Deep in the Diktian Cave of Minoan Crete
The myth of the Goddess and the Minotaur
This story is my contribution to Globetrotter’s monthly challenge for October to write about our most significant experience in a cave. Mine took place in a cave-shrine of the ancient Minoans. The Minoans were a Goddess-worshipping culture that flourished on Crete from about 2,000–1.500 B.C.
The text is excerpted and edited from my 2007 book, Savage Breast: One Man’s Search for the Goddess. The book is my exploration of the sacred feminine in pre-Christian Europe from a man’s point of view. The journey was both illuminating and terrifying, and it changed my life. Luckily, Teresa (who is now my wife), was with me through much of it. This passage is from Chapter One:
Teresa and I drove along the Plastic Coast of southern Crete, so named for the plastic roofs on all the greenhouses where tomatoes and vegetables are grown throughout the winter. We cut north up the winding mountain road that leads to the Lasithi Plateau where a remnant of the Minoans had lingered on centuries after the Mycenaeans and then the Greek Dorians had conquered Crete. Though most of the island is barren rock and sand, fit only for raising olive trees and goats, the silt washing down from the surrounding mountains each spring has made the Lasithi Plateau the most fertile spot on Crete. It was green with growing vegetables when we arrived, even though the night would bring a frost.
Though isolated, the plateau contained an important Cretan sanctuary: a cave that ran deep into Mount Dikte. The mountain was named after Diktyanna, an ancient Cretan goddess who was identified with Zeus’s mother, Rhea, in the Classical Era. It was in this cave, according to these later Greeks, that Rhea hid the infant god away from his father Cronus, who wanted to devour him. Zeus grew to manhood and with his mother’s help deposed old Cronus, and ruled in his place as king of the gods.
Yet, even a thousand years after the Greeks took over the island, the Cretans of the 5th century B.C. believed in their own version of Zeus. They venerated him as the young god who dies and is resurrected, and pointed to the outline of Mt. Juktas as evidence of this. From Knossos, Mt. Juktas looks like Zeus’s profile, as if he were lying like a dead man, flat on his back. To the Greeks the idea of a dying Zeus was blasphemy. Some Minoan experts connect the Cretan myth with the few Minoan images that have been discovered of young men. As author Rodney Castleden puts it in his book The Minoans: Life in Bronze Age Crete:
Since the goddess herself was not permitted to die, the annual death and rebirth were acted out by a young male Year-spirit, a small and inferior deity who took the roles of son and consort, and represented the important principle of discontinuity in nature. In the Minoan period he remained subordinate to his goddess, but at its end, as Zeus, he became much more important.
Other scholars, including Robert Graves and Joseph Campbell, connect the dying-resurrected god to the neolithic Anatolian bull-god, whose horns appear in the night sky as the waning/waxing moon. The bull was revered — and sacrificed — in Minoan Crete, which is the origin of the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, which took place in the Knossos Labyrinth on Crete.
Now, back to the story:
…the Diktian Cave was a short hike up a well-trodden path from the rim of the plateau. Other than a crew of workmen repairing the stairways, we met no one else as we climbed the mountainside. Eventually we stood alone at the vast gash in Mt. Dikte’s middle. The morning sun had become so intense that stepping into the cavern plunged us into disorienting darkness. In place of the sun’s warmth, a musky chill rose up from the damp floor and permeated the air. When at last our eyes could see in the gloom the cave revealed itself to be a great underground cathedral, with stalactites running down the sides like weirdly distorted pillars. Massive stalagmite formations spiked up from the rock floor like wet, glossy sculptures, eerie in the wan light of our cheap Greek flashlights. The cavern walls were streaked with glistening yellows and whites. Sediments formed into ridges looking almost like ribs. In places, slick surfaces were coated with translucent green algae. It seemed as if Mt. Dikte was a living thing, and we were trespassers strolling through her innards.
In summertime an unbroken line of tourists tromps down the slippery stairways to the far end of the cave, then loops back round to the surface, the guides yelling out that this formation looks like Zeus in a cradle, that one like the his mother’s breast. But this November morning there was no one in the cave at all except Teresa, me and the bats. We could hear their wings rustling high above us.
Two thirds of the way in, the floor of the cave dropped steeply. The pathway curved down around a rock hill in the center, cutting off the remaining outside light. The Minoans conducted their rites both at the front and as far to the back as they could get, leaving ritual vessels and charred animal bones buried in the rubble.
We stopped at the end wall, next to the stalagmite known as Rhea’s Nipple. It was a perfect limestone breast, upturned to catch an ageless drip from the ceiling upon its tip. I reached out and touched it. Sad, I thought, that I can’t help but perceive these things as natural geological formations that only coincidentally bear a certain resemblance to the human form. I envied the ancients for whom these dripping sediments were living wonders: a breast of stone in a mountain’s womb.
We turned off our flashlights and rested in the silence, in this netherworld that looked much the same to us as it did to the Minoans — and yet to them meant something totally different. I had to respect these people for penetrating so deep into the earth. Their imaginations were so vivid, the fantastical beasts of their art so weird, that such a place could have been too terrifying to endure. (In fact, the bats were already making Teresa nervous).
I wondered what drew the Minoans deep into this mountain. I looked through the blackness as if to pierce the mystery with my stare. Yes, something of it remained: melancholy, unsettling, charged, an old thing, hiding just out of sight. Groping in darkness, the invisible is perhaps easier to find. Teresa shivered. I put my arms around her, as much for my own comfort as to warm her.
I felt as if I had entered the Labyrinth myself, in search of the Minotaur, feeling my way along the wet walls towards the mystery hidden within the Minoan Dreamtime. I thought of how important Crete must have been to the Greeks: birthplace of Zeus, this cave the very place he was nurtured. Yet ancient Greek literature seems oblivious of the great Minoan civilization which so influenced later Greek beliefs. All they consciously knew was the myth of the maze and the Minotaur: an allegory of Crete’s dominion over Athens and the Aegean, and Theseus’ great deed: killing the beast.
Where once the bull-son of the goddess was her consort and sacrifice, the Greeks turned him into a bloodthirsty monster so hideous he had to be hidden away in the Labyrinth. Oh yes, the victors write the history books, and also the myths. What the Minoans actually believed can only be intuited from their art. Here in the darkness I felt a sudden kinship with this sacrifical man-beast.
I was suddenly aware once more of Teresa, pressed against my side. How long has we been standing here in the back of the cave, in utter blackness? I didn’t know. I heard the rhythm of her breath, felt the warmth of it on my cheek. She must have had her face towards me. All at once, the moment seemed most romantic. We embraced against the railing at the back of the cave.
“Hello! You okay in there?” a Greek voice called across the darkness. It was one of the workmen from the trail below the gate.
Obviously they had noticed we had not come back down the mountain path after such a long time in the cave, and had sent someone to make sure the dumb tourists hadn’t slipped and broken something.
“Yes, yes! Okay!” I called up.
“Need help?”
We felt like teenagers caught by the parents in the basement.
“No, no, we’re just coming out now!”
We sheepishly climbed back out into the brilliant sunlight, where a mustachioed laborer was waiting so see us safely out. Crazy tourists.
What were they doing in there for so long anyway?
***
These other Globetrotters wrote great stories about caves for this month’s challenge:
Carol Labuzzetta, MS writes about overcoming a case of cave claustrophobia to become a cave guide. Impressive!
And Kelly Benson makes fear of tight places seem funny as she squeezes through the underground “Sandwich of Death.”
Tim Ward is the author of Mature Flâneur: Slow Travels Through Portugal, France, Italy and Norway.
