The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  So for Wunderlich, Knossos was not the seat of Cretan kings—as Evans would have it and as everyone repeats after him—but a palace of the dead, an enormous cemetery. What we know about the life of the Minoans, just as in the case of the Etruscans, is not the testimony of their ports and cities pulsing with life (conquered and rebuilt by invaders anyway)—but quiet lagoons of death, expansive necropolises, spaces populated by ghosts, tombs more enduring than the houses of the living.

  Wunderlich was struck by the flimsiness of the material used to build Knossos. Wooden columns, thin walls, plaster, and stairs laid out in alabaster were more fit for the barefoot processions of the bearers of sacrifice. In addition to that, the rooms are small, often windowless, even if Evans provided them with various names suggesting royal splendor. The Throne Hall, for example, can barely hold twenty people. Hence the idea that they were crypts rather than living quarters.

  Although Evans allocated space in his reconstruction for a “household sector,” it is astonishingly modest in relation to the vast palace and does not have a sufficient number of buildings suited for use as workshops, kitchens, or stables.

  The sanitary system, which is the general delight of tour groups, the traces of sewer installations and water pipes, may have had an entirely different function than was thought. The huge meter and a half high pithoi—were they really, as Evans claimed, receptacles for olive oil, if the remains of bones were found in them? And were the bathtubs decorated with floral ornamentation not rather sarcophaguses?

  Crete the mysterious, its lips and eyes firmly shut, defends itself.

  A seismic island, often suffering the wrath of Poseidon, an island of uncertain and unsteady hypotheses.

  V

  It is truly the first white civilization; but also like the lagoon of the Maori world, changing in the sun; we cannot bring the Iliad or even the Odyssey into relation to these courtly entertainments in which naked princes with ostrich feathers in their hair lowered their spears before a Phaedra with bare breasts…

  ANDRÉ MALRAUX

  WHAT IS MOST STRIKING in Minoan civilization and to my sense brings it close to the Etruscan is the absence of marks of pompous magnificence, majesty, forbidding power, such as emanate from the monuments of Egypt or Assyria—pyramids, a menacing Sphinx, stone tablets on which is written the revenge of the king of kings.

  Moreover, not a single portrait of a ruler survives from whose terrifying features, hieratic pose or huge size, overwhelming everything and everyone, we might read the insanity and atrocity of those times. It seems the kings of Crete ruled benignly and departed to their gods stealthily, with a tact and discretion rare in rulers. But perhaps this is our delusion, caused by the need to believe in a golden age, in the innocent childhood of humanity.

  It is best to go to Crete straight from Mycenae. This is not a rule based on a transport schedule, the places are not even directly connected, but if we closed our eyes in Mycenae and opened them in Knossos, we would feel a shock and would understand the essential difference in style and spirit of these two centers of Mediterranean culture.

  It is a point well known from art history textbooks, but confirming it with one’s own eyes has an incontrovertible force of revelation.

  The centerpoint of the Mycenean palace is the megaron—a hall separated off, quite dark and not very big, just right for the king and his leaders to meet in conference before a pillaging expedition. The most characteristic feature of this architectural ensemble is the impossibility of building outward and being cramped, closed into the tight armor of walls. A habitat deep rather than spacious, as if modeled on a cave, and with only one not very wide entrance that can easily be slammed in the face of uninvited guests. The roofs of the buildings have double slopes and were evidently dragged here from a land of mist and rain. In a word, a vast castle reminiscent in atmosphere of the medieval fortresses with their precipice-like casemates.

  How different is the royal palace at Knossos, with its great number of halls and rooms grouped around a central courtyard; an enormous architectural complex, almost a city—not protected by any walls (which prompted surprise and admiration)—quite open to the air and sun. It gave me the impression of a honeycomb, because it could be enlarged at will, a “blossoming system” if you like, and at the same time its “organic” quality was based on its being rooted perfectly in the terrain, on the natural use of elevations and declivities. Terraces lovely as cascades of water run down the hillside.

  This architecture is picturesque almost to the point of theatricality, more reminiscent of the layered decorations of some great opera hall than of a seat of kings, a lofty throne made of boulders, a building from which gravity and strength should emanate. This general impression is so irresistible and insistent that it makes one wonder what its origins and causes are.

  Above all the building material is light, fragile, making gargantuan constructions impossible. There is no trace here of the Cyclopean walls that characterize Mycenean building. The walls made of small stones joined with mortar are thin, wooden columns and frescoes transform the rough surfaces into colorful curtains.

  But neither the kind of building material nor the presence of painting explains it all. I think the impression of theatricality comes from the Minoan builders’ artistic assumptions, from their aesthetics. This would explain the many layers, the variability of spacial rhythms, the large number of stairs, windows the light fell through, and the surprising perspectives. It is a dynamic, capricious architecture that mocks monumentality. Let us add the unprecedented comfort, the bathrooms, the water supply system one looks for in vain in Italian or French castles three thousand years later. You want to say this is not a place of grim power and cruelty but of innocent intrigues and coquetry.

  This is the impression one has, and many pages have been written in honor of this first European civilization, which was said to be suffused with happiness, peace, and joy. But we, the children of skepticism, know too much about the lies of art that gloss over reality so that dolphin frescoes, flowers, and goddesses with human smiles can lull us and dull our vigilance.

  It is remarkable, however, that not architecture nor frescoes (leaving aside even the clumsy reconstructions), nor sculpture—although in fact there is no monumental sculpture—are crucial to the greatness of Cretan art, but little figurines of faience and clay, revelatory ceramics, engraved half-precious stones, stamps and jewelry, as if life on Minos’s island had been a game, a somewhat shallow amusement, superficial, carefree, devoid of ecstasy, passion, and suffering.

  The British scholar and expert on Crete, Moses I. Finley, writes: “There is a paradox here6: as far as mobilizing people and materials was concerned, the palace’s builders worked on a grand scale, while everything else was on a small scale, both materially and emotionally. It seems neither religion nor royal power demanded anything more. One also has the impression that by the beginning of the middle period, life, in the sense of institutions and ideology, was stabilized, found an equilibrium that did not waver for 500 or 600 years. Those were years of security from every point of view, passive security, and nothing provoked any change or rebellion. From that time we date the significant improvement of technology, a growing population, palaces constantly enlarged, but all this took place along what might be called a horizontal line.

  “And suddenly came the great natural catastrophe around 1400 B.C.—and virtually from one day to the next the palaces of Crete were turned into ruins, and for good. We know nothing of the details of the catastrophe; the Linear B tablets that date from that exact time say nothing about it. But the ruins are the sufficient and undeniable proof: no one managed to mobilize this small people again and govern it, as the old kings had for 600 long years.”

  The best known Greek legend connected to Crete is the story of the Minotaur. Let us recall it in the briefest form. The mighty king Minos received a fine bull as a gift from Poseidon. The king’s wanton wife seduced the bull. From this coupling the Minotaur was born,
a monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man. To hide his shame, King Minos ordered Daedalus to build a labyrinth. Every nine years the Athenians, then under Cretan rule, sent a sacrifice of seven girls and seven boys from their best families. And the Minotaur made a tasty meal of Athenian youth.

  Theseus, the son of the Athenian king, was sent to Crete with this grim offering. Having arrived there he seduced Minos’s daughter Ariadne. With the aid of her spool of thread he entered the labyrinth and killed the Minotaur, and after that he sailed off to his native city with Ariadne—unpursued by Minos.

  The legend of Theseus can be interpreted in many ways, like all legends that weld a folk tale to a religious myth. Its hero personifies a typical Greek admiration for cleverness—or intelligence—triumphant over dark forces, the victory of rational order over chaos. Some find in this tale a transfiguration of historical facts, namely the process of Athens liberating itself from Cretan rule. In such an interpretation Theseus advances to the role of liberator, political hero, leader of an Athenian revolt that freed his country from the alien yoke.

  It is a Greek legend, anti-Cretan and like everything that is only “anti,” injurious. After all, even in the Hellenic tradition Minos was a symbol of justice, not cruelty, and after his death the gods made him one of the judges in the shadowy world of Hades.

  In Cretan iconography there is no image of the Minotaur, but the bull is omnipresent, though never presented as an ominous monster; on the contrary, it was more a victim (on the famous sarcophagus from Hagia Triada) or an animal appearing in games, contests, and festivities (the fresco in the Knossos palace showing the bloodless tauromachia).

  Nor does Greek art portray the Minotaur as a repulsive beast or one arousing fear and trembling. I remember clearly a beautiful amphora, in the Attic style with black figures, which represents the unequal battle of Theseus with the beast: an easy victory for man. The Minotaur is on its knees. Theseus has his left arm around his opponent’s neck in a predatory gesture; his right hand is driving a short sword into its neck. The Minotaur is handsome and defenseless. He has the well-shaped body of a young man with a bull’s head. A braid of blood falls from the nape of his neck to the ground.

  Poor Minotaur! From my earliest childhood I felt more tenderness for him than for Theseus, Daedalus, or any other sly-boots. When my father told me the tale for the first time I felt a painful ache in my heart and compassion for the half-beast half-man trapped in the labyrinth and in an alien human history full of cunning and axes.

  Maciu probably had something to do with it, Maciu my private Minotaur, who lived under the stairs leading to the cellar and to whom I made sacrifices from my curbed gluttony—chocolates and sweets, useless as processions and bells. For him I had to transgress against a severe parental taboo, a ban on contact with animals, the carriers of germs. But isn’t it a greater disease, even a deformity, to tame the feeling of honor and submission to an unknown will that has been rooted in us from palaeolithic times? I owe it to Maciu that my later reading of the mystics did not completely baffle me; he was inaccessible to me, filled with an alien life, only seldom did a purr answer my litany of love, my impassioned acts of worship; he looked down impassively from the height of his feline divinity.

  But returning to our subject—can we even speak of the history of ancient Crete if we lack written sources beyond the scanty information passed down by the Greeks or Egyptians? Only material traces bear witness to this long history—ruins of houses and palaces, ceramics, frescoes, burnt clay statuettes, sarcophagi. We don’t even know the names of the kings of the Minoan dynasty, we know nothing of the wars they waged or the colonies they probably founded on neighboring islands. The homeland of Phaedra, Ariadne, the Minotaur, Androgeos, the cradle of Zeus—an island favored by mythology—keeps a demure silence on its earthly political and social history.

  The decipherment of Linear B script did not throw much light on the history of Crete or its inhabitants. In fact, the brilliant discovery of Chadwick and Ventris—that scaling of the Mount Everest of Greek archaeology, as they say—yielded an important confirmation of the conquest of Crete by the Greeks, but the rest is a monotonous inventory of objects, as if the script had been invented for accountants, not for poets, prophets, or royal chroniclers.

  Did the Minoans have their aoides, Homers and epics, did they have a literature? It may have been written on transient material—papyrus or bark—and the fires that burnt the palaces may have consumed it for good. The frescoes, stamps, and gems portray priests, singers, musicians, but not one of the known iconographic documents preserves a portrait of a troubadour or even a scribe.

  Much has been written on Minoan religion, for nothing inflames the imaginations of researchers more than a lack of documentation and indisputable evidence. Scholars of religion—those poets of the humanities—often succumb to magical thinking, whose characteristic mark is the conviction that “everything is connected to everything.” With the aid of risky analogies—formal similarities in symbolism—they build dazzling theories that relate civilizations remote from each other in time and space, theories that leave the layman daunted and fascinated.

  In the archaeological museum in Heraklion my attention was drawn to an object that pressed on my imagination less by virtue of its aesthetic value than by its mysterious function. It is an ivory board found in Knossos, inlaid with mountain crystal, blue paste, and silver and gold leaf. This object is thought to have been a dice playing board and is called by common consent a “chessboard.” But what was the game? Was it a game of pure chance, or did it require intelligence and scheming ability? Was it played by two players or perhaps more? And most interesting to me: what was it in its essence—a mindless entertainment, a way to kill time on rainy winter evenings, or a contest giving rein to great passions?

  It is the same when we touch on ancient cults and faiths—but let the analogy not suggest anything frivolous. All agree that ancient civilizations, including the Minoan, were founded on religion. It inspired not only art but institutions. All other spheres of life could develop only in harmony with religion and under its powerful influence. We know this from the Minoan excavations. We found sanctuaries, a vast number of cult objects, and the murals and engravings give us a pretty faithful and detailed description of the ceremonies. But this is what Picard called a beautiful illustrated book without a text. We can sometimes decipher the script of extinct civilizations, but we cannot read the hearts of long-deceased people.

  But we can say something about the Minoan religion without resorting to risqué hypotheses. The characteristic feature of this religion is a predilection for symbols; they are meant to evoke a mood of sanctity and the god’s presence without the necessity of making the god visible. This is said by experts to be proof of a high degree of spiritualism.

  The elements of fetishism—just as in other primitive religions—are numerous, one might say omnipresent. Objects of adoration could be boulders, cave stalactites, tree trunks and stones, so-called betyls. A golden signet was found in Phaestos that portrays the dance of a naked woman before a betyl—the prototype of the column, which before it became a simple element of architecture was the object of a cult. Double-edged axes played a big role; we find them on frescoes, ceramics, and gems, and they were also often executed in stone, bronze, silver, and even gold. What did this odd ax signify? Was it a sacred instrument for religious sacrifice, or perhaps a sign of the lightning bolt and the god who wielded it—or perhaps a symbolic merging of a male and female divinity? Experts are divided on the issue. One thing only seems clear, that the name of Minos’s palace derives from the (non-Greek) name of the ax—labrys. So “labyrinth” would then mean “palace of double-edged axes.”

  Trees were also worshipped: pines, palms, olive trees, cypresses, as were animals: snakes, doves, monkeys, lions, and of course bulls, which occupy a privileged position in the Cretan bestiary.

  It is hard to give an answer to the important question in what age anthropomorphi
c tendencies appeared, or to put it differently, when, from behind the amulets, fetishes, and symbols, did a deity show a face that looked human? But one thing is certain: female deities predominated, and in the initial phase there were only female deities, much like in the religions of ancient Anatolia. The Cretan Olympus, so vague to us in many details, was ruled by a mighty goddess of nature, ruler of the world, people, animals, and plants, mistress of the sun and moon, earth, sea, and hell—the Great Mother. The vast number of images of her, deriving from different ages, allows us to trace her various attributes. She appears in the shape of terracotta statuettes as a symbol of fertility, surrounded by lions, snakes, and birds, on ships as the patroness of navigation, and also on helmets and armor, since she was also the goddess of war. Some think the Great Mother was the only goddess of Minoan religion. This view has met with the rather categorical opposition of scholars of religion. In the Mediterranean Sea basin, with the exception of Judaism, all religions were polytheistic.

  The Minoans did not build temples as the Greeks or Egyptians did. At first they made sacrifices in natural caves like Kamares on the slopes of Ida or Psychro in the Dikte massif. Neolithic inhabitants of these caves built themselves houses and made room for the gods. In the first phase of the Middle Minoan age, small cult sites appear on mountaintops, amid cliffs, near springs, marked off by trees and low walls. In that period the construction of chapels in living quarters, mainly palaces, is also begun.

  The Cretans’ religious ceremonies—judging from the records preserved on gems, vases, and signets—must have been breathtaking spectacles. They probably began with acts of purification, followed by a bloody sacrifice of goats, sheep, and bulls (at important ceremonies up to ten bulls were slaughtered) and those sacrifices are a frequent subject of Minoan art. Then came libations. The whole ceremony was concluded with a grand colorful procession, filled with dance, music, and the fumes from censers, rousing them to a state of ecstasy and bringing the gods and demons down to earth.