Note 259.1 — Chapter XIII · Babylonian, Anatolian, and Aegean Ritual.

Pursuing this phenomenon further afield, we come to the area of Minoan-Mycenaean culture. If the legend of the death of the Minotaur could be safely interpreted as arising from the periodic immolation of a bull-god, the idea that we are in quest of would be proved to belong to the Minoan Cretans; but the frescoes of Knossos present that event with such a gay and sporting entourage that one feels shy of forcing a solemn religious significance into it. More important for our purpose is the traditional Zeus-legend of Crete. It is generally felt to be alien to the genuine Hellenic tradition concerning their high god, as something adopted by the immigrant Hellenes from an earlier Eteocretan ritual and creed.259.1 We have a glimpse of a ritual in which the deity is born, is worshipped as an infant, and then as a boy—κοῦρος, as he is invoked in the new fragment of the hymn of the Kouretes—and especially as the son of a great mother, not as a mature independent personality. Again, there appears an orgiastic emotion and passion in the ritual that strikes a note in harmony with the Phrygian Kybele-Attis worship. The very early associations of Crete and the countries adjacent to the Troad are now being revealed by accumulating evidence, and may point to an affinity of stock. It may well have been, then, that the Minoan Cretans had their counterpart to Attis, a young god who was born and died periodically, whom they may have named Velchanos, the name of the young deity seen sitting under a tree on a Cretan coin of the fifth century. Though in age and character so unlike the Hellenic Zeus, we may suppose that the incoming Hellenes named him so because they found him the chief god of the island. We can also understand why the later Bacchic mystery flourished so fruitfully in Crete, if it found here already the ritual of a young god who died and rose again, and why in later times the inhabitants celebrated with such enthusiasm the Hilaria,259.2 the Easter festival of the resurrection of the Phrygian divinity.