Bull Session

I had the idea for so long this was titled "A Tribute to Georgia O'Keefe" but, really, Picasso was classier than that.

We more-or-less know the Greek gods. They were often regional, sometimes celebrated in veiled cults, but the playwrights and the philosophers alike wrote about them. We know significantly less about the Mycenaean gods. Homer and Hesiod are describing the Archaic gods, the gods (as far as we can tell) of their own time.

Some of the same names appear on the Linear B inscriptions, but so do unfamiliar names. Some of these names (or some of their attributes) appear oddly similar to Mesopotamian gods. But Linear B is always a narrow window. It records nothing of myth or philosophy; it records only when some temple with connections to the palace gave some valuable goods in or in the name of a god.

There are also frescoes and other illustrations, statuary that seems to have no other purpose but ritualistic, and the ruins of what appear to be places of worship. All the detailed reconstruction is conjecture, and it is thinly supported indeed.

The Minoans wrote in Linear A. The best that we have of Minoan worship is that there appears to have been some continuity from their time to Mycenaean; some of the same practices seem to have continued, even though some evidence points towards the Mycenae recognizing a difference. And there are some distinct changes in practice (the most major and obvious being that the Minoans appeared to have shrines in natural settings -- mountains and caves -- and though images of this kind of worship continue in frescoes and other decoration those shrines which have been recovered by archaeology show they fell into disuse during Mycenaean times.)




So, yeah.

Poseidon appears to have been in a place of prominence. He is a chthonic figure and associated with earthquakes, but not -- until Homer and Hesiod -- with the sea per se. He seems a more rooted fertility figure but that gets very odd in the early worship as pretty much everything seems to figure in some sort of death/life cycle, fertility and animals, sort of thing.

Zeus is appearing on the scene, perhaps a new guy, and there are various myths important to his birth and early years that are placed in specific locations in Crete. A place he comes back to again and again; he drags Europa there, to what in Roman times was Gortyns. He's a bull at the time, and I'll come back to that.

There is at least something of Potnia, but this name, meaning "mistress" and generally attached to a variety of goddesses, could mean practically anything in this period. Tantalizing mention is made in some places, for instance, of a Mistress of the Winds. There is also, unsurprisingly, a fluidity of relationship; sometimes Hera is a goddess equal to and/or consort of Zeus, or perhaps Poseidon, or there is a male "Hera" in addition to her.

And there are a whole set of images of a boy god seemingly worshipping an elder/more powerful goddess; possibly the young Zeus, or possibly some completely other character. This Boy Zeus stuff in particular makes me think of the Silver Age Wonder Woman; originally Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot were presented as stories from Diana's earlier days, but then they started showing up in the same timeline and having adventures together and now nobody knows how they are actually related any more.

Gods. They can do stuff like that.

Let's not even start on the whole Minoan snake thing (except to mention that the famous "Snake Goddess" figurine is almost certainly a priestess, not the goddess being worshipped). Bulls. Snakes. Oh, and boobs. The Minoans also seem to have been into boobs -- that is to say in a ceremonial/religious context -- and yeah once again the same iconography shows up in Mycenaean art but we can't tell if they kept the religious practices (and the outfits) or just liked painting topless women. Same thing for the bull-leaping. We assume the Minoans did it. The Mycenaeans painted it. They may have even done it -- but we have no idea what religious significance (if any) they gave to it.

Of course there's bulls. Bulls figure prominently in various Mesopotamian religions as well. The Mycenae seemed as fond of them -- at least decoratively -- as the Minoans. They also kept the Labrys, although it looks a lot more like just a decoration in Mycenaean times. And they seemed to have lost the Horns of Consecration that the Minoans put on every available roofline. But we can't read too much from Mycenaean figurative art. In Mycenaean art it is more likely to find the lions and other animals hunting or being hunted. Man is in the picture now, and He usually has a sword. And they kept the sea life -- but for some reason the Mycenae were really into octopus. Like, way into octopus as a motif. I'm pretty sure octopus-leaping was never a thing, so...does it mean anything other than "cool thing to paint on walls and make into really nice pieces of gold jewelry?"




So I'm playing with some very odd ideas. I want to reference The Chalice and the Blade but as a pleasant dream, not as a past reality. For the middle part of the book I am basically doing Berkeley in the 60's. (What? I went to school there.) So a people's revolution that has all of that wonderful illusion that within their reach might be a change in consciousness, a reshaping of the very paradigms of power and control. And some of the inner struggles too, a revolution that believes it is for everyone but is not always there for all the disenfranchised. As, for instance, so many women have written in oral histories of the Peace Movement; "First we stop The Man from trampling on our rights. Then we'll get around to your issues." A story which alas is familiar to anyone in the Atheist movement today.

Or to put it in the most simplistic terms; some of the revolutionaries see their struggle as returning the power and prestige of the Minoans (and their gods). A subset among them like to think that perhaps that this age of glory had also been a matriarchy.

(And, yes, this is very much going to run into realpolitik. Among my odd ideas for the politics of the time is the weak rulership is in a Devil's bargain with the Black Ships. If the revolution actually overthrew the palace...there would be nothing to stop the raiders from cleaning up before they left for greener pastures.)

How this works with what we know or conjecture about actual worship practices is, well...   Heck, I have a lot of trouble trying to work out what the people of Knossos in 1200 BCE even know about what was happening in 1450, much less in 1700.  (Those being roughly, the time the Mycenaeans came to prominence in Crete and a time of widespread destruction, and the time of the Thera eruption and, similarly, widespread destruction. And rebuilding into what is likely the Minoan Golden Age.)

Among the really odd directions I'm tempted by is that the bull of so much Minoan decoration is not being worshipped, per se. It is being feared. It is The Sleeping God, a power they keep propitiated lest it rise up and destroy them. Part of my reason for this is the bull motifs and the goddess figures of the peak shrines, surrounded by animals, don't seem to have anything to do with each other. The bull just sort of appears, sus generis. Or is that os generis?

And somewhere here, also, is the possibility of a change in order. Poseidon and Zeus have changed character by Hesiod's time. Was that happening already in 1200 BCE? Was it visible to worshippers of the time? Can you describe this as one religion being supplanted by another?

Oh, yeah. And everything I know of the actual iconography and historical traces of the old forms and plausible reconstructions says no way, but I can't shake a mental image of the bull of the Labyrinth, a massive and mysterious chthonic figure whose stamping hooves shake the earth...