The famous goddess is partly modern
The two “Snake Goddesses” in Heraklion are the best-known images of Minoan religion. They are made of faience, a glazed ceramic material, painted, with the parts made in moulds and joined with wire. The taller one (33.8 cm) has snakes coiling round her body and a tall headdress; the smaller one (29 cm) holds snakes in her hands. They belong to a group of six or seven similar figures used in the Central Palace Sanctuary in the west wing of Knossos. After a destruction around 1600 BCE, the objects were buried as sacred relics in stone-lined pits, the so-called Temple Repositories, found by Arthur Evans. The museum calls them goddesses or priestesses: the label is open.
How much of them is ancient? Less than it looks. The smaller figure was found without its head and part of the left arm. According to the art historian Senta German, the Danish artist Halvor Bagge, working with Evans, made the matching arm and snake, the head, and placed the hat and the cat on top, details that have no parallel in any other image of a Bronze Age woman. The taller figure was mended from very many fragments and restored on most of the skirt.
Across the Atlantic the problem is sharper. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston owns an ivory and gold “snake goddess”, 16.1 cm high, bought in 1914 with no record of where it came from. Its label gives two dates: “about 1600-1500 B.C. or early 20th century”. Some experts find the face too modern and the hips too narrow, and scientific tests have proved inconclusive. Real or fake? Unresolved.
Where did the Minoans worship?
In many places. The palaces were centres of ritual, but, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes, major religious activities also took place in the countryside, at caves, springs and peak sanctuaries, that is, open-air shrines on mountain tops. At Malia, a pillar crypt next to the grand staircase is described by the Greek Ministry of Culture as a room of religious character.
The most disturbing site is Anemospilia, in the province of Heraklion. It is a rectangular building with three narrow rooms opening onto a long corridor, used for only about half a century and destroyed by an earthquake in the middle of the seventeenth century BCE. In the central room the excavators found a xoanon, a cult statue of the deity; in the west room, by the altar, what the excavator, Yannis Sakellarakis, interpreted as the first known human sacrifice of the Minoan world. The Ministry of Culture reports the interpretation as his, and it remains one reading of a single, unusual find.
Horns, axes, trees and birds
Some signs mark a place as sacred again and again. The most common are the stone horns that archaeologists call “horns of consecration”: a pair from Gournia is 36 cm high, while those found at Knossos and at the peak sanctuary of Mount Juktas were about two metres tall. They crowned buildings of religious importance, as frescoes, seals and rings show, and smaller ones stood in indoor shrines.
The clearest picture of a Minoan religious scene is on a gold signet ring, the so-called Ring of Minos (1500-1400 BCE), found in 1928 near the Temple Tomb of Knossos. Its authenticity was doubted at first; today scholars accept it as genuine. On its oval bezel a woman shakes a tree growing out of a shrine, a kneeling man pulls a branch and offers a fruit to a seated goddess, a small figure floats down from the sky, and below, a goddess sails in a boat carrying an altar crowned with horns. The Heraklion museum reads it as the goddess appearing in the sky, on land and at sea.
Rituals in pictures
Stone vases show the ceremonies themselves. On the Harvester Vase from Hagia Triada (1500-1450 BCE), men carrying harvesting tools walk and sing to the rattle of a sistrum, an instrument inspired by Egyptian ones; one turns round and laughs at a man who has fallen. The vase is a rhyton, a vessel with holes for pouring liquid offerings, like the stone bull’s head from Knossos, filled through a hole in the neck and emptied through the mouth. The same animal appears in the arena with the bull-leapers.
The richest scene is on the sarcophagus of Hagia Triada, a chest of poros stone 130 cm long, covered with plaster and painted like a fresco around 1370-1320 BCE, in the Mycenaean era of Crete. On one side, priestesses pour libations into a tub between two poles topped by double axes, while a procession of men brings the dead man models of animals and a boat. On the other, a bull is sacrificed, offerings are made at an altar in front of a shrine with a sacred tree, music plays, and birds signal the presence of the goddess. On the ends, figures ride in chariots drawn by wild goats and griffins.
After the palaces: goddesses with raised arms
In the centuries after the palaces, the evidence comes from shrines in the villages. From the thirteenth century BCE, clay figures of women with both arms raised (perhaps a gesture of prayer, greeting or blessing) stood in communal sanctuaries. At Karphi one of them reaches 86 cm and wears a diadem with birds; at Gazi, the “Poppy Goddess” wears poppy seed heads, probably the sign of a goddess with healing and soothing powers.
What we cannot read
Why so many question marks? Because the Minoans wrote their prayers in a script nobody can read. Linear A appears on stone libation tables and miniature double axes, so we know that words were part of the rites, but not what they said. Only later, when Mycenaean scribes at Knossos wrote in Greek, do titles of divinities appear, such as a “Mistress of the Labyrinth” who received honey, and from there the story continues with the gods of later Greece. For the Minoans themselves, we can describe the gestures, the places and the symbols with some precision. Their beliefs remain, for now, a reconstruction.
Where to see it
Almost all these objects are in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum: the snake goddesses and the bull’s-head rhyton in the galleries of palace cult, the Harvester Vase with the objects of domestic and open-air cult, the Karphi goddesses with the shrines of the Postpalatial period and the Hagia Triada sarcophagus with the painted coffins. The Boston ivory figure is not on display. Check the museum’s rooms and opening times before you go.
Sources
- Heraklion Archaeological Museum: “Snake Goddess figurines” (Υ63, Υ65), “Stone horns of consecration” (Λ563), “The Ring of Minos”, “Harvester Vase” (Λ184), “Stone bull’s-head rhyton” (Λ1368), “Agia Triada Sarcophagus” (Λ396), “Figure of goddess with upraised arms” (Π11043).
- S. German, “Snake Goddess”, Smarthistory.
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “Statuette of a snake goddess” (14.863).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Minoan Crete”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (2002).
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Odysseus portal: “Anemospilia”, “Malia”.
- G. Owens, “The Labyrinth”, Daidalika, Hellenic Mediterranean University (KN Gg 702).
