We're exploring the ancient Cretan world through the concentric circles of its spiritual and cultural life. It all begins and ends with The Earth, which alone endures all change; and The Ancestors are the most stable, intimate and instructive link the people have with it. Also surrounding these clans, families and individual selves is a world of "Powers" and living things, with which the Cretans came to terms worth understanding.

     Cultural historians from Alexander Marshack to William Irwin Thompson have shown that, in a sense, "civilization" began when early humans began to notice, and produce symbols about, the rhythmic regularities of Nature---cycles of the Sun, Moon and waters, of herd-migrations and plant-growth (including the varying strengths of medicinal herbs within these cycles), of reproduction and the phases of life itself.

     Marshack's discovery---a carefully-cut hand-sized "lunar calendar"---is one of the oldest-known of all human symbolic productions, a clue to the ancient importance of knowing how the world works. Some anthropologists believe that such calendars and other "records of abstract information" were also cut into the earliest human tool, the digging-stick, with which women hunted nourishing roots and planted seeds. The knowledge marked there was manifest as successful practical expertise of many kinds, a sign of its bearer's "initiation" to the great mysteries. In time, this was the substance behind the powers of the ruler's sceptre---truly a kind of magic wand that enabled one to seem to bend the forces of Nature to the benefit of the group.

     The image above and others have indeed been abused by some who portray ancient Crete as a rigid "matriarchy." Others dismiss the fact that ancient Cretans most often symbolized their world as the realm of a powerful "Lady of the Wild Things." (We do find images of powerful men, but they are rarely if ever conceived quite like that.) It simply says, Behold: The mountain (Earth) endures, and Her temple. Even the fiercest beasts seem to know She understands. Proud as Pandora, strong, erotic and elegant, She holds Her knowledge high. And I can hardly help shielding my eyes for the glory of it all.

     The Cretan calendar (like most of its neighbors' then) was a lunar one of thirteen months, whose fabric was interwoven with cycles of the sun, trees, crops, wild plants and animals. The Cretans were explorers and learners as they managed and even celebrated multiple relations with their great surrounding element, the sea. They were also renowned for their refinements in viniculture, wines and grapevines: the idea of fermented "spirits" came from them as the great semi-buried vats' crushed contents moved, heaved and gurgled during separation of liquids and solids; as the plant itself grew by greeny spirals, signs of The Ancestors pushing up good stuff. Husbandry itself connotes a man's honorable labor in the garden of a woman. From there to America, men have imagined "paradise" in those terms.

     We noted some of the animals of practical and symbolic importance in Crete. In all their culture, however, one creature and Power called for special attention.

      Bull---The wild bulls once plentiful across the island. Bull was Crete's biggest, strongest, most imposing animal, prodigious in its power and potency. One modern elderly Cretan's most awesome boyhood-memory was the sound of bulls cracking their heads together over mating-rites, in the moonlit olive-groves of his family's farm. Cretan art of all kinds shows their skills (and sense of humor!) in managing these "monsters" for their purposes. He was loved in part because he would not be tamed. From his horns flowed the plenty of the world.

     Bull, it seemed to the Cretans---Bos, or better, a huge bull under The Earth, an Earthbull---was also the only way to describe or understand the sudden devastating powers of earthquake. At least twice in "Minoan" history, Bull had literally flattened the island's greatest buildings and towns. The Cretans made bulls the living language of their response to this Power. We find the skulls of sacrificed bulls in a quake-ruined (and unrepaired) section of The Labyrinth. The smashed stone blocks you see in the ruins at a house on Santorini testify to these terrifying blows. Here, the people listened well enough to evacuate; and the crater you see above was once a huge mountain. Its collapse produced "the loudest explosion ever heard on Earth," and a "nuclear winter."

     Until that (not) final blow, the Cretans rebuilt better than before. Their extraordinary technical response was to lace their buildings' walls with wooden beams, which allowed them more play for surviving shocks to come. We have to laugh to imagine that the people who thought that up were the conditioned suckers of charlatans dressed as gods. "Royalty" needs its artisans more than they need kings and queens. Not even Pharaoh dared to overdo it, graciously "allowing" his tomb-builders decent housing (as we now know) and six months off to harvest crops that fed his Great House.

     Even the catastrophic full eruption of the Thera volcano---whose remains you see in the crater at Santorini today, and which hurled 80 square miles of island into the sky---would not have kept the Cretans down. To do that required wholesale opportunistic invasion that capitalized on the eruption's damage. Bull had never behaved like a mainland Mycenean on a mission of retrogressive "cultural reform." And this is where we may most wonder where The West (and the world) might be today, if Thera had not so darkened our cultural skies and buried the actual past.

     Clearly, Crete's most influential leaders appropriated Bull into a political symbol. In their language Bull was Bolynthos: He Who Makes [You] Holy. They addressed this most disturbing and amazing of Powers for the great group and in return received many kinds of fealty that produced satisfactory order. Priests of Crete were famous as Kouretes, "Initiated Ones" who swung a great perforated oaken board round-and-round on a rope to bring the dreadful music of the Bull-Roarer into ceremonies. Jane Harrison argues that young Cretans, in learning to do this, learned that indeed people create and act out "gods" for each other (a power that, yes, can be abused). This is paralleled in Native America's Iroquois "False Face Societies"; in which this secret is learned when you first don your elders' intimidating masks, masks which till then have "kept you in line" as a child. We look far and wide for other cultures with so much faith in their young because of so much self-confidence as teachers.

     The great Cretan centers wielding the signs of Bull must have stood in part as centers of socio-political justice among the clans of each Cretan region. Cnossos was likely where those judges brought their own high-level disputes. As we compare this system with other countries' creation and use of symbols of power, we find no trace of a Cretan bull externalized, lording itself over a foreign empire. The tyrannical Minos and youth-devouring Minotaur are figments of later propaganda; for myths, as Graves remarked, did sometimes function like today's political cartoons.

     It's interesting to find instead that in the same culture that does so appropriate Bull to political ends, we find "the monster" at public play with its girls and boys. As mentioned, the patriarchal Myceneans---for an age the cultural pupils of Crete---couldn't believe that Cretans "let" their women participate in so much public life. We've been told (by them) that Bull "ate" these and their own children; told (by Mary Renault) that these youths were foreign captives for the blood-sport entertainment of a culture gone "soft as a woman." We've been told, by generations of fabulists and historians who never bothered to look or try for themselves, that this sport can't be done; that its purpose is bloody spectacle born of a nihilistic death-fetish (Wunderlich)---on and on.

     Maybe, instead, there is a serious (as well as exhilarating) reason for this highly-honored passion of ancient Crete. Maybe Bull (or, through him, mystical chance) is being allowed to winnow the best from the best young Cretan men and women for high office; the way Earthbull winnows away at older Cretan cultural way, from religion to building. We think of the elaborate codes for judging a modern matador's skill and achievement ("grace under pressure" as Hemingway puts it), and see that a Cretan need not get gored or killed to be "eliminated" or destined for lesser station. We can hardly doubt that some participants did die: they still do in its spectacles. But there was something very socially important about this "game" in a culture where Bull received so much "serious" glory, fearful sacrifice and political appropriation. That social function must be the source of the serious substance so clearly in these Bull-games for the Cretans.

     Life Eats Life. As a species we have always found this disturbing. A "Power" drives us to kill fellow-creatures to feed our babies. At our best, we are not comfortable with the aggressive and overpowering aspects of love and sexuality. The most careful readings of humanity's earliest symbolic images reveal (in part) these dilemmas and anxieties, and most of the time, an articulate response to them. Crete is one example.

     In Crete, Kourotrophos had a root-meaning as "mother, child-rearer." But more broadly, it denoted the furthest-imaginable "source" of Life itself: beyond the tomb, beyond the living womb, the source of the drive in everything to live. In a phrase, Life Gets Very Crazy In The Living. "All Kouroi have a touch of the young sun in them." This means you.

     We notice as the Cretans did that "Life" could care less about knocking down our monuments in its very praise. It wears them away in what we cannot tell our children or what they won't hear. Moralists notwithstanding, "Life" has the same end for the good and the evil. The closer we look, the more opposites converge: the least hot is the least cold, pain and pleasure share frontiers, love and hatred haunt the heart, light and darkness the mind. Creation destroys things. Mischief can be as much fun as helping a neighbor (for awhile anyway). If there's anything permanent besides The Earth and stars, it's change. "Who consents, She guides: Who refuses, She drags."

     A growing consensus suggests that there are discernible social, cultural and political differences produced by factors once called "a woman's view of the world." Many are connected with direct, bodily, biological experiences universal to womankind, especially the cycles of blood and birth. What manifestation of power teaches (changes our knowledge) more? To be bodily "possessed" with pregnancy, in a sense overpowered from within by life-forces crucial to the group. Its long-earned and dramatic act of creation and accomplishment, the nurture of a human bond almost unmatched. Not least, the wonder of one's group and their inspiration at such renewal; which in turn brings on all the ambiguous joys and changes that children are, from private life to public consequences. In a sense these Powers are really existential dilemmas. Across time and cultures they are The Powers we need most to address and learn to negotiate: Birth, Sexuality, Difference, and Death. They demand that we get wise help from our culture.

     What does it tell us of "Minoan" sexuality that the cooperative initiations of the young and their place within tradition are among their artisans' brightest subjects? Why was religious-sponsored sexuality once called "holy communion"? Even today, Sex and Spirit speak the same languages. What kinds of erotic expression do you discern in the Cretans' images? In your own? How do you account for the differences? See the cover of the novel Ariadne's Brother below, based on an image from Cretan ritual. The "accompanist" role is a man's, and he's wearing women's garments. See also the section on Self below as you explore Crete's responses to Difference in gender.

     Cretan preparation for the "confrontation with Difference" began in their blood, clans and country. Cretan boys were called scotioi because in their first years they were raised "among women." Was this conditioning, humiliation, or a chance to discover equality despite many differences?

     Another technique by which historians erase uncomfortable differences between themselves and cosmopolitan others is to lower the playing-field. Many tell us that the "Minoans" were such a peaceful cooperative bunch because, out on that isolated island, they never had to face the (delusionary) "limited resources" competition that caused (they mean, excused) the spread of warfare as "politics by other means"; often called History, or Progress.

     This about a people sailing the seas from the beginning. There was no other way to reach Crete in the first place. Does an isolated people need to guard its interests with the first thalassocracy of international trade, with standardized weights and measures? Immigrants enriched "Minoan" blood down their history (below). They were free to adopt any foreign trends they pleased and they had the strength(s) to keep out the rest. It is their choices we so admire, and some resent.

     Multilingual Cretans mingle in every port of their world at trade, on commission as builders and teachers. Beyond their quiet but certain intermarriages, they melt away onto the seas that surround historical record. These are famously close observers, who know the Mediterranean as one vast "eddy-field" that ships can leapfrog, if you learn the currents. They observe in port, too. And others observe them. Few peoples fly blind. They migrate along known routes, and go where it felt good before, or where they sense promise.

     Which is the "divine being" here? At left we see a planted fruit-tree pulled up by its roots: not the way to harvest fruit, unless you have something more to say with this particular act. We may be as spiritual and initiated as the priestess, but when we take from Nature for nourishment, we do violence and cause death. Helpless to resist desire (Kourotrophos), we "hunt" the right lover, dissemble and seduce, empower ourselves to build appeal and then seek out abandon and surrender. "Life" (a spiral) turns around to displace us with children: the best thing in the world.

     We have only each other for comfort. Plan: Reach high: Touch another, (perhaps a god), palm to palm. The Mystery will never be resolved. It simply is. And She seems to understand.

     This divinity has no connection to sin. There are no moral theatres in her schema, no drive for identifying evil, for labeling restrictions, for the expiation of guilt through suffering. Her goodness is in her ancient tribe, toward facilitating the mysterious spontaneity of all life. Her wisdom is from her unquestioning acceptance of the irrational, of suffering as a cycle of life unrelated to sin, but inherent in the ebb and flow of natural seasons. She is an embodiment of the blind [sic] human passions, of grief and bleak depression, of love and ecstatic freedom. She would not have fit well into Plato's Academy or been excited by the logical symmetry of the Apollonian world-view. Far from Aristotle's conception of God, she is more numen than idea; representative [as Sylvia Brinton Perera writes in Descent to the Goddess, 1981] of "the liminal, intermediate regions, and energies that cannot be contained or made certain and secure...she symbolizes consciousness of transitions and borders, places of intersection and crossing over that imply creativity and change, and all the joys and doubts that go with a human consciousness that is flexible, playful, never certain for very long.
                                                       (Meredith Powers, Heroine 143)

     As of Western Tradition beginning with the Mycenean conquerors of Crete, we have learned to ghettoize if not erase this as Utopia, Romanticism, etcetera (the place where they put people who think Nature and Spirit inseparable). Perhaps instead we should ask anew why those pioneering hero-corsairs who sacked Troy, rather than trade with it, were always on such a rapacious Odyssean quest for The Happy Isles where the fruit never falls; like old Gilgamesh.

     Friedrich Nietzsche, the "father of Modernism" (the art of producing culture in a culture that makes little sense), was virtually the only philosopher who could face the ancient answer to his own day's troubled search for the wind. To be an initiate of "the gay science"---a knower of Life (in all its disorder and madness) who is happy---you had to learn to dance, no matter the pain. Like old Crete's Dionysos, half-man, half-divine:

      What is romanticism? Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life: they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers. First, those who suffer from the over-fullness of life---They want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic insight. And then [there are] those who suffer from the impoverishment of life, and seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anaesthesia, and madness. All [true] romanticism in art and insight corresponds to the dual needs of the latter type....He that is richest in the fullness of life, the Dionysian god and man, cannot only afford the sight of the terrible and questionable but even the terrible deed and any luxury of destruction, decomposition, and negation. In his case, what is evil, absurd and ugly seems, as it were, permissible, owing to an excess of procreating, fertilizing energies, that can still turn any desert into lush farmland. Conversely, those who suffer most and are poorest in life would need above all mildness, peacefulness, and goodness in thought as well as deed---if possible, also a god who would be truly a god for the sick, a healer and savior; also logic, the conceptual understandability of existence---for logic calms and gives confidence. In short, a certain warm narrowness that keeps away fear and encloses one in optimistic horizons....I ask in every instance, "Is it hunger or super-abundance that has here become creative?"...The desire for destruction, change, and becoming can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with future....but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy, because what exists, indeed all existence, outrages and provokes them....                                                                    (The Gay Science 328)

     We are all blessed "over-full" with Life: children of Kourotrophos. The question is what skills you'll receive, with which you yourself will meet those Powers.