“These goddesses eventually took the form of our familiar Greek goddesses. But originally they had names that are very strange to us—I mean, they are linguistically very unusual, which makes the whole thing even more mysterious, don’t you think?”
I nodded, not sure how many more mysterious things I could take. Fritz went on without missing a beat.
“Wanasoi,” he pronounced, gazing dreamily at the ceiling. “Those were the twin queens who may have become Demeter and her daughter Kore. Sitopotiniya, the Mistress of the Grain. Erinu, who also was a Demeter prototype, although her name sounds very like that of the Erinyes, “the Angry Ones” or Furies, who gave Orestes such a hard time. Britomartis or Atemito, who was probably Artemis. Pasaya. Querasiyua, the Huntress. Inachus, who was named for a sacred river. Othiym and her lover-son Pade, the sacred child—”
I gasped. “That name—”
Fritz looked at me sideways. “Which one?”
“Othiym—”
He nodded, smiling as though I had posed an intelligent question. “Ah yes: Othiym Lunarsa. The Woman in the Moon. Another garden-variety lunar deity, although some scholars translate her name as the Destroyer. You know, like the Hindu goddess Kali.”
I swallowed. My mouth felt parched as I croaked, “And these goddesses—they all came from Crete?”
Fritz shrugged. “Who knows? Originally, no; but many of them were worshiped there. Crete was the center of the ancient Minoan civilization, which was an incredibly sophisticated and advanced civilization, even by our standards. Flush toilets, hot running water, and according to the frescoes and pottery they left, they had an absolutely fantastic sense of style. And they may have had optical lenses, for telescopes and spectacles, and wet-cell batteries—and this is four, five thousand years ago! Compared to the Minoans, the ancient Greeks were really just a bunch of pederastic misogynist thugs.”
“But then what happened to them?”
Fritz looked wistful, almost sad. “That entire part of the Mediterranean was blown off the map by a gigantic volcanic eruption on Thera around 1628 B.C. Fffft—” He snapped his fingers. “Like that. Utterly destroyed, all in one day.”
“But Crete wasn’t destroyed,” I broke in.
“It might as well have been. The island of Thera had been central to the Minoans, and Thera was completely obliterated—like Pompeii. So the Minoans lost one of their most important ports and cities. And their religion took a hit as well. The so-called labyrinth at Knossos, and all these other temples on Crete, had already sustained some pretty serious damage from earthquakes. They all had been rebuilt, but when Thera blew, that was pretty much the death knell for Minoa.”
Fritz sighed. “All that beauty! Crete could have rivaled ancient Egypt—and we’ll probably never know the extent of what we lost when we lost that culture.”
“What were they like? Were they goddess-worshipers?”
“Ha!” exclaimed Fritz. “You have been listening to your young friend’s mother! Yes, Virginia, they were goddess-worshipers, at least as far as we can tell. The Minoans left no literary accounts of their culture, but they did leave wonderful images: paintings, statues, temples, the entire marvelous temple-labyrinth at Knossos; and almost all of their religious images seem to be of goddesses or priestesses.
“The frescoes show that women were not only worshiped in Crete but probably also ruled there, and certainly played a major part in the political structure of the city-states. They seemed to have some sort of bull-worship, which was pretty common in the ancient world. It’s very likely that the bull-worship as well as the goddess icons originally derived from central Europe, where we’ve found numerous similar icons and images.”
“What about their religion—I mean, what did they do?”
He frowned. “What did they do?”
“You know, did they worship a golden calf, the Ark of the Covenant, stuff like that?”
“Who knows? The frescoes indicate they were real naturalists—there are beautiful, beautiful paintings of sea animals, of flowers and plants and trees. Sir Arthur Evans, who led much of the restoration at Knossos, liked to think they were flower children. You know, very airy-fairy, artsy-fartsy, wearing pretty clothes and jewelry, skirts for boys and girls and lots of makeup. A quote-unquote ‘feminine’ culture: fancy hairdos, ritual transvestism, lots of attractive young people doing aerobics in the stadia.”
“Sounds like Dupont Circle.”
Fritz smiled. “Well, Evans has been proved to be wrong, at least in part. It turns out that the Minoans, at least some of them, were actually more bloodthirsty than we first imagined. There is a famous fresco that shows women sharing communion in some kind of religious ritual—only women, which is interesting in itself—and some of the tablets we’ve deciphered in Linear B list as much as 14,000 liters of wine used in a single year at one major temple site.”
“Mass alcohol consumption.”
“To put it mildly. There’s also evidence that opium was very widely used. Some people have said that the labyrinth—palace, really—at Knossos looks like it was designed by an architect under the influence.”
Fritz laughed, somewhat grimly. “But some of them may have really needed a few drinks—
“Not long ago, archaeologists managed to decipher some of the script on one of the Linear A tablets that postdates the Thera eruption. It was a record of the hieros gamos, the so-called ‘sacred marriage’ that was supposed to appease the Great Goddess. Apparently these particular survivors believed that she had caused the volcanic eruption as punishment to them, for turning from her to these new young sky-gods from the north.
“But even before we learned that, we may have found evidence of the same ritual being performed. Back in 1979 another group of archaeologists discovered a small shrine overlooking Knossos—Anemospilia, on Mount Juktas. In addition to an arena where sacrifices were performed, and a sort of sacred rock—like those goddess-meteorites found in parts of old Europe—an altar was found, with the ossified remains of a seventeen-year-old boy on top of it. His legs were drawn up to his chest and might have been tied there, though of course we don’t know that. What we do know is that he was murdered—sacrificed, there was a very ornate curved dagger in the shape of a crescent moon found next to the skeleton. A lunula, they call it. Bone analysis indicates that the blood had been completely drained from the upper portion of his body…”
I gasped, but Fritz wasn’t finished.
“That’s not all. It seems that this particular sacrifice was being carried out at the exact moment of the terrible earthquake that leveled Knossos in 1700 B.C. So when archaeologists searched the area further, they found the bodies of three other people who had been taking part in the sacrifice—skeletons of temple servants. One of them was holding a shattered rhyton with a bull painted on it. There was also a man, possibly a priest or priest-king—he was wearing a sacred ring—lying on his back in front of the altar. Probably the guy who used the knife. And finally the body of a woman, a priestess, who appears to have been anemic—so there may have been some kind of ritual bloodletting going on with her as well. The earthquake must have struck minutes after this boy was killed—the rhyton had traces of blood on it, and it had probably been full when the whole temple collapsed and buried them all. Nice, huh? Kind of makes you long for the good old days.”