Children are brightly visible in ancient Crete; quite in contrast to the Achaian or Mycenean world, in which the young are almost always men marching. We need to question the familiar charge that "matriarchal" culture "erases the individual" in favor of the "hive." Among Native Americans, nothing could be further from the truth, yet the same was charged against them by their conquerors. The reality is closer to an equal respect for individuality (for the young never are just like the old) and the group. There is fine variation among individual faces in "Minoan" crowd-scenes and, in contrast to Egypt's and Middle Eastern art, virtually no two individuals look alike. The Cretan artist was typically too keen an observer for that.

     How did Crete "produce people" to carry the past into the future? Saining a baby---rituals to ward off malignant Keres (minor spirits or powers) and to attract benign ones---suggests that parents saw the child as "born connected" to the larger world of Earth, Ancestors and community. More evidence---thousands of tiny, exquisitely-carved "milk stones" still being passed down by women in modern times---testifies to weaning as a momentous passage for both child and parent. Most likely (scotioi above) boys and girls grew up together. We know they shared roles in each other's "matriculation" to adulthood and we see them later sharing sports and rituals. This is one of the great values of the careful pioneering work by Nanno Marinatos (see Art and Religion in Thera and Minoan Religion). With methods from comparison to logical deduction, she decodes the meanings of individual "Minoan" signs and then brings them together with semiotic insights to let us hear the symphony of what they produced in the real lives of this world:

     Granted the roles of these [Theran] figures in assisting the girls during initiation, it is still puzzling as to why it is males, rather than females, that have supporting functions in a puberty rite for girls. One explanation would be that the interaction smooths and facilitates contacts between the sexes at a period when the consciousness of sexual and role identity is most acute. By juxtaposing themselves to these males (who may well be relatives), the girls become most aware of their solidarity and social position as women. It is no accident that in African society, a "fruitful contest of the sexes" takes place during a girls' puberty rite. In the Theran case there is no contest but rather support: still, the reinforcement of one's image by a counterimage can be achieved even without competition.

      (Religion 211)

        Cretans, of course, love competition. It's fun and healthy all around, but it's not what "life" is about. Cretan men are manly as they come: hunters, mariners, military men, priests, artisans, farmers and laborers. Crete's women, besides all their other achievements and powers, shared in setting standards of their day in producing (not just wearing) jewelry, textiles, ointment-perfumes, eye-paint, a wide range of elegant hairstyles, diaphanous cloth, colorful short kilts and majestically "feminine" bell-skirts. There are many quite-androgynous beings in the Cretans' images of themselves, as well as men assuming women's ritual garments.

     If "history" had not intervened, we might respond to this today with a great "So what?" It took a long time to erase and forbid such flexibility---even in later Mycenean "Greece" we read of a female "Key Holder," a crucial go-between as people of the countryside hand over their produce. "This the priestess holds," proclaims a tablet, "and solemnly declares that the god has the possession, but the temple the true ownership of, [this] wheat."

     How children became the adult Cretans we know can never be wholly understood from books or archaeology. As you'll see below, these are still people who take their past seriously. Direct intimate observation is indispensable to judging other sources. The men grow up manly as can be. They also remain emotional, spontaneously generous and warm, spirited dancers and feared enemies. Their "rank" is utterly tied to their group's estimation from Ya-Ya (Grandmother) on down. They steal time-off to walk the market with a kid or two on each hand. Children safely walk the streets alone. You see them headed home from school arm in arm without anybody wondering. The women share a murderous wit and a vast decorum too often misunderstood as silence. In fact these are among their most effective means of influence. The proud Cretan struts so freely and his heart is light for all its depth because he knows who really decides what to do with the money, with the children's education, with this marriage or that cousin, with that field and this tree. In the honesty born of friendship and a few raki, many men say how glad they are of it. Anybody who thinks this is less than manhood, they say, can pound sand. Many have tried to change it; and nobody has ever really conquered Crete.

     The correspondence of religious and political ideology is not absolute. On the contrary, it can be shown that religion often emphasizes truths that society may suppress or conceal. Is it an accident that it is mostly in the male-dominated Catholic countries of the Southern Mediterranean and South America that The Virgin Mary, the mother,is most popular?" (Marinatos 192)

     It may not be accident, but it certainly is more complicated. For one thing, all ideologies---systems insistent on their own authority---"leak." In their protests (anthems, denigrations, tantrums, violence, erasures) we perceive the shape of the exceptions and opposites still both "out there," and within. Men "dominate" where, according to a cultural code like Mary's, women cannot. Where are these forbidden elements in "Cretan ideology"? Where do we see men exercise power over women, what kind of power is it? Where are the women in rebellion, where do they crave a category that scarcely exists---"the man's world"? (What we do see is rather the reverse!) Where is a trace of a punitive disciplinary mechanism for those who exceed the Cretan way?

     Those changes in burials speak a great deal. The difference in "late" times is that men begin to be buried with weapons and trophies---either to leave a warrior's memory or expecting more trouble beyond. Either way, while alive those men were changing what it meant to be a man. The Myceneans followed Crete out onto the international seas, planted colonies hard by Crete's, and in time no doubt began to undersell the Cretans for transport and military protection. Their trade itself hurt Cretan markets. Their myths tell of countless forced marriages of one kind or another. Their "literature" resents female deities, splits and trivializes them and insists on male gods such as Poseidon and an "immortal Zeus." How would a Cretan boy receive his kinsmen fresh off the sea with news of more Mycenean predatory raids among the island-cities---their favorite pastime? His healthiest protective instincts play straight into the cultural change with so many tragic consequences. He arms himself, in many ways. If he doesn't, he knows that other less brave people are. And he begins to hear even the poets mock on behalf of the new-style kings:

.You wights who take no pride to wield

The ash-wood spear and heavy shield,

I cast in a thrice on your marrow-bones

To call me king and lord.

     Cretan girls too face this needless challenge to their elders' ancient life. Those ways, going by the evidences, are accomodative. They always have been. But it cannot be easy to understand the strength behind Cretan tolerance as even the people of Cnossos build new shrines into The Labyrinth dedicated to immortal gods. They see their families' economic losses in that "real" secular world, and trust their traditions, and try to marry the strangers in. But with these men, blue-eyed blonds and red-beards, it doesn't work as it should to tie up the worst of their ways in social obligation.

     Instead, in the end by violence, they find themselves in over their heads. Self-blame cannot be far behind. The age of the vocal, proud-shouldered, confidently beaming Western woman begins to change.

The "Queen's Chamber" deep inside the Crossos Labyrinth. Note the change-in progress from spirals to more static sunflowers. A modern guide tells tourists, "The Queen wanted to change the wallpaper."

     The eruption of Thera devastates the entire Cretan realm, and makes every other problem grow. Their protective fleet gone virtually overnight, crop-failure and hunger rampant, the boys turn more toward war and "readiness for it." Women and leading councils try all they know to stem the cultural tide. And with ambitious pupils like the Achaians, every placation-strategy backfires. Before they know it the Cretans are no longer rulers in Achaian eyes. They become prey.

     As war-chariots, bigger horses and military men become an intrusive presence, Crete's clans appear to withdraw their "confidence" in the once-leading cultural centers. In Native America, too, the "knowledge elite" of sachems and shamans came to seem in some people's eyes to lack true powers that could deal with unprecedented challenge. Some Cretan histories suggest that the true end of Cnossos and other centers came from within---a civil war between Cretan conservatives and groups more cooperative with Achaian cultural change.

     We will probably never know for sure. Perhaps the Cretans lost this confidence; but they did not lose themselves, their continuity through this and many more crises.

     "The problem" between Crete and the mainland was not in Crete. Crete tried to marry them in like all others. The problem was the Achaians/Myceneans. Our books call Agamemnon and others "great kings." Why? The word as used denotes their power over "minor kings." Little more. It is time to recognize that The West (beyond its bloody history of empires) owes no "great" cultural debt to Homer's heroes. Not even admiring sources suggest a genuine concern with ethics or sensitivity to "outside others." The ancient presence of Cretan culture proves that these were choices and not inevitabilities based in ethnic ignorance. Beginning with childhood, Achaian identity was founded on difference (or more precisely, superiority). A "He" is "not a Her." "We have never mixed our blood with the Shore Folk," exults Theseus in Mary Renault's The King Must Die (as if everything needful to life is in our culture: the rest is booty). Manhood means protecting your sisters' virtue while sowing wild oats upon your neighbors' girls. Your own touch outside of monogamy makes them "whores."

     There are continuities on this side of the question too. Alexander carried Homer's tragic tale of Troy across the world. According to Graves, he "cut the Gordian Knot" to show not his wisdom-based right to govern but that the sword would rule henceforward. "Power" is something held alone. I rule, and you are with me or against me. I owe nobody anything. In fact, all envy my ways and "freedom," so conquest is actually beneficence. All depend upon my labor. Violence decides things. I am the sum of all I can steal or get away with. I live on as a name of fear and "glory."

     The most controversial aspect of Crete's "loss of confidence" is the incidence of human and child sacrifice. There seems no end to the crude, maudlin melodramas produced around this subject by hackademics, idiotic journalists and documentary-producers with "what the people want" (not) in mind.

     Human sacrifice is known in Crete for certain in two places and times: once around 1700 BCE at the inland site called Anemospilia, where severe earthquakes toppled the very building in which it took place. The other is a more recent find near Cnossos itself and appears to date from the last "critical" period. In the first find the "victim" was a young man. In the second it appears that children's bones were scraped clean of their flesh. This does not necessarily mean they were eaten, though "incorporation" was believed in many places to signify eternal life through direct nourishment of the group. It may only signify excarnation---the ritual removal of flesh as part of the generally-tender treatment of deceased persons' bones.

     The conquerors of Crete and its legions of later harpists made this---along with those untamed Cretan women---the heart of their propaganda: the "good moral reason," the "shocking depravity" that they only meant to set right. Here, let us try---through the words of Graves' novel Watch The North Wind Rise---to understand this rare event from within its own ethical world.