MYTHS OF CRETE & PRE-HELLENIC EUROPE
Skinwalker:
with the animal forms she assumed in season as the deity of fertility. There were serpents in her hair, a dove in one hand and a dolphin in the other, like the Demeter of the cave of Phigalia Withal, she was the standing-stone which was visited at certain phases of the moon by women who prayed for offspring. In the Scoto-Irish legend, the Cailleach, after the period of spring storms, transforms herself into "a gray stone looking over the sea". In India goats are sacrificed to the stone of the goddess Durga, which stands below a sacred tree. The legend of the birth of the Cretan Zeus is of special interest in this connection. Cronos swallowed a stone, believing it was Rhea's son, and it was afterwards set up as a sacred object at Delphi. The original Zeus was evidently worshipped as a stone pillar--the pillar which enclosed his spirit, or the spirit of his earthly representative, the priest-king.
Skinwalker:
The earliest form of the agricultural myth, judging from the Demeter-Persephone legend, appears to have been one in which goddesses only were concerned. All the ceremonies performed were based on the experiences of the sorrowing and wandering mother, the dark woman who concealed herself in a cave, and the abducted daughter condemned to pass part of the year in the Underworld.
Skinwalker:
It is possible that the Osirian legend, in which the daughter is displaced by the slain young god, came to Crete from Egypt by an indirect route-perhaps with a community of late invaders from Syria or Anatolia. After Osiris taught the Egyptians the art of agriculture he went abroad on a mission of civilization, and when he was slain, and set adrift in a chest, Isis voyaged to Byblus to recover his body. This may be a memory of the missionary enterprise of the Osirian cult. Minos, the Cretan king who resembles Osiris as an earthly king and lawgiver, became, like his prototype, a judge of the dead.
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Skinwalker:
His mother, Europé, a princess of Phœnicia, who was abducted by the Zeus bull, may have been a form of the cow Isis.
The Minotaur may have been a still more primitive form of Osiris. That god, as Apuatu, his earliest known form, was "the opener". He was therefore identical with the animal-headed Anubis. The mother of the Minotaur was Pasiphaë, the queen. Like the Egyptian Queen Isis, she appears to have had originally a cow form, which gave rise to the legend that Dædalus constructed for her the image of a cow, which she entered. The legend that the Minotaur was slain by Theseus may have displaced an earlier myth about the slaying of the corn-god in his bull form. In the Anpu-Bata Egyptian story the sacred bull is slain so that its spirit may enter its tree incarnation. The Apis bull was periodically sacrificed in early times.
Skinwalker:
Although human sacrifices were offered to the Minotaur--the victims, no doubt, of the bull-ring--that fact need not be urged against the identification of the bloodthirsty monster with Osiris. It is not improbable that the primitive Osiris was a bull-headed man like the Minotaur, which in one of the Cretan seal impressions is depicted seated on a throne below a tree conversing with a priest; its close resemblance to Anubis and Sebek is highly suggestive of Egyptian origin. 1 Professor Breasted has proved, from the evidence of the early Pyramid texts, that Osiris had at one time as unsavoury a reputation as the Cretan Minotaur. He calls him "a dangerous god", and adds: "The tradition of his [Osiris's] unfavourable character survived in vague reminiscences long centuries after he had gained wide popularity. At that time [the prehistoric period] the
p. 186
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