"I really admire this culture's respect for The Earth, respect for women. I'd like to learn more," people tell many a Native American as they share the spirit, dance and quick-humored social life at today's public Powwows, from New England to Alaska.

     "That"s nice. Have you learned about your own culture?" comes the reply.

     This is by no means a full portrait of ancient Crete, the birthplace and center of what we call Western Civilization. The first peoples appear in Crete circa 10,000 BCE. With many immigrants after them, they emerge as "Minoans" by at least 2800, early in the Bronze Age. In common they find very compatible conceptions of a Goddess-centered world, and artistic traditions at least as old as the sophisticated Mesolithic sites of Catal Huyuk (Turkey), and the islands of Malta and Gozo (circa 6000 BCE).

     The most essential book about these worlds is still Robert Graves' 2-volume The Greek Myths. Why? Graves' historical works are much-maligned by academics and other amateurs confined by tenure and libraries---but Greek Myths is still the only collection that has brought together all the evidences to arrive at its tellings of Cretan and later legends: from archaeology to linguistics, from local folk-tales to Classical sources. Remember, the more archaeologists discover in the field, the more the old stories ring true. We can hardly understand a dig anywhere without strong knowledge of the ethnology---how a people see themselves and the world..

     Also get hold of Nanno Marinatos' 1993 Minoan Religion: Ritual, Image and Symbol (Columbia: U. South Carolina Press). This is a detailed, comprehensive attempt to deduce what was on the "Minoan" cultural mind. Its conclusions are problematic, but you'll learn a great deal quickly and clearly. Expensive yet very worthwhile!.

   The Web offers plenty of good sites around and about the ancient Cretans. This one is built from 15 years' research and 2 years' intense experience living there. You'll find a Chronology and other standard aspects, but the main goal is to take you there spiritually: to help you see, feel and understand the world as they did.

     So let's explore the world of Mother Kriti (Strong One) from the ground up---for we post-Europeans too have our beginnings in respect for The Earth, for women and more. Look and listen, study and ponder, re-evaluate and remember.

     Here are the main elements of that world, and what this Aegean site contains:.

     The Earth is where you came from, where you are, and where you're going. "Who consents, She guides," says the ancient proverb. "Who refuses, She drags"

     As in Native New England, archaeologists of Crete and the Aegean have a good clue to find ancient settlements: anywhere there's a spectacular view, of a magnificent coastline, river-valley and/or mountain-range; preferably with easy access to all three......

     The Earth, as Crete's farmers say, feeds us; so The Earth must eat and drink. And as a traditional funeral reminds us still, "The Earth that fed you now will eat you."

     Michael Wood, producer of several fine PBS documentaries on the ancient world, calls these "dark words" (in his program on the Mysteries of Eleusis). Indeed they are---if we believe that our egos have some right to eternal existence. But let go of that (just for a moment!) and consider yourself as unique, wonderful and temporary as a snowflake, whose fate is to melt back into The Earth...to sleep forever in the bosom of Mother Earth with your family and ancestors.

     This was one Cretan trait that quite unsettled, frightened and outraged its late-arriving conquerors. Not only did those Cretans "let" their women take leadership and other parts in political life, sports and public rituals---They were also known to teach their Mysteries of Initiation (spiritual knowledge) to the public at large! In the Cretan tradition that survived into Classical times at Eleusis (on the Greek mainland), "you" went through at least a year of preparation for the great "secret message" about Eternity, taught by learned priestesses and priests there. Every kind of human feeling came out in the open, including "hurling insults at the most important citizens" (see Mircea Eliade's History of Religious Ideas Vol. 1)...

     Out of what The Earth teaches, the world begins to shine from within all things. This is why the Classical record of how people looked after Eleusis was the envy of other religions. In their spirits they gave The Earth its due, and gained the world-eternal here and now. "Truly among mortals these initiates were most supremely blessed."

     The point is forever in front of your face. Lovingly enjoy yourself and others, right here and now, "in play with everything" that Goddess has freely given us as equal children of The Earth. (Another of Her million Cretan names is Pandora, All-Giver.) Cultivate The Earth and yourself, find your peace in their harmonies, and look forward to the world of your past---the Ancestors, in their round "tholos" tombs built up into beehives in early Crete, or laid out in family graves shaped like the great "Minoan" symbol, Labrys or the Double Axe (from which we get Labyrinth for a maze, House of the Double Axe).

     Many before you: many to come. So remember that when your bones have all but melted away, they'll be shoved aside to make room for others. No offense! You know how it is.

"My brother whom I loved, the end of mortality has overtaken him. I wept for him 7 days and nights till the worm fastened on him.Because of my brother I am afraid of death....How can I be silent, how can I rest? He is dust and I shall die also and be laid in The Earth forever....How shall I find the life for which I am searching?"

Then said Utnapishtim [the Mesopotamian counterpart to Cretan Deucalion, and Biblical Noah], "There is no permanence. Do we build a house to stand forever, do we seal a contract to hold for all time?...It is only the nymph of the dragonfly who sheds her larva and sees the sun in his glory....The sleeping and the dead, how alike they are....What is there between the master and the servant when both have fulfilled their doom?"

Then Gilgamesh [the man in quest through The Underworld] said..."I look at you now, Utnapishtim, and your appearance is no different from mine: there is nothing strange in your features. I thought I should find you like a hero prepared for battle, but you lie there taking your ease on your back. Tell me, how was it that you came to enter the company of the gods and to possess everlasting life?" Utnapishtim said..."I will reveal to you a mystery, I will tell you a secret of the gods...."

(N.K. Sanders, trans.)

For the Phaeacians have no use for the bow and quiver, but spend their energy on masts and oars and on the graceful craft they love to sail across the foam-flecked seas....The things in which we take perennial delight are the feast, the lyre, the dance, clean linen in plenty, a hot bath and our beds. So forward now, my champion dancers, and show us your steps, so that when [our guest] gets home he may be able to tell his friends how far we leave all other folk behind in seamanship, in speed of foot, in dancing and in song....

     We begin to touch upon "Powers" of The Earth with which, hopefully, your culture too will teach you to come to pleasant terms. We need to know one other aspect of the ancient Cretan existential attitude that keeps peeking its twinkling eye through all their elegant formalities---

     There is no ancient sense of humor so visible as the Cretans'. First above we see a tiny masterpiece of carving which shows that an artisan with utterly-elite training devoted a great deal of her/his time to making you smile. As you turn the vase in your hand, you watch a group of young men heading home up a country road after working (and probably drinking) all day in the olive groves, where they blister their hands whacking fruit from the trees. They're singing at the top of their lungs, arms flexing, rib cages puffing, two by two they go by---and Duh! A buck-toothed companion stumbles and pratfalls in the ranks. Below that, you see a gold cup carved with similar skill: a Cretan getting his ass kicked as he and his friends try to capture one of Crete's "monstrous" wild bulls.

     Why are these scenes "worth commemorating"? We cannot know---but there they are among plenty more. As if the spirit of this culture really does understand both the short and long view---that there's more to life than order. That "Perfection is for the gods." That order and control are good but at best flawed propositions; that human failures are best understood as comedy, so that they don't engender its opposite.

     Every worthwhile journey has its nasty doorway-guards to pass. Let's confront and by all means take with us two of the most "doubtful" recent voices: Cynthia Eller's The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why An Invented Past Will Not Give Women A Future (Boston: Beacon 2000) and Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence, edited by Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris (University of Wisconsin Press 1999).

     There are new trends among feminists of (shall we say) influence who, for example, reject all Goddess-born questions of Biblical "history" as an invitation to antiSemitism. (See "Where Did the Ancient Cretans Go?" here.) Minds remain closed also in the name of "rigor"; yet, in an academic world of vicious self-thwarting politics and vanishing jobs, not one of them has written an angry analysis of patriarchal "myth." Eller's point of departure (4) is her early career anxiety of being "laughed at," along with a "guide at Cnossos" (Crete) who tells the visitors with her there, one day, of ancient women's powers. Some of the guides there are native PhD's: others, yes, are charlatans. Eller doesn't mention which she got, or who the group "laughing" was---a group of teachers or a German soccer-team on holiday.

     Like good old Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae, 1991), Eller learns to sneer defensive ridicule and gross generalization for her salt-bread-share of success among other library-bound academics (Paglia: "If women ruled the world we would still be living in grass huts"---See if you agree). Eller beats up on you by beating up her own Straw Goddess. Anybody can do that. Just as any academic can prove their "worth" by retreating into the familiar moan: "Well, we just don't know." This tells us nothing toward understanding what we have---thousands upon thousands of original images to speak to us; of an early history plain to see that held The Earth sacred, the body too (all bodies), and found spiritual vision in erotic communion of many kinds. This kind of culture-war-history tells us nothing to explain such day-night differences.

     Eller's research includes not one functional piece of information not found off the tracks of schoolmen and tourists---the land, for example. She provides not one meeting with native historians that could bring us in turn her own "seasoned" take on what they say. Not one look at any larger context from land to the thousand things found here that made the Aegean what it was. Not one heads-up comparison with even today's "matriarchies" (the word itself is a straw target): see for examples Susan Sered's global anthropology, and almost all of Native America. Book after book (praised throughout the glib media) seems far more concerned with throwing the Goddess out with the necessary bath-water: see Ronald Hutton's Triumph of the Moon and Kenneth D.S. Lapatin's Mysteries of the Snake Goddess for more examples.

     You'll find the Goodison/Morris book far more useful though it suffers the same needless limitations: perhaps they want you to feel limited too. Do you think that all this world's unmistakeable veneration of "the female" is objectification and enslavement? Do you think the ancient world's definitions of Power (there are many kinds) were the same as academics' ideas today? Do you think ancient people saw no sources of women's power except through their birthing babies? Do you think that a culture that loves women condemns men to second rank? Do you think the Aegean was a straw Utopia when its central legacies to our time include the first Western courts, international laws, renowned judges---institutions that presuppose human troubles, even in The Isles of the Blessed?

     The "Minoans" drew upon powerful sources to be what they were. Where does all this come from?