That which is not in healthy relationship to its past has little future. We're faced with a question scarcely asked, although no period of Western Civilization has lasted longer than "Minoan" Crete (at least 1500 years, depending on where you first see "Minoans" in the archaeological record: Chronology below). How did the Cretans thrive for so long: what sustained so many generations of exuberant development, "ending" only in the shocks of Thera and the suppression of life-ways 100 generations young?

     Crete was an ongoing melting-pot of Mediterranean bloods and cultural influences. This means that each group of immigrants---from Egypt's pre-Dynastic Nile Delta, from the Middle East and more below---came to Crete having left some previous cultural ways behind them, and holding on to others. Migration in small boats has a way of deciding what you really want to carry and what you don't.

     Ancestors, then, are "the memorable ones," honored because their choices made "the tribe" what it is. In the ancient Cretan world, the Ancestors are Intermediaries between The Earth, its Powers and Living Things, and the living community of clans, families and people. Themis they call the ancient way, the way of the Ancestors, the "divinely right" way that has always been. Reciprocity is the rule. With ancestral guidance, the living keep in balanced relation with The Earth and those Powers, and the Ancestors live on in their good stewardship. As people carry on the kinds of choices that made us who we are, the Ancestors literally deliver life-sustaining crops and other good things (from wine to olive oil) from beneath The Earth. Food, identity, ethics: their practical fruits.

     This was the cultural center of Cretan and probably Aegean civilization for fifteen centuries: over 1500 rooms, indoor plumbing, expert lighting and ventilation, multiple purposes (residence, ritual, craft-shop), saturated with sanctity, color, and playful cutting-edge art of every kind. The many-cultured immigrants of Crete clearly found their strongest common ground right here. (This conception courtesy of History Professor Karen Carr, Portland State University).

     First of all in the need for regular sacrificial Offerings. The many "pillar crypts" of Crete's great buildings are laced with stone channels into which the Cretans poured the blood of sacrificed animals (giving back something for the plenty received)---as well perhaps as wine, oil and other choice liquids obtained from The Earth and The Dead. The more humans take, the more the (healthy) instinct of "guilt"; and because Crete was a land of incredible plenty, its people felt they had a lot of giving-back to do. Even today the mountain-roads of Crete are bedecked with local farmers' shrines doing this.

     This is why most of the many entranceways to The Labyrinth were covered with images of Cretans in gift-bearing processions. People from all of Crete's great houses (each with different Mediterranean ancestries) came here to meet their spiritual duties to the land in high fitting style, and in the process reenacted the cultural fusions of their past, keeping social relations close and lively with each other..

     We're used to seeing the throne of Cnossos flanked by a stiff symmetry of lilies and griffins: a style that well-suited the Mycenean conquerors. But when the throne-room was first excavated, beneath the remains of those painted images archaeologists found very different images: a simple landscape of hills, running waters and living things, and a stately palm tree bent as if shading the throne and whoever sat there.

     Once the idea of "power" was changed in Cnossos and Crete, somebody thought Crete's throne needed to be more "impressive." But suppose you knew that Tamar, a very ancient form of Goddess from the Middle East, was "identified" with the palm tree and all its virtues of elegant form, shade and nourishment? What if you believed that sacrifice and Reciprocity, expertly facilitated by priestesses and priests (note the palm borne by the woman above), was essential to your people's well-being? A bull-calf---like a rebirth, a new year, a refreshed sense of community and culture---is born from the death of the old. Power is not something wisely clung to.

     "God impersonation was not a uniquely Minoan feature, of course," writes Nanno Marinatos (Religion 179). "What makes Minoan ritual different is that the impersonation was probably the main means to make the goddess manifest to the worshipers. We might then say that a Minoan would have been subjected to visionary conditioning....We may suspect a combination of psychological suggestion and manipulation coupled with the cynical calculation that whoever had the experience [being or seeing the Deity] would be singled out as privileged."

     Yes, if privilege is the object of the game. Academe tends to universalize its own concerns, to translate all human relations (with its one definition of Power) into questions of who speaks (as if silence is an empty void), who manipulates and receives privilege. Questions of keeping the academic peace should not be inflecting our textbooks. Nonetheless we crawl beyond the assumption that most people are passive simpleminded children. For how else can we explain Marinatos' simultaneous and much better judgment that Cretan art "stresses perception....stresses subjective vision rather than mere conceptual ideology" (178)?

     If that is so, and it is, which came first: the cynical suggestion, or a person's ecstatic description of Deity as a Lady of the Wild Things? Crete's Ancestors lived and so passed on to their children their "remarkable departures from the established traditions" of their original surrounding countries. (Marinatos 178).

     Leaving Egypt, the Cretans' ancestors left behind the dawn of dynastic, imperialistic Pharaohs, kings-for-life who began to surround themselves with armies, cringing slaves, overbearingly inhuman architecture, and a self-righteousness that tore for ages through the Middle East. They saw (as we do) the first Pharaohs surrounded with the piled-up heads of their "enemies" and, as Pharaohs grew more manful, saw them sitting no longer in the lap of Goddess Isis (whose "blessing" had its political reality in the consent of clans and families). Such erasures demonstrated the political corruption of once-spiritually and socially expressive imagery. By the time of Crete's conquest, the Cretans saw Pharaoh scratch the very being of his mother Hatshepsut from the walls. Their own "Menos" or Minos---whatever his debatable Cretan importance---was no such kingly figure at any time until the Myceneans turned him into a convenient "monster".

     Leaving the Middle East (as Europa's and others' stories tell), Crete's ancestors left behind millennia of ossified "conceptual ideology," and took with them the best of its traditions (writing, building, international tongues of diplomacy, craft-skills, symbols, and more). In time they returned as famous mariners and traders, even sending their extraordinary painters to decorate great houses from Ugarit to Byblos.

     One of Crete's oldest and still-liveliest communities, Archanes, had a substantial "island presence" from early times. From The Cyclades and other islands, "Pelasgian" Cretan immigrants brought a spirit of culture that sparked the lively humor you see above. Where else do we find artists devoting their skills to a pair of swooping swallows, a charmingly porky hedgehog proffering a bowl? At Thera (on today's Santorini) the "Minoan" town is known to have been among the richest of its time. Amid all this, we find their most important rituals teaching women and men to support each other and to lovingly cooperate.

     The dance is the key factor to making this transition. The rituals that developed into worship of the great goddess were tribal exercises. It is likely that they were led by the mothers of the tribe, who were the social center of the tribe as well as the identifiable ancestresses. The emotion of the dance was the lofty, cohesive goal and became closely associated with the chief dancer. The emotion of the group, its immanent divinity, was enhanced by the loss of the individual's ego in the rhythm of the music. The group's ecstacy reinforced itself and created the deity....

                             (Meredith A. Powers, The Heroine In Western Literature,1991:30)

     Heritage, culture, religion: they're either living bonds or dead things. That's why these crowded public courtyard ceremonies featuring dramatic recounts of ancestral stories express the constantly self-refreshing nature of ancient Cretan life. Their vast diversity of origins was a bottomless well of cultural chemistry sparked with careful outside interactions and borrowings as well as new discoveries. This went with a deep sense of unity achieved only with past knowledge, regular intimate socializing, shared prayer---Cretan ritual life is a path marked by constant re-initiation to an endless Mystery, not without pain and sorrow. But is that image of priestesses dancing our first Western "motion picture"? Do we see one priestess or thirteen? Is she/are they each showing us one significant gesture of a language? Only the families watching them know.

     Bonds make us subjects---self-aware beings conceived as parts of the group---not necessarily slaves or dim automatons. Crete's interrelated clans and families, having learned from their pasts, provided labor in farming, building and mining, artistic talent, foreign trade-connections, military strength and seagoing exploration-skills (Cretans were always looking for tin to make bronze and seem to have dug mines in southwest England). In return, Crete's great houses provided the fruits of a redistributive economy: a standard of living unmatched in its day, bronze tools, luminous textiles, exquisite jewelry and ritual-ware, pottery, and foreign luxury goods---from tasty Nile beans to the painted ostrich-eggs of inland Africa.

     Crete's conquerors had to work hard to change all this. They put elders with their memories to the sword, forced marriages, enslaved religious clergy and artisans to new ends. From Homer's Heroes to the founding of Athenian democracy, politics becomes a protection-racket run by one (male) tyrant after another: Hand over the wealth (to which you its producers have no right), or we burn your town and enslave you. Democracy becomes necessary because people(s) are forcibly, programmatically taught to turn away from their ancestors' woman-centered bonds of clan and family relationship. A vote stands in for felt relation and shared interest---as if there's no time to reach consensus. Any other parties' gains in power are a "threat" to your own. By Classical times the Greeks are sick to death of Mycenean-style, nightmarish stasis or in-fighting. Or how do you explain all that hateful repudiation of women and family violence in later Greek myth? (More below.)

     Cretan families today find themselves approached by globalizing corporations with money to burn, offering (for ex.) a cool million for the family's prime real estate; which they'll "develop" into eyesore hotels that take every drop of wealth out of the country. "Our family has lived here time out of mind," some Cretans reply. "Okay then, two million. Three. Three-Five...." When Crete looks like Berlin, nobody visits, and (almost) everybody loses.

     This is not Development. Crete and The West need their Ancestors more than ever.