MYTHS OF CRETE & PRE-HELLENIC EUROPE
Skinwalker:
Divine Pelasgus on the tree-clad hills
Black earth brought forth, to be of mortal race.
"And Pelasgus", he proceeds, "when he became king contrived huts that men should be free from cold and rain, and not be exposed to the fierce sun, and also garments made of the hides of pigs, such as the poor now use in Eubœa and Phocis. He was the inventor of these comforts. He, too, taught people to abstain from green leaves and grass and roots that were not good to eat, some even deadly to those who eat them. He discovered also that the fruit of some trees was good, especially acorns." 2
Skinwalker:
A similar legend is related by Plato regarding the patriarch of his Lost Atlantis. He states that on the hill above the palace (Knossos) lived "one of those men who in primitive times sprang from the earth, by name Evenor. His wife was Leucippe. They had only one daughter, named Clito". Clito became the wife of Poseidon, and the ancestress of all the tribes. 3
Skinwalker:
Minos, like Pelasgus, was evidently a semi-divine patriarch. Sir Arthur Evans shows that the "tomb of Zeus" was at one time called the "tomb of Minos". This "seems to record a true religious process", he says, "by which the cult of Minos passed into that of Zeus". 4
Probably the legend of the birth of Minos was appropriated
p. 188
Skinwalker:
by the Zeus cult. The child was suckled, according to one legend, by a sow, and to another by a goat--totemic animals, perhaps, from whom the food-supply was received. A Knossos seal impression depicts a child suckled by a horned sheep. Sir Arthur Evans refers, in this connection, to the legends of the son of Akakallis, daughter of Minos, being suckled by a ****; of Miletos, "the mythical founder of the Cretan city of that name", being nursed by wolves; and of the fabled suckling of the Roman twins by a she-wolf. "There is", he says, "some interesting evidence of a cumulative nature, which shows that Rome itself was indebted to prehistoric Greece for some of the oldest elements in her religion." 1 The Indian heroine, Shakuntala, was guarded at birth by vultures, as Semiramis was by doves, while the eagle protected Gilgamesh and the Persian patriarch Akhamanish. In Egypt Horus was nourished and concealed by the serpent-goddess Uazit.
Skinwalker:
All the eponymous heroes had probably animal forms at the earliest period. Serpents figure prominently in the winged disk of Horus, suggesting the fusion of the falcon and serpent clans of Egypt. The young god was usually depicted with a falcon's head and a human body, and he was an eponymous ancestor. In the bull-headed Minotaur, therefore, it would appear that we have a survival of an early form of a Cretan Osiris or Horus, the link between the bestial deity and human beings.
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