Your History Book Got It All Wrong
About the Minoans, that is...
Snake Goddesses! They were everywhere in ancient Crete, right?
Wrong.
But they sure are everywhere in history books and online. It’s funny how easy it is to misrepresent an ancient culture, accidentally or on purpose, by framing certain objects as iconic.
They may be iconic to us, but they were practically unknown to the Minoans.
Those two Snake Goddess figurines above? The only two of that sort. There are exactly three others of a different style (ceramic bell jar figurines) that also have snakes.
Five. Out of everything the Minoans produced. Yet we think of the Snake Goddesses as encapsulating Minoan religion.
Why? Because they’ve been so enthusiastically publicized as representative of Minoan religion, even though they’re rarities.
You know what really represents Minoan religion? The hundreds and hundreds (maybe thousands by this point - I haven’t counted lately) of votive figurines the Minoans gave as offerings at the cave shrines and peak sanctuaries of their island. These terracotta and bronze figurines, of humans and livestock and even body parts (presumably offered as requests for healing) were a common part of Minoan religion, something everyone would have been familiar with.
But they’re not as exciting or flashy as figurines of women with writhing snakes.
Sir Arthur Evans needed to make an impression. He needed publicity. So he pushed the artifacts that got people’s attention. They were, not coincidentally, also the artifacts that supported his theories about the Minoans.
He made Snake Goddesses so popular that museums and private collectors clamored for Snake Goddess figurines. This resulted in a large number of forgeries. Evans’ own workshop in Knossos even made forgeries alongside their legitimate museum copies, just to keep up with the demand.
There are other issues as well, regarding the way Minoan art has been cherry-picked for “flash” and ended up misrepresenting Minoan religion and life. There are more details in today’s Minoan Path blog post: Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics… and Minoan Art.
Yeah, I could rant about this subject for days. I’ll rein myself in. Just be aware that this kind of skewing of what’s really there is very easy to do, with both ancient and modern cultures. So it always pays to look beyond the headlines and the short write-ups to find more information.
Real life doesn’t look like flashy PR or sound bites. It didn’t in the ancient world, either.
Hi Laura, I am understanding and I am reading Ariana's thread. I am enjoying it very much.
I have heard or red before and I don't remember where I heard it or where I read it. the archaeologists just through whatever they had together to make a goddess and added snakes and other desperate pieces that they felt would look good together but that's not necessarily what the minoan goddesses look like.. It's pretty interesting. It's also kind of depressing as I and I'm sure many other people love the snake goddess us as well as Ariande.
I have a question for you I love your Tarot deck and I could not find it on your website I can only find it on Amazon and there was only one left. It is on my list by so I'm hoping you're going to publish it again, could you let me know? thx.
Another question, kind of unrelated but when I Google you I get Laura Perry transgender woman. Just out of curiosity are you a transgender woman or they're just a lot of Laura Perry's?
I would love to see a 'reconstruction' of the Corridor of the Processions where they're playing who-horns from the Grinch.
I'm currently reading Ronald Hutton's Queens of the Wild, and it's amazing just how much 19th-century anthropologists invented without any evidence, influenced fiction writers, and became a large part of modern paganisms.