[Editor’s Note: This and the forthcoming sequels are originally published in Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture (2018 Mago Books). Part 3 discusses the matristic/matriarchal nature of the Cretan Goddess religion in the Bronze Age.]
Rejoicing in the Goddess Religion—In Bronze Age Crete
The archaeological record of Crete during its Neolithic Age (circa 7000 to 3000 BCE) and Bronze Age (circa 3000 to 1100 BCE) provides abundant evidence for a goddess-centered, partnership civilization. The island was first settled by people from central Anatolia (now Turkey), beginning about 7000 BCE, and later by peoples from western Anatolia, Old Europe (traveling down across the Aegean Islands[1]), as well as settlers from lower Greece during the late Bronze Age,[2] in particular the Mycenaeans. Religious and economic connections are made with northern Africa, including Egypt; but it is not yet clear if there were settlers from Africa in Crete.
Because the island of Crete was protected from mainland war-faring empires around the Mediterranean Sea, this goddess civilization was able to remain at peace for thousands of years and to see its culture prosper economically and flourish artistically and spiritually. The confluence of trade and cultural influences from the east, north, and south resulted in a dynamic and highly creative civilization.
One of the names for Crete was Makaris, country of the blessed.[3] Probably the most appealing aspect of the Goddess tradition in ancient Crete is the joyful celebration of the key aspects of life, with music, singing, dancing, and feasting.
[From] the archaeological record … emerges the vibrant image of a way of life that was nature-loving and nature-embedded; a spirituality that was fully embodied and erotically pleasurable; and an individuality that was so nurtured within community that even the most deeply personal and intimate of all human experiences—birth, sexuality, and death/rebirth—were occasions to be celebrated and honored as an integral part of the greater life of the human community within the all-embracing cosmos. Their profound understanding of the interconnectedness of all life sought expression in the people’s ritual reenactments.[4]
From her research into matriarchal cultures, feminist philosopher Heide Goettner-Abendroth identifies a “matriarchal aesthetic” as: magical, mythical, participatory, ecstatic, dynamic, ritualistic, festive, erotic, social, public, transformative, life-giving, inclusive, and wholistic.[5] She contrasts a matriarchal aesthetic to a patriarchal aesthetic, which she describes as: fictional, dogmatic, created by an individual artist, dividing emotion and thought, objectifying, formal, elitist, artificial, de-natured, and divisive. This contrast of cultural arts and values can be seen between the ritual arts of the Goddess peoples of Crete and the artworks of the subsequent patriarchal warrior clans who dominated not only Crete, but all Greece, during the late Bronze Age.
The Goddess of Nature in Crete was sometimes depicted in a singular form; and sometimes depicted with a daughter or daughters, or a son. She was depicted surrounded by lilies or crocuses and other plants; by birds such as the dove or large bird of prey; by animals such as the cow, bull, or mountain goat; and by maritime creatures such as the dolphin, octopus, and flying fish. Sometimes she appeared in hybrid form, partly human and partly bird or snake. Sometimes her epiphany was heralded by magical creatures such as the griffin that had a lion’s body and the wings and head of a great winged bird. She was often accompanied by devotees, performing rituals together, in caves, on mountain tops, in home shrines, and in temples.
The evidence regarding goddess/es in Crete can be interpreted as many different goddesses, or as a single goddess with many faces and powers. Sir Arthur Evans, the chief archaeologist of Knossos, largest temple-palace complex on Crete, began his excavations in 1900. Evans interpreted the iconography of Knossos as showing a single Mother Goddess of Nature.[6] Archaeologist and classicist Martin P. Nilsson saw many different goddesses and gods.[7] Archaeologist Nanno Marinatos, in her important work on Minoan Religion, thinks that while there most likely was a “female polytheism,” there was probably a single goddess essence:
iconographical analysis … has confirmed [Arthur] Evans’ contention: there is an essential unity in the symbolism which connects the goddess with nature in all its manifestations … [and] points unambiguously to a concept of primary importance: a nurturing goddess of nature of similar iconography across place and time.”[8]
The archaeomythology scholar Joan Cichon provides us with a detailed analysis of goddess imagery within ritual contexts in Crete, from the Neolithic to the Post-Palatial period (circa 6500-1070 BCE). She concludes that the central deity for some five thousand years was a single Mother Goddess of Nature: “She was Life-Giver, Death-Wielder, and Regeneratrix.”[9]
Eisler proposes a Many-in-One view of the Goddess/es of Crete, or what can be called a pluralistic monotheism;[10] a view with which I agree, certainly as it applies to the earlier, pre-Mycenaean, pre-Indo-European, goddess-centered epoch. The Mycenean takeover of Crete, circa 1450 – 1100 BCE, created a cultural watershed, and the cultures before and after this momentous event need more careful distinction, between the earlier goddess civilization and the later, increasingly male/god dominated culture.
Archaeologist Marina Moss, whose data span both pre-Mycenaean and Mycenaean periods from circa 2050/2000 to circa 1000 BCE, thinks there were many distinct deities. Her database includes the material and symbolic evidence for deities in a selection of houses and settlements, palaces, hill sanctuaries, mountain sanctuaries, and rural sanctuaries; and from this she concludes there was a goddess and god pantheon for Middle to Late Bronze Age Crete. After cataloging her finds by time and place, she then developed the following list of goddesses and gods: Bird Goddess, Deity of Cattle and Sheep, Goddess of the Dead, Dove Goddess, Fertility Goddess, Guardian of the Sun, Healing God/dess, God of Initiation, Goddess of Initiation, Maritime Deity, Mountain Mother, Goddess of Renewal, Snake Goddess, Solar/Sky God, Stellar Goddess, Goddess of Vegetation and Agriculture, and War Divinity. In contrast to Moss, the research of Aegeanist Lucy Goodison and Marinatos points to a Solar Goddess instead of a Solar God.[11]
Moss’ analysis indicates that the goddesses are more numerous and generally earlier in the chronological record than the male gods.[12] She demonstrates that the Pre-Mycenean culture worshipped a Dove Goddess, Goddess of Renewal, Goddess of Vegetation and Agriculture, and Snake Goddess. The Creto-Mycenaean Linear B tablets that were inscribed following the Mycenaean invasion in the late Bronze Age, named various deities, including some with “imported” Indo-European names: a Mountain Mother, Bird Goddess, Potnia (Indo-European), Potnia-Atana (?Athena) (Indo-European); and Lady of the Labyrinth (Indo-European).[13] The research of Goodison also confirms the relatively late appearance of most male gods in the Cretan archaeological record.[14]
The first image of an important male/god, carefully sculpted in marble, appears during the Neolithic Age, at Knossos. A few other young gods appear during the early Bronze Age, but more gods appear after the Mycenaean military conquest of Crete.[15] In later eras, a youthful male god is depicted in seal-rings, sometimes as a boy-god floating in the air. The Sacred Consort, lover of the Goddess who joined her in Sacred Marriage, appears in later mythology: a God of the Sea, or God of the Sky, or God of the Willow Tree. The Creto-Mycenaean Linear B texts from Crete name the gods Poseidon, Are (?Ares/God of War[16]), Paiaen (?Apollo), Velcanos (Willow Tree God), and Zeus. Moss identifies Zeus as Indo-European. An image of a Warrior Goddess at Knossos (?Atana/?Athena) is from the Mycenean era as well.
My view is that the singular Great Mother Goddess of Nature of many faces—who was worshipped throughout Crete, along with various young or youthful gods for the first five and a half thousand years—began to be fragmented and diminished following the Mycenaean invasions. Her pre-eminence was finally subordinated by the Greek warrior clans and their Indo-European god, Zeus.
that celebrated the birth, sacred marriage, death, and rebirth of all life. Pentelic marble relief. Eleusis, Greece. c. 440-430 BCE.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public Domain (Wikimedia Commons).
Probably the earliest name of the Goddess in Crete is found in the Linear A texts as DA-MA-TA, which can be translated as Earth Mother. It is found in the libation formula I-DA-MA-TA at several locations around the highest mountain, Mount Ida. Linguist Gareth Owen translates. this as: “Behold the Mountain Mother!” (I = I see; DA = Earth; and MA-TA = Mother) [17] Owen argues that this is an early form of Demeter. The variant “Da-ma-te” appears in the Pylos Linear B scripts from southern-most Greece, before 1200 BCE, and is translated as Demeter and/or fields of barley. Demeter was both.
Additional lines of reasoning that support the translation of DA-MA-TA as Mountain Mother and as an early form of Demeter comes from the archaeologist Lynn Roller in her book, In Search of God the Mother. She acknowledges the worship of a Mother Goddess in central Anatolia at Çatalhöyük during the Neolithic Age; and also the widespread worship of a Mountain Mother in Anatolia during the Bronze Age. She establishes that the primary name for the Mother Goddess in Phrygia, the Mountain Mother whose worship began circa 900 BCE, is Mater; she is connected to Crete, and to both Rhea and Demeter in Greece, and later to the Magna Mater of Rome.[18] Roller holds that the close links between the Greek Meter and Crete during the 5th century BCE, “may well derive from memory of cult practice on Crete.”[19]
Further archaeological and linguistic finds connect Crete with Demeter and the influence of Cretan religion and culture on Greek religion and culture. One of the pre-Mycenaean names for the goddess in Crete was Eileithyia, the Goddess of Birth.[20] Demeter-Eileithyia is a name of Demeter in Greece. And Eileithyia is connected to Demeter at Eleusis. Ritual equipment used in Crete, the wreath with many cups to hold the fruits of the harvest (called kernoi), also feature prominently in the rituals of Demeter at Eleusis. Like other scholars, I see the rites in honor of Demeter and her Daughter at Eleusis as carrying forward the spiritual heart of the religion of ancient Crete. Sir Arthur Evans, the chief excavator of Knossos, gave the name Minoan to the civilization he discovered, after the legendary King Minos from the Mycenaean era. But Minoan is a misnomer for the Goddess civilization that existed for some 5,500 years before the arrival of the Myceneans and the rise to power by King Minos. I propose that the Goddess civilization of pre-Mycenaean Crete be called Damatrian Crete, after the Earth Mother DA-MA-TA / Demeter.
While there is scholarly consensus that Crete was a Goddess-centered culture, several debates remain. Was pre-patriarchal Crete a matristic or matriarchal culture? When did beneficial hierarchies appear and when did exploitative hierarchies appear?
Cichon provides a compelling argument for matriarchy in Crete, using the perspectives of archaeomythology and Modern Matriarchal Studies. She argues that the four-fold definition of matriarchy provided by feminist philosopher Heide Goettner-Abendroth in terms of economics, politics, social relations, and religion, applies to the culture of Minoan Crete.[21] Economically, matriarchal societies are usually self-reliant, subsistence agricultural societies “of economic mutuality, based on the circulation of gifts.”[22] Socially, they are ”non-hierarchical horizontal societies of matrilineal kinship.”[23] Politically they are “egalitarian societies of consensus.”[24] And spiritually, matriarchies are “sacred societies and cultures of the Feminine Divine” that regard “the whole world as divine.”[25]
Gimbutas and Eisler prefer the term matristic to matriarchal because it avoids the general notions that matriarchy is simply the reverse of patriarchy and means the domination of men by women. While Goettner-Abendroth speaks of “non-hierarchical horizontal societies of matrilineal kinship,” Eisler sees in Crete the emergence of “hierarchies of actualization,” which she contrasts with “hierarchies of domination” that appear in dominator societies.[26] I see that Goettner-Abendroth’s definition would apply to the Neolithic Age and early Bronze Age in Crete, at least until the rise of the temple-palace societies circa 2000 BCE; after which there is evidence for the emergence of hierarchies of actualization.
Once the term matriarchy is re-defined to signify the mother as first principle rather than as dominating principle, then both matriarchal and matristic are terms that suitably describe ancient Crete. Christ refers to early Crete as an “egalitarian matriarchy”; she defines “egalitarian matriarchy as a society and culture organized around the mother principle of love, care, and generosity, in which mothers are honored and women play central roles, and in which men also have important roles and every voice is heard.”[27] The term that would include these several variants is matriculture, a term now being used in some Native American tribes to name cultures that are “matrifocal, matrilineal, matricentric, matrilocal, and/or matriarchal.”[28]
While scholarly debate continues as to when hierarchies of domination replaced earlier communal, egalitarian practices, there is strong evidence for this change being established after the invasion of Crete by Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland circa 1450 BCE, with the burning of temple-palaces at Chania, Malia, and Zakros, and the occupation of the temple-palace at Knossos, followed by escalating warfare, taxation, the first warrior burials with swords and sometimes gold and even horses; and images of domination entering the iconography of Crete.
While the Goddess continues to be worshipped, Zeus becomes ever more important. He was the chief deity of the fabled ruler, Minos. Homer, the poet of the Archaic Age in Greece, writes in the Odyssey that King Minos of Crete was a “familiar friend of mighty Zeus“; and that “Minos [was] the glorious son of Zeus.” [29] Again, the term Minoan for the pre-Mycenaean Goddess civilization does not apply; it is an anachronism. The Neolithic and early and middle Bronze Age of the Goddess civilization of ancient Crete is more aptly named Damatrian, after the Mother Goddess of Nature, DA-MA-TA, Demeter, Goddess of Abundance.
(To be continued)
[1] Harald Haarmann, “Writing in the Ancient Mediterranean: The Old European Legacy,” in From the Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas (Manchester, CT: Knowledge, Ideas & Trends, 1997), 108-121.
[2] Joy J. King, S. Sebnem Oozkal, Tristan Carter, Peter A. Underhill, “Differential Y-chromosome Anatolian Influences on the Greek and Cretan Neolithic,” Annals of Human Genetics (April 2008).
[3] Andonis Vasilakis, Minoan Crete: From Myth to History (Greece: Adam Editions, 2001), 15.
[4] Mara Lynn Keller, “Crete of the Mother Goddess: Communal Rituals and Sacred Art” ReVision 20, no. 3 (1998): 12. Rituals are detailed more extensively in the work of Nanno Marinatos, Minoan Religion (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993).
[5] Heide Göttner-Abendroth, “Nine Principles of a Matriarchal Aesthetic,” in Feminist Aesthetics, Gisela Ecker, ed., Harriet Anderson, trans. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 81-94.
[6] Arthur J. Evans, The Palace of Minos: A Comparative Account of the Successive Stages of the Early Cretan Civilization as Illustrated by the Discoveries at Knossos (4 vols.) (London: Macmillan, 1921-1936), http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/evans1921ga/.
[7] Martin P. Nilsson, Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and its Survival in Greek Religion, 2nd revised edn. (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1950), 392.
[8] Nanno Marinatos, Minoan Religion: Ritual, Image, and Symbol (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 1993), 165-166.
[9] Joan Cichon, “Matriarchy in Minoan Crete: A Perspective from Archaeomythology and Modern Matriarchal Studies,” (PhD diss. California Institute of Integral Studies, 2013), 338.
[10] Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, xvii.
[11] Lucy Goodison. Death, Women and the Sun: Symbolism of Regeneration in Early Aegean Religion, Bulletin Supplement 53 (University of London, Institute of Classical Studies, 1989); Nanno Marinatos, Minoan Kingship and the Solar Goddess: A Near Eastern Koine (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2010).
[12] Marina L. Moss, The Minoan Pantheon: Towards an Understanding of its Nature and Extent, British Archaeological Reports, BAR International Series 11343 (Oxford: John and Erica Hedges LTD., 2005). Her study covers the time periods denoted by Crete scholars as Middle Minoan IA to Late Minoan IIC.
[13] Moss, Minoan Pantheon, 54-77,especially 75-77.
[14] Lucy Goodison, Moving Heaven and Earth: Sexuality, Spirituality and Social Change (London: Woman’s Press, 1990).
[15] Moss, Minoan Pantheon, 164, 173, 185.
[16] Moss, Minoan Pantheon, 183, 190. Moss found evidence for a war deity at the cave of Arkalokhori, from Middle Minoan IIIA to Late Minoan IB. She avoids absolute dates for the most part, because an absolute chronology for ancient Crete has not yet been definitively established in the scholarship; it awaits a scientific determination on the date of the volcanic eruption of the nearby island of Thera.
[17] Gareth A. Owens, “New Evidence for Minoan ‘Demeter’,” in Kadmos, 35 (1996): 172-175. See also Gareth Alun Owens. “Evidence for the Minoan Language (1): The Minoan Libation Formula,” in Cretan Studies 5 (1996): 163-179.
[18] Lynn E. Roller, In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 30, 39.
[19] Roller, In Search of God the Mother, 135.
[20] Linear B tablets record offerings of honey to “e-re-u-ti-ja,” Eileithyia.
[21] Joan Cichon, “Chapter 9: Was Bronze Age Crete a Matriarchy?” in Matriarchy in Minoan Crete, 462-515.
[22] Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Matriarchal Societies: Studies on Indigenous Culture Around the World (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), xxv.
[23] Goettner-Abendroth, Ibid.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Eisler, Chalice, xix-xxiii.
[27] Carol P. Christ, “What is Egalitarian Matriarchy and Why is it so often Misunderstood?” Feminism and Religion, April 16, 2018. https://feminismandreligion.com/author/carolpchrist/, April 22, 2018.
“Crete, Religion and Culture,” in Encyclopedia of Women and World Religions (forthcoming).
[28] Sherri L. Mitchell, Miigam’agin, Evie Plaidce, Margaret Kress, “Wabanaki Women’s Wisdom,” panel for the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology: Scholarly Speculations: Animal, Earth, Person, Story (Las Vegas, Nevada, March 17, 2018).
[29] Homer, Odyssey, The Odyssey, trans. A.T. Murray, Vol. XI (Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1919), 568-71. http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg002.perseus-eng1:11.567-11.600/.