Fertility Goddess of Crete
The famous faience bare-breasted and proud Snake Goddess, seemingly a prevailing and beloved deity of the Minoans, pictured again and again in many female forms. As a priestess, as life giver, as the Lady of Nature and Animals, as receiver of worship of "adorants". She was the nature embodied herself. Caves were (and of course still are) her wombs - and tombs, where death was probably seen as a meaningful transition of the soul into the afterlife.
The ancient groves of sacred trees her original temples, twin-peaked mountains often related to the axis of some of the her nurturing breasts. The mythical labyrinth, an allegory of Crete's multitude of caverns reflected then in the palace complexes, being perhaps the analogy of the sinuous interior of female body as well as the meandering, nonlinear nature of the Life's Mystery.
She seemed to have stood for reverence for life - in all its wild beauty and natural processes and passion for self expression. Her image is trying to recreate and recall from the shadows of the past the sense of oneness with the benevolent universe. Goddess had started to teach about herself, giving a passion for her lore as it manifests not only here but also around the world.
Who was She? Why the Goddess? Does Spirit have a gender, and if we can personify the Essence and Intelligence of the universe, why the feminine? Goddess represents the mother-matter-matrix-like energy animating our world. She is the Spirit whose nature it is to embody and manifest itself. She reminds us of the sacredness and uniqueness of our day-to-day experience amongst human beings, animals, natural world, with its rhythms, birth, life cycles and transitions, death, its emotions, creativity and unknown mystery.
She is personified as feminine because She births all creation from within herself, from the un-manifested essence, which is her mythological Womb, and then she nurtures what she birthed, throughout its cycles, to finally take it back into her comforting body when its journey is over - humans, plants, thoughts, cultures, galaxies. The nature of the Goddess is growth, movement and transformation...interlaced with periods of dissolution, gestation and regeneration...and acceptance and understanding of these as part of life. What image of the divine could be more natural, organic and closer to our way of being so we can relate to it?
That is why the Minoan Goddess was perhaps worshiped like no other - because her people left us a wealth of record of her many forms and expressions. Someone cannot help feeling that she was not only revered by them but also truly loved and justifiably so, that she was their good deity.
The renowned archaeologist Marija Gimbutas researched the prehistoric Goddess culture of what she called "Old Europe" - the vast region covering area between UK a Scandinavian countries in the North, and Malta , Crete and Anatolia in the south.
"I do not believe, as many archaeologists of this generation seem to, that we shall never know the meaning of prehistoric art and religion. Yes, the scarcity of sources makes reconstruction difficult in most instances, but the religion of the early agricultural period of Europe and Anatolia is very richly documented. Tombs, temples, frescoes, reliefs, sculptures, figurines, pictorial paintings, and other sources need to be analyzed from the point of view of ideology. For this reason it is necessary to widen scope of descriptive archaeology into interdisciplinary research. For this work I rely heavily on comparative mythology, early historical sources, and linguistics as well as on folklore and historical ethnography."
"The main theme of Goddess symbolism is the mystery of birth and death and the renewal of life, not only human but all life on earth and indeed in cosmos. Symbols and images cluster around the parthenogenetic (self-regenerating) Goddess and her basic functions as Giver of Life, Wielder of Death, and, not less importantly, as Regeneratrix, and around the Earth Mother, the Fertility Goddess young and old, rising and dying with plant life. She was the single source of life who took her energy from the springs and wells, from the sun, moon and moist earth. This symbolic system represents cyclical, not liner, mythical time. In art this is manifested by the signs of dynamic motion: whirling and twisting spirals, winding and coiling snakes, circles, crescents, horns, sprouting seeds and shoots. The snake was a symbol of life energy and regeneration, a most benevolent, not an evil, creature. Even the colours had different meaning than in the Indo-European symbolic system. Black did not mean death or the underworld; it was the colour of fertility, the colour of damp caves and rich soil, of the womb of the Goddess where the life begins..."
(The language of the Goddess, M. Gimbutas)
