In Search of the Labyrinth

The Cultural Legacy of Minoan Crete

Nicoletta Momigliano

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350156708
• eBook ISBN: 9781350156715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: Social Sciences

Shortlisted for the European Association of Archaeologists 2023 book prize In Search of the Labyrinth explores the enduring cultural legacy of Minoan Crete by offering an overview of Minoan archaeology and modern responses to it in literature, the visual and performing arts, and other cultural practices. The focus is on the twentieth century, and on responses that involve a clear engagement with the material culture of Minoan Crete, not just with mythological narratives in Classical sources, as illustrated by the works of novelists, poets, avant-garde artists, couturiers, musicians, philosophers, architects, film directors, and even psychoanalysts – from Sigmund Freud and Marcel Proust to D.H. Lawrence, Cecil Day-Lewis, Oswald Spengler, Nikos Kazantzakis, Robert Graves, André Gide, Mary Renault, Christa Wolf, Don DeLillo, Rhea Galanaki, Léon Bakst, Marc Chagall, Mariano Fortuny, Robert Wise, Martin Heidegger, Karl Lagerfeld, and Harrison Birtwistle, among many others. The volume also explores the fascination with things Minoan in antiquity and in the present millennium: from Minoan-inspired motifs decorating pottery of the Greek Early Iron Age, to uses of the Minoans in twenty-first-century music, poetry, fashion, and other media.

1

Introduction: Desperately Seeking Ariadne – the Cultural Legacy of Minoan Crete¹

The Minoan civilization has been brought across the threshold of the western modern imagination, to become part of the familiar landscape of our minds, like the Hellenic and the Roman, only still with that mysterious and monstrous strangeness which lends to pre-Hellenic ages something of the dissolving, uneven quality of dreams. It is almost too much to take.

Rose Macaulay (1953: 112)

Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar.

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

Paul Klee (1920: 28)

On 1 March 1933 a new patient knocked on Sigmund Freud’s door at Berggasse 19 in Vienna: the bisexual imagist poet Hilda Doolittle, a.k.a. H.D.² This former fiancée of Ezra Pound, and wife of Richard Aldington, was about to start a course of treatment for her neurosis, in which Minoan Crete played no small part. After one of her sessions with Freud, H.D. wrote to her lover Bryher (the nom de plume of author and heiress Annie Winifred Ellerman):

We got to Crete yesterday. I went off the deep end, and we sobbed together over Greece in general. He [Freud] hasn’t one of the little Crete snake goddesses. I said ‘I will get you one.’ He said ‘ah … I doubt if even YOU could do that.’ Now my object in life will be to starve in an attic and get him a little goddess for his collection. He loves Crete almost more than anything and I had to tell him how we balanced there in rainbows last spring and I felt it was a promise and I would return. We are terribly en rapport and happy together. Do you happen to know how one would go about finding him a goddess? Would there be one in a private collection or are they very, very rare? Please let me know. Would you write Evans for me, he might like to know Freud has all his books, he might help one get one for Freud.³

H.D. never managed to present Freud with a Minoan ‘snake goddess’ (see Fig. 1.1).⁴ The Viennese psychoanalyst, however, provided his patient with a Minoan diagnosis. As shown by Cathy Gere, according to Freud’s controversial notion of inherited memory, H.D.’s neurosis, poetic obsession with Greek islands, Minoan Crete, and bisexuality were clear symptoms of her regression to a pre-Oedipal, mother-fixated stratum in her psyche, which, in turn, was linked to the Mother Goddess–matriarchal–Minoan stratum in the evolution of human psychic layers.⁵

Fig. 1.1 Knossos, ‘The Snake Goddess and her votaries’: Evans’s conjectural arrangement of her shrine (after Evans, 1903: fig. 63).

This Viennese episode is just one of numerous examples illustrating the considerable fascination that ‘Bronze Age’ or ‘Minoan’ Crete has exercised among a wide public since its discovery in the early twentieth century, in the wake of the spectacular excavations by Sir Arthur Evans and other archaeologists at sites such as Knossos and Phaistos. The French author Paul Morand, writing in the early 1960s, described this fascination as an obsession – a ‘Cretomania’ – that swept European cultural capitals, such as Vienna, Munich, and Paris: ‘Cretan and Mycenaean arts and all their decorative elements came to shake Viennese art, to animate the official art of Munich in 1905, and also the art of the first painters who worked for Diaghilev [Ballets Russes] … This Cretomania was to last until 1914.’⁶ One might even adapt Rose Macaulay’s words quoted in this chapter’s epigraph, and suggest that Cretomania was part and parcel of the Minoans’ becoming ‘part of the familiar landscapes of our minds’, while also representing something strange, disturbing, and ‘almost too much to take’.

The period 1900–14 – Morand’s age of Cretomania – coincides with the latter part of what Lesley Fitton has aptly called the ‘Heroic Age of Excavation’ of the Aegean Bronze Age, starting with Heinrich Schliemann’s discoveries at Troy in 1870 and ending with the First World War.⁷ The years 1900–14 could be seen as the ‘Heroic Age’ of Cretomania too, but as I illustrate in this work some obsessions with the Minoan past can be found even in antiquity, while Morand’s Cretomania arguably increased after the First World War, has lasted into our present, and is not limited to the fine arts, as it occurs in a wide variety of different cultural forms and practices.

The persistence of Cretomania after the Belle Époque is partly due to new spectacular discoveries in the field that captured the public imagination, such as the new series of excavations conducted by Evans and others on Crete in the 1920s and 1930s; the decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the early 1950s; the spectacular finds by Spyridon Marinatos at Akrotiri on Thera (Santorini), the Pompeii of the Aegean, in the late 1960s and early 1970s; and the gruesome discoveries by Efi and Yannis Sakellarakis at Anemospilia, and by Peter Warren at Knossos, in 1979, hinting at Minoan human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism. But the continuing fascination with Minoan Crete is also due to the desire that every generation has to rewrite history, to provide new meanings and responses to the Minoan past, and to find in it the cultural legacy it looks for.

This legacy is not limited to what the inhabitants of Bronze Age Crete left to Mycenaean Greece and, via Mycenaean Greece, to Classical Greece and hence Europe in terms of material and non-material culture, from religion to language. This legacy also includes the dreams, desires, and creativity that the Minoan past has inspired since antiquity, and especially since the early twentieth century AD. In fact, I should like to suggest that the most significant and enduring Minoan cultural legacy largely rests upon the long chain of its interpretations and receptions, both within and beyond recondite archaeological research.⁸ After all, the label ‘Minoan Crete’ does not simply refer to what happened on that island in the third and second millennia BC – the current canonical chronology of its ‘Bronze’ or ‘Minoan Age’. Minoan Crete is largely a modern construct – the product of centuries of scholarship, interpretations, reconstructions, and modern responses to this Bronze Age past. These are all steeped in interpretative traditions, which are not exclusively related to archaeology and its practice, but encompass other fields, from anthropology to sociology, gender studies, and art history. Whether it is the iconic ‘snake goddess’ figurines or the amazing ‘Palace of Minos’ at Knossos with its famous Minoan frescoes, these material remains are the products of Minoan or Bronze Age Crete, but have also acquired multiple layers of meaning throughout their life.⁹ They were produced in the past, but are also simultaneously part of our present, and are understood within it: to recognize this constant, two-directional, and ever-changing dialogue between past and present is a first step towards a deeper understanding of both.¹⁰ It is often impossible to create a clear-cut distinction between ancient objects on the one hand and people’s ideas about them on the other, and least of all in connection with the place of Minoan Crete in the modern imagination – both are products of complex webs of entanglements.¹¹ For example, the faience statuettes of the ‘snake goddess’ and her votaries from the Temple Repositories at Knossos (see Fig. 1.1), which for Evans were symbols of the Great Minoan Mother Goddess and precursors of the Virgin Mary,¹² in other contexts have represented the Oriental and alluring nature of Minoan culture, full of sexual promise, or the simultaneous antiquity and modernity of Minoan culture, its feminine or even matriarchal/matrilineal character, symbolic of a happier past and hope for a happier future, especially for women (see Fig. 1.2). Similarly, the Knossos ‘palace’, from a possible ceremonial centre or ‘temple-palace’,¹³ has become the labyrinth of King Minos of Classical sources, a lieu de mémoire (realm of memory) for both ancient and modern societies,¹⁴ a Cretan ‘Acropolis’,¹⁵ and something resembling what the French philosopher Michel Foucalt has called a ‘heterotopia’: a place that, unlike utopias and dystopias, has a physical presence and reflects but also distorts reality.¹⁶ In fact, one might argue that Minoan Crete (and, by extension, the Minoans and their legacy) can be seen as a heterotopia: a real place that has been used as a mirror for modern societies and individuals, linking past, present, and future.

As will be clear ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Desperately Seeking Ariadne – the Cultural Legacy of Minoan Crete
• 2 Sons of Europa: From Medical Remedies for Constipation to Bestiality, Sexually Transmitted Death, and the Dawn of the ‘Minoan Age’ (from Antiquity to the Mid-Nineteenth Century)
• 3 Rediscovering European Origins: Ariadne as the Great Mother Goddess (Mid-Nineteenth Century–First World War)
• 4 Minoans and the World Wars (c. 1915–49): The Aryan Revenge
• 5 The Minoans in the Cold War and Swinging Sixties: From the End of the Greek Civil War to the End of the Colonels’ Dictatorship (c. 1949–74)
• 6 Minoan Paradises Lost and Regained: From Cannibalism to Postmodernism (c. 1975–99)
• 7 Minoan Cultural Legacies: Every Age Has the Minoans It Deserves and Desires
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright