Note 69.1 — Chapter IV · Anthropomorphism and Theriomorphism in Asia Minor and the Mediterranean.

Looking now directly to the Minoan-Mycenaean monuments, before we consider the early Hellenic records, we must distinguish between those that are obviously cult-scenes and those that are not obviously but only hypothetically so, and this second class are those with which Mr. Cook’s papers mainly deal. The former have been treated masterfully by Sir Arthur Evans in his paper on “Tree and Pillar Cult”; from these we gather that the worshipper did not usually pray before an idol, but before a pillar or a sacred tree combined often with horns of consecration or an axe; also that he imagined his deity generally in human form, the pillar serving as a spiritual conductor to draw down the divinity from heaven. Therefore I may remark that the phrase “pillar-cult” here, and in Miss Harrison’s paper quoted above, does not express the inwardness of the facts. But the latter writer endeavours to prove the prevalence of a direct cult of birds in this period; and further maintains the dogma that “in the days of pillar and bird anthropomorphism was not yet.” The Minoan monuments on which she relies are the great Phaistos sarcophagus, the trinity of terra-cotta pillars surmounted by doves found in an early shrine of the Palace of Knossos,69.1 with which are to be compared the dove-shrine of Mycenae and the gold-leafed goddesses of Mycenae with a dove perched on their heads; and finally, the semi-aniconic idol of a dove goddess, with the dove on her head and her arms outspread like wings, found in another shrine of the palace of Knossos, and descending from a pre-Mycenaean traditional type.70.1 Whatever we may think of these monuments, they cannot be quoted as the memorials of a time “when anthropomorphism was not yet”; for the earliest of them, probably that mentioned last, is of later date than the type of the naked human-formed goddess of the Neolithic Aegean period.