MINOAN WORSHIP. Discoveries in Crete and other centres of the Minoan-Mycenaean culture have furnished certain facts about the Minoan worship. According to L. R. Farnell, " the most striking figure in the Minoan worship was a great goddess, conceived mainly as a mother but here and there al-so as virginal, imagined as a mountain goddess, whose familiar animals were the lion and the snake, and ethnically related to the Phrygian Cybele and the ancestress of the Cretan Rhea and probably of some Hellenic goddesses. By her side is sometimes represented a youthful deity imagined prob ably as her lover or son. We discern also the figure of a sky-god, armed and descending through the air." But the predominant and immemorial cult seems to have been that of the goddess. " The Minoan imagination of the divinity was clearly anthropomorphic. but probably admitted the idea that it might occasionally be embodied in animal form; that is to say, the anthropomorphism was not yet stable." The divine ancestor would seem
to have been worshipped. " As regards the ritual of this period, the famous sarcophagus found at Hagia Triads reveals a ceremony of blood-offering, in which the blood of the sacred ox is first caught in a receptacle. and then poured on an altar; we may take this as evidence of the idea of a mystic potency inherent in the blood of the victim." Four of the worshippers are represented as wearing the skin of the sacrificed ox. Another feature of Minoan worship is " a communion-service in which the mortal was absorbed into the divine nature by the simu lated fiction of a holy marriage." See L. R. Farnell, Greek Religion, 1912; D. A. Mackenzie, Myths of Crete.