This little figure and the one on the introduction to this blog were found by Arthur Evans in Knossos, Crete, in 1903. As with other archeological finds from pre-literate times, these two figures raise questions. Often referred to as Snake Goddesses, we can’t know their full significance to the culture or artists who produced them. Are they images of deities, priestesses, or perhaps votive offerings? Neither was found whole, and today most believe the cat on the head of the first one was a later addition.
Evans’s interpretation was influenced by Johann Jakob Bachofen’s 1861 study, Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World. At Knossos he finds persuasive evidence of a female-centered religion and matriarchal society predating the Olympian pantheon we know from Homer’s epics.
What adds to the mystery of Knossos is the civilization Evans uncovered, extensive and previously unknown, its art full of flowers, exuberance, and nature and possessing written artifacts. Hieroglyphics, Proto-Linear, Linear A and Linear B scripts have been found there. Minoans weren’t pre-literate after all, though little can yet be translated. Ongoing excavations through the twentieth century revealed the matriarchal system began to break down as war-like Indo-Europeans invaded. But fortunately they didn’t destroy what they conquered, preserving the handsome buildings and frescoes of images from nature and beautiful women with black curls, kohl-lined eyes, and gowns utterly unlike those associated with later Greece (though similar images have been found in pre-Hellenic Mycenae).
Chief among the female images at Knossos were these little statues of serpent women. They echo the prevalence of serpents in myth and religion, often associated with female figures, across the early world. In Crete they appear to date back to the immigrants who arrived from Anatolia in approximately 6000 BCE with their Goddess religion and agrarian knowledge. Over the next centuries Minoans developed such arts as pottery, weaving, metallurgy, jewelry making, and architecture. For eons, Crete appears to have been ruled by a woman, the Goddess embodied, to whom tribute was paid.
Scholars have concluded that this island of beauty and grace had a more equitable distribution of wealth than other high civilizations of the era, with no evidence of poor dwellings contrasted with grand monuments to power. Nor did developments serve the few rather than the many, such as sanitation and drainage, irrigation, reservoirs, and roads, available to all. Archeologists excavating Crete found no evidence of war. When the Myceneans invaded they adopted rather than destroyed the underpinnings of Minoan civilization.
Erich Neumann’s The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1951, translated into English in 1955, inspired many studies of the Goddess, reflections, poems, and novels in subsequent years. Taking into account Neumann and Bachofen’s thought, along with recent archeology and perspectives, writers envisioned past female-centered religion during our era of feminism and anti-war sentiment. A civilization devoted to beauty and love with no signs of powerful kings or warfare and honoring the primal female force inspired scholars and writers both female and male.
Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths was first published in two volumes in 1955, more recently in the combined edition of 1992. His introduction discusses ancient mother goddess religion, and the book itself has intriguing structure. Each roughly chronological entry tells its story with a lower-case letter marking each paragraph, followed by footnotes. Then comes a section of numbered paragraphs connecting details of the myth to archaic, often matriarchal roots.
As my previous post mentions, myths came down through the oral tradition, often varying with location. By the time Homer wrote his epics and Hesiod his Theogony, everyone knew the stories from those centuries of recitation. However, the Homeric gods are not the only versions of the Olympic pantheon or its predecessors. Notably, Homer doesn’t mention Demeter nor Hestia, except the latter as goddess of the hearth to whom the drops of libation are poured. These two are all who remain in Homer’s Achaea of the earlier dominant goddesses overpowered by Zeus, Apollo, and Athena, born not of a female but burst fully armed from Zeus’ forehead. Indeed, the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter persisted into Roman times. Plato was an initiate. Queen Hera was reduced to the jealous, vengeful wife of Zeus, but the Earth Mother Demeter’s preeminence survived.
Back to the Minoan figures with their snakes: serpents have long been associated with the Mother goddess and fertility, as is the knowledge and wisdom they represent. (No surprise there’s a serpent in Eden.) Predating the Hebrew Bible is the story of Apollo slaying Great Mother’s Python and taking over the oracle of Delphi for himself. Thus did patriarchal gods supplant ancient goddess worship, a shift from matriarchal society and religion to patriarchal. One of these Minoan women holds a snake in each hand and with the other, above, they coil around her arms and skirt. They have tamed these snakes, now their totems not only personal but perhaps of Minoan religion.
Good sources for ancient goddess worship and matriarchy, most with bibliographies for further exploration: Merlin Stone: When God was a Woman; Raine Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade; Nor Hall, The Moon and the Version; Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur, and Charlene Spretnak, Loss Goddesses of Early Greece—among many others. Reading these books long ago stimulated my novelist’s imagination.