Note 24.1 — Chapter II · THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD

Minoan-Mycenæan religion.—But any account of the Hellenic polytheism of the second millennium demands a critical study of the Minoan-Mycenæan religion as well, and before we can decide what part of the Homeric and later systems belongs to the aboriginal Aryan-Hellenic tradition, we must know what the northerners found indigenous in the lands that they conquered or occupied. We know now that they found in many centres a culture superior to their own and a religion of an advanced theistic type with elaborate, though mainly aniconic, ritual, devoted pre-eminently to a Great Goddess, by whose side a God was only the subordinate partner. It has been pointed out24.1 that where we find in historic Greece the Goddess-cult predominant, and especially the prevalence of a virgin-goddess, we should recognise the Minoan-Mycenæan tradition in antagonism to the ‘Aryan,’ the latter invariably maintaining the predominance of the God. We may therefore believe the cults of Artemis in Arcadia and Attica, of Athena in Attica, the cult—though not the name—of Hera in Argos24.2 and Samos, to have been inherited from the former rather than to have been brought in by the latter. And sometimes linguistic science will be able to assign the different personalities of the polytheism to its different ethnic strains, by determining the group of languages to which the divine name in question belongs. Those that can be explained with certainty or probability as of ‘Aryan’ or Indo-Germanic and may therefore be presumed to have penetrated Greece from the north, are Zeus, Hera, Ares, Demeter, Hestia, Dionysos, probably Poseidon and Apollo. On the other hand, ‘Athena,’ ‘Artemis,’ ‘Aphrodite,’ ‘Hephaistos’ defy explanation on these lines, and probably belong to a primitive Ægean language. We may be doubtful about ‘Hermes,’ though elsewhere I have argued for his ‘non-Hellenic’ origin. That philology has not yet brought us nearer to the solution of many of these problems is due to the lacunæ in our knowledge of the pre-Hellenic Mediterranean languages, and especially to our ignorance of the Minoan script for which we have masses of material but as yet no interpreter. Finally, the evidence of the early geographical area of a certain cult may sometimes be decisive in itself; this is the case in regard to the cults of the ‘Mother of the Gods’ and of Aphrodite, who are aboriginally connected with Crete and Cyprus respectively, that is, with the centres of the Minoan culture.