, quizzically decorated pottery sherds, and then bloody well took over my life for the next couple of months as I began the sherds' reconstruction.
The half-dozen sherds came from an area within the Minoan city of Paleakastro, in easternmost Crete, that was directly adjacent to the most important known shrine there -- that of the kouros, the young god. By looking at the sherds' fine-grade ceramic material and their shape -- luckily the sherds included two distinctively shaped rim pieces -- two of the site directors, Dr. Alexander MacGillivray and Hugh Sackett, concurred that these were part of a kylix (a large drinking vessel) manufactured at the central Cretan city of Knossos. My job, should I choose to accept it (I swear that's what Sandy said), was to reconstruct in pen and ink the form and design of the vessel. Hugh and Sandy were hopeful for answers to the questions presented by these sherds -- did they come from a ritual vessel, and did that belong to the kouros shrine or some other?
I advanced my reconstruction of the Paleakastro kylix from the recognition that in Minoan iconography, birds and flowers -- notably lilies, crocus, papyrus and lotus -- are consistent companions. I was able to begin the interpretation of this theme after collecting and comparing several hundred bird and plant images. We were lucky in that the Paleakastro kylix fragments contained the two elements together.
Late in the summer, we discovered another fragment among the strewing tables that is not reflected in the view above. However, it joined with an existing piece and helped us confirm our bird design and adjust the illustration.
All along, I made every attempt at caution in my interpretation, because with so few fragments it was a very nerve-racking thing to state, oh, sure, that's a bird, and see here, that's a flower. "But will it fly?" Hugh joked. I needed to be able to assure Hugh that indeed, it would fly.
As I related in part one of this article, birds appear within a complex of other motifs in Minoan art -- marsh plants and crocus, dragonflies and butterfly chrysalides, water, fish, 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, both in her aspect of the domestic shrine and the wild world. It is a reasonable conclusion that the bird and flower theme symbolizes the vibrant new life of spring. That this theme also often occurs in the context of either part of a ritual, emblazoned upon a container, or accompanying a goddess, god or priestly figure, or both, assures us that the bird and flower are undeniably sacred -- perhaps indicating the spirit of life itself.
Put together, the location of the Paleakastro kylix near a shrine, its probable origin as an import from Knossos and its being decorated with iconic bird and flower symbols point to the high likelihood that this chalice held an important ritual function.
According to Colin Renfrew in The Archaeology of Religion, 1994, one of the indications in the archaeological record for the presence of the deity is in the use of a cult image or representation of the deity in abstract or morphed form upon ritual structures and equipment, including the quite common use of animal symbolism. In the earlier Neolithic, hunter-artists probably used this technique as a way to maintain a connection between themselves and their prey or their totem animal, that is, maintaining a personal relationship to the divine. Archaeologist Calvin L. Martin writes in In the Spirit of the Earth, 1992: "To render a creature's likeness in another substance ... means to inject its personhood and powers into that new substance as well as to confer upon it the power inherent in that new skin."
The appearance of cultic animals on ritual vessels, for example, implies the blessing of the divinity upon the vessels' contents. Figure 2 illustrates this usage. This unusual double vase of the Late Minoan III period from Kalami, Crete, was used to mix liquids together, probably water and wine while they were being libated. It is completely covered with bands of repeating bird heads.
The High Goddess
at Karphi
One of the figures represented in the Yule issue of Widdershins also bears repeating (figure 3), because though of somewhat crude execution -- formed in a period of artistic decline -- she is really very interesting. I'll look at several iconographic themes that radiate from her.
At 52 centimeters tall, she is one of the shorter of several similar terracotta goddess figurines (from 52 to 90 centimeters in height) that were made at the sanctuary site of Karphi during the final phase of the Minoan world, the Sub-Minoan period. From a simple bell-shaped skirt, these figures rise bare-chested, arms held aloft in hieratic gesture, and are crowned with doves, horns and disks. Their faces are enigmatic, silent, within-looking -- and yet they are in the midst of conveying something very important to their dedicants -- perhaps a blessing, a mystery, the reassurance that the goddess's presence is eternal even as the people's lives suffered wave after wave of change, destruction and terrible uncertainty.
Karphi is the highest peak sanctuary and settlement in Crete, rising 4100 feet (1158 meters) up in the Dikte range. Circa 1100-1000 BCE, post-Dorian invasions of Crete followed the decline and disintegration of Minoan palace culture, which came after the 1450 BCE Theran explosion, earthquake destruction and economic hardships on post-ash fallout agricultural regions. Cretans left the major urban centers and resettled in smaller, more remote hill and mountaintop retreats.
"Here at Karphi, then... Cretans who had lost their wealth and courtly refinement were still serving the old Minoan divinity with emblems representing her ancient aspects," writes Jacquetta Hawkes in Dawn of the Gods, 1968. "She must have remained in undisputed power in the mountainous district of east Crete, where the population continued to speak the old Minoan language into Late Classical times."
I've made the hike to Karphi myself. It's a long, rough car journey into the mountains above the high Lasithi Plain, followed by a numbing trek into the sky, 1300 feet above the plain. The goats seemed to be shunning our path, which is saying a lot. Admittedly, we went the easy route, as the other, "backdoor" route that the residents of Karphi used was several hundred feet of frightfully steep and rugged cliff-side. The town is situated on a tiny, rocky saddle at the peak, no more than a few hundred meters square. The buildings were on the whole very small, and likely the 3500 or so inhabitants had a very meager lifestyle farming goats and olives on the lower slopes. One cannot fail to be impressed at the sheer toughness of a people driven to survive here.
My companions and I spent an afternoon looking at the remnants of stone buildings and the crude pottery sherds strewn about, torn by incessant high winds, and occasionally stopping to gaze around in sheer wonder. Half of my photos from there have our small group spreading our arms into the wind at one time or another, like some instinctual gesture, some kinship of the desire to fly, fingertips fluttering like wingtip feathers. High above, a hawk wheeled looking for a kill.
Anthropologist, writer and naturalist Loren Eiseley conveyed this feeling rather well in his essay "The Judgment of the Birds." In it, he has waked early and contemplates the birds from his New York apartment window, drawn, dreamlike, to a desire to fly. The desire is one of existential longing, and I wonder if the residents of Karphi (in their great faith) ever experienced the same when faced with the wind.
I leaned farther out. To and fro went the white wings, to and fro. There were no sounds from any of them. They knew man was asleep and this light for a little while was theirs. Or perhaps I had only dreamed about man in this city of wings -- which he could surely never have built. Perhaps I, myself, was one of these birds dreaming unpleasantly a moment of old dangers far below as I teetered on a window ledge.
Around and around went the wings. It needed only a little courage, only a little shove from the window ledge to enter that city of light. The muscles of my hands were already making little premonitory lunges. I wanted to enter that city and go away over the roofs in the first dawn. I wanted to enter it so badly that I drew back carefully into the room and opened the hall door. I found my coat on the chair, and it slowly became clear to me that there was a way down through the floors, that I was, after all, only a man.
I dressed then and went back to my own kind, and I have been rather more than usually careful since not to look into the city of light. I had seen, just once, man's greatest creation from a strange inverted angle, and it was not really his at all. I will never forget how these wings went round and round, and how, by the merest pressure of the fingers and a feeling for air, one might go away over the roofs. It is a knowledge, however, that is better kept to oneself. I think of it sometimes in such a way that the wings, beginning far down in the black depths of the mind, begin to rise and whirl till all the mind is lit by their spinning, and there is a sense of things passing away, but lightly, as a wing might veer over an obstacle.
To see from an inverted angle, however, is not a gift allotted merely to the human imagination. I have come to suspect that within their degree it is sensed by animals, though perhaps as rarely as among men. The time has to be right; one has to be, by chance or intention, upon the border of two worlds. And sometimes these two borders may shift or interpenetrate and one sees the miraculous.
The Goddess's Egyptian Reflection
We can look at several examples that may help to draw a more complete picture of the theme of the goddess and her birds bringing renewal to the earth. First, because we have some fair idea what the Egyptians meant by their religious imagery and we can establish cultural and economic connections between Crete and Egypt from 3000 BCE on, we can study the gesture the Karphi goddess is making in terms of inferences drawn from Egypt.
The upraised arms of the Karphi goddess figures are reminiscent of the horns of consecration upon her brow, but hearken as well to the symbols that crown the Egyptian goddesses Hathor and Isis.
In figure 4, Isis pours the waters of renewal upon the field of new grain, thus raising the young god Osiris to new life (here as the ba, his soul). Isis and Hathor are both goddesses of the universal creative principle, the mother and matrix of life -- much the same as the great goddess of Minoan life.
MacGillivray has postulated that the Minoan horns of consecration may have represented the path of the sun's journey from solstice to solstice, thereby delineating the key agricultural and ritual seasons. Recall from the Yule issue that water has a "season" in Crete, as in Egypt. The assurance of life returned in Egypt around summer solstice, when the star 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 on June 21, our summer solstice.
Sitting alongside the horns on the Karphi goddess's head, the birds reflect the idea of the course of the seasons. The context of the goddess's power becomes clearer.
In figures 5 and 6, we have individuals echoing the same gesture -- arms raised, holding feathers and crowned with feathers. The first example has been interpreted by J. Naydler in The Temple of the Cosmos, 1996, to be a ritual posture, meaning "rejoicing." The second example is that of a "vindicated one," a person that has undergone all the trials of a soul journey after death and has been found worthy of an afterlife and the possibility of rebirth. She stands adorned with the feathers of Shu, god of the air, and embraced by the goddess Maat, personification of cosmic equilibrium, in an attitude of an initiate rejoicing.
The god Shu, eldest son of the creator Atum, is one of a twin set of lion gods: the Aker. His sister-wife Tefnet is the goddess of moisture and also mother of Geb, the spirit of the fertile earth. Geb is usually pictured in Egyptian art as either the cosmic goose or reclining and covered by his sister-wife Nut, the sky. (They are both children of Shu, who is also the force of nature between earth and sky -- atmosphere and intermediary.) Realize that the gods Shu and Tefnet are usually pictured guarding the eastern and western horizons, or each side of a horn of consecration with a sun disk resting within. The two doves of the Karphi figures take up this same position, and thus we see a connective theme of horns-sun-sky-birds-soul-rebirth-earth-moisture-life between both cosmologies.
One of the most fascinating Egyptian images of the god in the renewal cycle is from one of a few bezel rings found cut with a scene from the early stages of the spring season. The size of the rings has dictated that all artwork cut into them has to be reduced to the most salient details and shown in highly stylized form. Abstracted scenes such as these show some of the first visual appreciation of myth, their details recognizable by their contexts.
The ring (figure 7) shows nature in need of regeneration: The young god lies waning upon the earth, leaning upon a boulder and unable to rise until the appearance of a large bird carrying a chrysalis -- the beginning and mystery of new life. The young god, here like the Egyptian god Geb remembering the blissful, cosmic kiss of his sister-wife Nut, hails the chrysalis, the seed and its herald the bird. This bird is long-tailed, long-pinioned and bearing a hooked beak -- identifiable as a falcon, according to J-P. Ruuskanen in Birds on Aegean Bronze Age Seals, 1992, and Emma Faull, unpublished draft, The Imagery of the Bird in the Bronze Age. The gentle shrine-dwelling dove is not present here, because the bird appropriate to the function has to be larger and swifter.
Next, the Karphi goddess's gesture mirrors that of the Egyptian ka symbol. Like the ba, the ka was one of the parts of the Egyptian concept of soul. It was the source of a person's vital energy, the ancestral custodian of the source of life -- a reservoir of one's deeper self that resided in the divine world. Since the ka basically assured your existence throughout time, naturally the ancient Egyptians tended to feel very fond of their kas. Sometimes they had poems written to their kas and portraits drawn of themselves in the arms of their kas. Pharaohs had many kas, that is, a lot of vital energy. Did the Karphi goddess's gesture carry any of the same meaning -- did it resonate the same qualities of life to the Minoans? It is easy to see her in this manifest pose, feet on the earth and arms reaching and contacting the sky, as representing the same theological perception we speak of as being "between earth and sky."
At some point, however, we could get inextricably caught up in comparing cross-cultural ideography. Without further proofs, we either must stay our hand for the moment or lose sight of the center of our argument. Then again, there is some joy to the game, after all, as Charles Saunders Pierce wrote in 1905-1906: "It seems a strange thing, when one comes to ponder over it, that a sign should leave its interpreter to supply a part of its meaning, but the explanation of the phenomenon lies in the fact that the entire universe -- not merely the universe of existents, but all that wider universe, embracing the universe of existents as a part ... is perfused with signs, if it is not composed entirely of signs."
Life-Bringers, Goddess-Heralds
To tie the picture together, consider the painting on this pyxis (a small covered jar, usually circular) from Kalami, Crete, Late Minoan III period (figure 9). Several themes gather in this complex image: a figure holds a lyre in one hand and a leafy branch, possibly olive or myrtle, in the upraised other. He is surrounded by wavy and crosshatched water symbols (see figure 4 again; the Egyptian hieroglyph for water is exactly the same), horns with double axes, lily flowers and many large birds in flight. Obviously, there is something important going on here -- likely, this is a picture of a ritual. The lyre and the leafy branch suggest that the figure is a priest or important celebrant at a springtime rite. That the image heralds renewal is evidenced by the presence of water, flowers and birds. Alternatively, the figure could be the young god himself, rising joyful with plants and music in the spring. He is reminiscent of Horus in the new grain or the local Cretan Zeus-Welkhanos in figure 10.
The painting in figure 10, off of a 900 BCE ceramic grave shield from Fortetsa, near Knossos, shows the god standing before the oracular tripod with bird and possibly plant in hand. The earth goddess Rhea rises from below accompanied by birds, possibly cranes or glossy ibis. Both the classical phoenix -- bird of regeneration -- and the Egyptian phoenix, the bennu bird, is identified as the crane. In Egyptian art, the glossy ibis is a symbol of both Thoth and the part of the soul known as the akh', the subtle body that reflects the celestial powers.
In either case, it is clear that the birds are the bringers of life, heralds of the goddess.
I believe that the Minoans embraced a very personal and intimate congress with the sacred natural world. I think that this is further shown by the vitality of art that they produced. A society that embraced immanence and personal connection could maintain a culture of high individual freedom, relative equality and the innovation, quality and joy portrayed in their art. Where birds, among the other natural symbols, are prevalent in art, these qualities must shine through. What better symbol of these things than the bird -- beautiful, free and of immense variety.