Another problem now being reconsidered is the nature of Minoan religion (which would probably be helped a lot by the translation of Linear A). Sir Arthur Evans, who first brought Knossos, and thus the Minoans, to light, was heavily influenced by a school of thought known as the Cambridge School, best expressed in the work The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer. Much of this school claimed that ancient, "primitive" religions functioned around the need for fertility. Thus, ancient myths, ancient rites, and even ancient gods were all understood as aspects of some massive fertility cult. The center point of such religions, as the ancients understood it, was an Earth Mother/fertility goddess, who usually had a son-consort vegetation god who died and was reborn annually. Even to this day, Stone Age figurines such as the Venus of Willendorf are understood as "fertility idols." So influenced, Evans, and other scholars after him, seeing the prominence of females in Minoan iconography (see chapter 8), have suggested that the Minoans had a fertility cult surrounding the Great Minoan Mother Goddess. This symbolism was believed to explain such "awkward" images as the prominently displayed breasts of the Middle Minoan Snake Goddesses—lactation imagery, according to the Cambridge School.
In recent years, though, scholars such as Christine Morris and Lucy Goodi-son have challenged such notions, most accessibly in their 1998 publication Ancient Goddesses (Goodison and Morris 1998). Here, they consider such facts as the utter lack of any pregnant goddess imagery in the Minoan repertoire, the fact that none of these "mother goddesses" are ever shown with children, and the fact that the various items decorating the different goddess images— snakes, birds, labrydes—suggest that we are dealing with several goddesses, not just one major one. In point of fact, monotheism was almost unheard of in the ancient world until the rise of Akhnaten of Egypt in the fourteenth century.
Furthermore, the evidence from the Linear B tablets shows that there were several goddesses and gods in the Minoan repertoire (names appear in the tablets that are non-Greek and that are associated predominantly with Crete, having few to no cults on the mainland). Thus, deities such as Fade, Pipituna, and Qerasija appear from the records in Knossos, indicating Cretan but not Greek deities (Hiller 1997, 211). Some of the male deities, such as Enyalios and Paiawon, were apparently later absorbed by Greek gods—they became Ares Enyalios and Apollo Paean. Even the Minoan iconography shows male deities worshipped in sanctuaries, most notably the Palaikastro Kouros discussed in chapter 8. The notion of a single Mother Goddess and her Dying God consort must now be seriously reconsidered and replaced in the literature.
World History
