Mycenaean religion

• 1. Introduction

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  Mycenaean religion left behind four words that classical Greeks kept using. Theos meant deity, hieros meant holy man, nawos meant temple, and temenos meant land set apart for communal use. It also left behind some of the gods themselves, among them Zeus, Poseidon, and Dionysus, along with practices like animal sacrifice and votive offerings. These survivals span the gap between Mycenaean Greece, roughly 1600-1100 BC, and classical Greece, roughly 510-323 BC. What is far less certain is how much of that Mycenaean religion was itself inherited from an even older tradition on Crete. That question, and how much of the whole picture can be reconstructed from a scatter of surviving evidence, has divided scholars for decades.

• 2. A Contested Inheritance

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  John Chadwick counted at least six centuries between the first Proto-Greek speakers arriving in Hellas and the earliest Linear B inscriptions. Across that span, ideas about the gods fused with the beliefs of people already living there. Chadwick suggested they may also have merged with Minoan religion from Crete. The Linear B tablets that survive mostly list offerings and simply name gods as the recipients of goods. Beyond those lists, no other Mycenaean literature has been found, so the tablets say very little about how people actually worshipped.

  Chadwick also cautioned against blending Minoan and Mycenaean religion just because their material remains overlap archaeologically. He said: "the attempt to uncover the prehistory of classical Greek religion by conjecturing its origins and guessing the meaning of its myths." He considered that kind of guessing especially treacherous when it leaned on etymology.

  Moses I. Finley went further, finding very few authentic Mycenaean traces inside the eighth-century Homeric world despite its supposedly Mycenaean setting. Martin Nilsson pushed back against that skepticism, though not by trusting etymologies either. He pointed instead to religious elements and to how the gods were depicted and what functions they served. He argued that many Minoan gods and religious ideas had fused into Mycenaean religion. Writing in 2008, Thomas G. Palaima found that Mycenaean religion shared common origins with other pre-Greek peoples, the Minoans included. Even so, he concluded that the Minoans' "key elements" were either wholly absent or negligible among the Mycenaeans.

  None of these scholars agreed on how much Minoan myth shaped Mycenaean belief. What they did agree on is that the tablets preserve real divine names, and those names are where the surviving evidence begins.

• 3. Poseidon And The Ladies

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  Po-se-da-o, as the Linear B tablets spell him, held a place of privilege among Mycenaean gods. He was a chthonic deity tied to earthquakes, called E-ne-si-da-o-ne, literally the earth shaker. And, as often happens in Northern European folklore, he seems to have doubled as a spirit haunting the underworld's rivers.

  Several tablets from Pylos record a goddess called only Po-ti-ni-ja, meaning "lady" or "mistress," with no other name attached. She appears to have held an important shrine at a site called Pakijanes, near Pylos. At Knossos on Crete, one inscription names a "mistress of the Labyrinth," da-pu-ri-to-jo po-ti-ni-ja, a title that echoes the myth of the Minoan labyrinth. The title Potnia itself was not reserved for one goddess; it was applied to many.

  One Linear B tablet from Pylos records something more specific still: "two queens and the king," written as wa-na-ssoi and wa-na-ka-te. John Chadwick linked this pairing to the divine ancestors later known as Demeter, Persephone, and Poseidon himself.

• 4. Demeter, Persephone And Despoina

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  Pe-re-swa is a name recorded on Linear B tablets at Pylos, and scholars think it may be an early form of Persephone. The same tablets mention Si-to po-ti-ni-ja, an agricultural goddess, and Demeter herself carried the cult title Sito, from the Greek word for wheat, sitos. In classical times, Demeter and her daughter Persephone, the goddesses at the center of the Eleusinian Mysteries, were usually called simply "the two goddesses" or "the mistresses."

  The Eleusinian Mysteries themselves were founded during the Mycenaean period, around 1500 BC, at the city of Eleusis. They appear to build on an older, pre-Greek vegetation cult that carried Minoan elements. That original cult was private, and no record explains what happened inside it. Certain details do suggest a kinship with the cult of Despoina, "the mistress," the precursor goddess of Persephone worshipped in the isolated region of Arcadia, a cult that survived there into classical times.

  In the earliest Arcadian version of the myth, Poseidon took the shape of a horse to pursue Demeter. She turned herself into a mare to escape him. Their union produced the horse Arion and a daughter, Despoina, born with the shape or the head of a mare herself. The traveler Pausanias described animal-headed statues of Demeter and other gods standing in Arcadia. At Lycosura, a marble relief shows women dancing with the heads of different animals. That relief helps explain a Mycenaean fresco from around 1400 BC, which depicts a procession of figures wearing animal masks. A golden ring found at Tiryns shows something similar: a procession of "daemons" filing before a goddess. The Greek myth of the Minotaur likely grew out of a daemon figure much like that one.

  At Lycosura, the cult of Despoina bound the two goddesses closely to springs and animals. Poseidon and Artemis both figured centrally there. Artemis carried the title "mistress of the animals" and was said to have been the very first nymph. Nymphs themselves were tied to the particular trees or waters they were believed to haunt.

• 5. Artemis And The Tree Cult

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  A-te-mi-to and a-ti-mi-te are the earliest recorded forms of the name Artemis, appearing in Linear B tablets from Pylos. In the Arcadian cults, she is described as a daughter of Demeter, and she went on to become the most popular goddess in Greece.

  Her likely precursor, probably the Minoan goddess Britomartis, is shown standing between two lions on a Minoan seal and on gold rings from Mycenae. Those images are close in style to the later cult figure of "Artemis Orthia" at Sparta. Inside her temple at Sparta, archaeologists found wooden masks carved with human faces, worn by dancers taking part in a vegetation cult.

  The same evidence connects Artemis to a Minoan "cult of the tree," an ecstatic and orgiastic practice pictured on Minoan seals and Mycenaean gold rings. Not every borrowing from that same Minoan world produced a beloved goddess; some borrowings shaped gods who nearly vanished from later memory instead.

• 6. Paean, Athena And Dionysos

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  Pa-ja-wo is likely the forerunner of the physician of the gods who appears in Homer's Iliad. In the Mycenaean world he personified the magic-song believed to cure the sick, and that song later became a song of victory too, the paian. The magicians who performed it were known as "seer-doctors," a role eventually folded into the god Apollo.

  A-ta-na turns up in a Linear B inscription at Knossos dating to the Late Minoan II period, in the form A-ta-na po-ti-ni-ja, "mistress Athena." That phrase is close to the one Homer would use centuries later. She was probably the goddess of the palace, the figure shown in the well-known "Procession-fresco" at Knossos. Another Mycenaean fresco shows two women reaching their hands toward a central figure hidden behind an oversized figure-eight shield. That figure is almost certainly a war goddess carrying her palladium, or standing in for one through the shield alone.

  Di-wo-nu-so appears in some of the same inscriptions, his name most likely meaning "son of Zeus" and carrying a Thraco-Phrygian origin. His cult became tied to Boeotia and Phocis before the Mycenaean age even ended. That timing explains why his later myths centered on Thebes and why Mount Parnassos in Phocis became the site of his orgies. In Homer he appears as the consort of Ariadne, a Minoan vegetation goddess. He stands out as the only Greek god besides Attis who dies in order to be reborn, a pattern common in religions of the Orient. His story echoes a Minoan myth of a "divine child" abandoned by his mother and raised instead by the forces of nature. Related versions of that same myth appear in the cults of Hyakinthos at Amyklai, Erichthonios at Athens, and Ploutos at Eleusis. Across Mycenaean Greece more broadly, a similar divine-child myth kept resurfacing. The abandoned child was sometimes identified as Bacchus, sometimes as Zeus, and sometimes as another figure of mythical importance now lost to memory.

• 7. Lesser-Known Gods

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  A-pa-i-ti-jo, named in tablets at Knossos, is most likely an early form of Hephaestus. Aphrodite, by contrast, is entirely absent from the surviving record, with no trace of her name in any tablet.

  Hera fares better than Aphrodite. Her standard Homeric epithet, "cow-eyed," derives from the Mycenaean term Qo-wi-ja, and texts from the period already pair her with Zeus as a couple. Ares may survive under the name Enyalios, assuming the two were not originally separate gods. A related term, Areias, resembles the name of a war god, though its precise importance is unclear. Eleuthia is linked to Eileithuia, the Homeric goddess of childbirth. Hermes and the Erinyes appear in the record too, though little else is said about them.

  Representations of the "Minoan Genius" are found widely across the mainland regions of Mycenaean Greece. Naming a god in a tablet is not the same as knowing where people gathered to honor that god. The archaeological record of shrine sites tells a very different, far patchier, story.

• 8. Shrines And Sanctuaries

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  Lerna stands out among the sites that mattered for Mycenaean cult activity. Worship there took the form of a house sanctuary rather than a freestanding temple. The familiar later model, a temple that held a cult statue inside its cella, fronted by an open-air altar, had not yet appeared. That came later. Inside citadels, certain buildings were built around a central oblong room called the megaron, ringed by smaller chambers. These may have doubled as places of worship. A domestic cult, practiced inside ordinary households, is thought to have existed alongside them.

  At Phylakopi on the island of Milos, excavators found a substantial number of statuettes, almost certainly crafted as offerings left at a shrine there.

  Archaeological layers at several other sites, Delphi, Dodona, Delos, Eleusis, and Abae among them, suggest they too were already significant shrines during this period.

  In Crete, a number of Minoan shrines continued in use into LMIII, the phase running roughly 1400-1150 BCE. By then, Minoan and Mycenaean culture had already begun to blend into one shared world of worship.