“How are we supposed to find anything down there?” She felt a sense of despair creep over her.
Erik had removed his back pack and was rummaging around for something. Wordlessly he handed flashlights to his two companions. He managed to make silence sound like a reproach.
“Sorry,” Griffin apologized. “It didn’t occur to me to pack a torch. Stupid of me not to have realized we’d need them.”
“Let’s go,” Erik prompted. “Watch your footing.”
The two followed him down the first few stairs.
Cassie felt cool damp air hit her face. After the bright sunlight and dry heat outside, it was as if she’d dived into a pool. Then her feet began to slide sideways. The stairs were slippery from the moisture in the cave. She gripped the handrail tighter and threw her flashlight beam up toward the ceiling. The roof of the cave was rippled with stalactites. It would have been impossible to spot a carving of a lily or a bird or anything else for that matter. The wavy texture played tricks with the eyes. You could imagine any shape you wanted to see in those rock formations.
The trio traveled on in silence until they reached the bottom of the stairs which opened out into a huge chamber.
“This cave has been used as a sacred site since the earliest Minoan settlements on the island,” Griffin started to explain. “It was sloppily excavated at the turn of the twentieth century. Sections of the roof had collapsed and then were blasted apart for removal which obviously disturbed layers of strata. This chamber is roughly a hundred feet by fifty feet and in it archaeologists have discovered pottery and votive objects. Things like goddess figurines and small double axes. They also unearthed a large number of libation tables and cups for food offerings. Other offerings, such as animal sacrifices are evidenced by numerous bones from bulls, sheep and goats.”
Cassie swept her flashlight around the chamber, noting even more of the gnarled, twisted stalactites sprouting from the ceiling. “Do you really think we’re going to find any key symbols here?’ she asked bleakly.
Griffin shrugged. “We have to try. Each of us should take a portion of the chamber and focus on the largest stalactite and stalagmite formations. Those would be the most likely places to find an inscription.”
Erik nodded wordlessly and moved to the opposite end of the chamber. He trained his flashlight on a large stalactite and allowed the beam to travel down its length.
Cassie moved off to the opposite end of the room. She followed Erik’s method by beginning with the upper edges of stalactites and tracing them down. After about ten minutes her eyes began to blur. She started seeing faces and forms in the rock. Quite a few of them looked like Casper the ghost. At least they were friendly. She shook her head to clear away the mirages. Walking back to Griffin, she announced, “It’s hopeless. I can’t find anything.”
“Nor can I.” Griffin turned to her. “Perhaps it’s time we proceed to the lower chambers.”
“There’s more?” Cassie cried. She couldn’t rally much enthusiasm for the idea of spending time in a space that was bound to be even darker and damper than where she already was.
“Erik?” Griffin called questioningly.
The Security Coordinator rejoined them. “No dice,” he said. “I didn’t see anything like the symbols in those photos you gave me.”
“Then it’s unanimous,” the Scrivener announced. “We descend.”
Cassie looked upward wistfully toward the bright gap in the earth several hundred feet above them. Then she turned and followed the men into the depths of the cavern. “I don’t get it. Why wouldn’t they just build a temple like the Hellenes did? Why climb all the way down here to do their rituals?”
Griffin paused and turned to answer her. “It might seem easier to build a structure for cult purposes but the ancient peoples of Old Europe saw a cosmic connection between caves and the goddess. In fact, they would have seen a space like this as the womb of the goddess. The place where birth, death, and rebirth occur.”
Cassie cast a doubtful look in his direction.
For once, Erik contributed to the conversation. “The Minoans used to bury their dead in caves like this for about a thousand years before they started building tombs above ground.”
“Tomb maybe, but womb? Where do you get the idea that they viewed this place as an incubator too? I mean even Freud said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
Griffin smiled before turning to descend further. “I believe the proof you seek waits below.”
They found themselves in a chamber that was even larger than the one above. Erik immediately strolled off to one side to sweep the walls with the beam of his flashlight.
“Yikes, how big is this room?” Cassie asked when she reached the bottom.
“About twice the size of the one preceding it. I’d say two hundred by one hundred feet.”
The girl could hear water dripping off in the distance. She swung her flashlight. There was another room off to the right. “Is that a pool?”
“Yes, the Minoans placed votive objects in the pool and on the stalagmites around it. Bronze double axes or knife blades, clay figurines, even jewelry. But the pool is less interesting than what’s supposed to be over here.”
Cassie followed Griffin to a small chamber on the left side of the main room.
He shone his flashlight around the space. “This is called the cradle of Zeus which proves my point that the ancients thought of this cave as a place of birth as well as death.”
“Zeus!” Cassie exclaimed incredulously. “You mean the Hellene god with the thunderbolts. What’s he got to do with a Minoan shrine?”
“Everything,” Griffin hinted cryptically. “According to the ancient Hellenes, Zeus’ mother Rhea hid him in this cave to protect him from his father Kronos. You see, Kronos had a bad habit of eating his offspring and Rhea apparently grew tired of giving birth to her husband’s dinner. She was determined that at least one of her children should live. So she enlisted the help of a goat named Amalthea to nurse the infant and raise him in secret in this place.”
There was a long silence as Cassie considered the tale. “OK, you’ve told me the official version of the myth. Now what’s the real story?”
Griffin laughed out loud. “You are catching on, aren’t you? I suppose you might consider the Zeus myth to be propaganda. A way to capitalize on an existing legend and exploit it to serve the purposes of the overlord invaders.”
Cassie trained her flashlight beam on the cradle of Zeus, studying the space for a few moments. “So you’re saying the Minoans had some sort of god who hatched in this cave before thunder boy got here?”
“Quite so. We know the Minoans recognized a male deity because we have seals which show a goddess and a youth as her companion. He is usually depicted as smaller than she and in an attitude of adoration toward her. He would have been her consort—a year god whose life cycle symbolized the passage of the seasons. The goddess gave birth to him in the spring. He matured and became her lover in the summer which resulted in the fruitfulness of the land. In the autumn he died as the crops were harvested and the goddess mourned for him in the winter when nothing would grow. The cycle began again in the spring.”
Cassie felt shocked. “I guess they didn’t think incest was icky.”
Griffin hastened to explain. “You have to understand that the ancients believed that all life proceeded from the goddess. In that sense, every part of creation was a child of hers. And it wasn’t the Minoans who invented the myth of the goddess and her consort. It exists in nearly every culture in this part of the world. In Sumer it was Innana and Damuzi, in Bablyon it was Ishtar and Tammuz, in Egypt it was Isis and Osiris, and in Canaan it was Anath and Baal. Even Hellenic myth had a counterpart in Aphrodite and Adonis. This commonality suggests that the prototype for the tale originated in old Europe and was carried here by successive waves of immigrants.”
Cassie glanced over to Erik who had already searched more than half of the main chamber. He didn’t seem inclined
to join the conversation.
The Scrivener continued. “When the Minoans first started ritualizing the liaison of the goddess and her consort, a human youth would have been chosen as the personification of the year god. He might have spent some time in this cave undergoing a symbolic birth into his role as a nature deity. During the time of his reign he would have been treated like a god. At some point in the year he would have mated with the high priestess as she acted the role of the goddess. Their union would guarantee the fertility of the land. At harvest time, the youth may have been sacrificed.”
“You mean sacrificed as in murdered?” Cassie shook her head. She couldn’t reconcile the playful artwork of the Minoans with the idea that they were capable of blood rites.
“The sacrifice of the year god was a practice shared by many ancient cultures and may go back as far as the Paleolithic era. In fact, Christian religion is based on the same idea. Jesus sacrificed himself for the sake of his people and then was resurrected. Lest you think too badly of the Minoans, however, it does appear that they came to substitute an animal as the ritual victim instead. I believe that’s why bull sacrifice became so prominent in Crete. The bull is the offspring of a cow. He is sacred because he bears the bucranium, the symbol of the goddess’s regenerative powers. Therefore, he becomes an appropriate metaphor for the sacrifice of the year god.”
“So what’s all this got to do with Zeus?” Cassie asked abruptly, bringing the conversation full circle.
“It was a way for the invaders to interject their own principal deity into the mythology of the native people. They said their thundering sky god was really the year-god of the Minoans which made it easier for the local people to accept him.”
The girl laughed humorlessly. “Who would be stupid enough to fall for that idea?”
“Given a long enough period of indoctrination, it’s quite an effective ploy. The same maneuver was used successfully by the Catholic Church to convert goddess-worshipping pagans to Christianity. The Celts in Ireland were resistant to conversion until some enterprising missionary explained to them that the Virgin Mary was really their great goddess is disguise. The misogynistic church fathers would never have actively promoted the divinity of Mary if it hadn’t won them new converts.”
Cassie once more looked around to see what Erik was doing. The Security Coordinator was now searching the other half of the chamber and was still oblivious to their dialogue.
The girl was quiet for several moments, weighing everything Griffin had told her about the legend of Zeus’s birth. Something still didn’t add up. “You said that this Minoan consort god died at the end of each year. I always thought that Zeus was immortal and all-powerful.”
Griffin nodded approvingly. “You’re quite right to point out the inconsistency. The Hellenes found themselves caught between a rock and a hard place, or perhaps a cave and a hard place. They wanted to fit their deity into Minoan mythology but that meant they had to accept his mortality. They resolved the problem by going into a state of denial and conveniently forgetting to tell that part of the story. The new version of the myth, minus the death of Zeus, was repeated often enough and long enough that it eventually came to be accepted as fact. By 600 BCE, Epimenides of Knossos, a Cretan himself, wrote a poem in defense of the immortality of Zeus and chastised his fellow countrymen for daring to say otherwise. He wrote, ‘All Cretans are liars.’”
Cassie chuckled in spite of herself. “And I thought brainwashing was a twentieth century invention.”
Erik rejoined them. “While you two were yakking, I covered the entire room. There’s nothing here. Let’s go.”
Chapter 38 – Cryptic
By the time the trio had climbed out of the cave and back down the mountain it was mid-afternoon. Cassie and Griffin insisted they stop for a brief lunch at one of the tavernas at the base of the trail before continuing onward to Karfi. Erik’s look of contempt spoke volumes but he offered no objection. He even condescended to order a bowl of soup for himself.
A half hour later, somewhat less hungry and irritable, they all piled back into the car to continue their journey. Fortunately, the ruins of Karfi were only a short distance from Psychro. Just outside the town of Tzermiado, Erik unaccountably pulled the car over to the side of the road and parked it. Cassie looked out the window. They were in the middle of nowhere.
“Why did you stop? What’s going on?” she asked.
“We have to hike to the top from here. There aren’t any roads and the foot trails aren’t marked too well either.”
The three got out of the car while Erik retrieved his back pack from the trunk. This time, he reached inside and brought out a trail map which he handed to Griffin.
“Oh, I see,” the Scrivener said, squinting first at the map and then at the mountain.
Cassie walked up to him and raised an eyebrow quizzically. “Care to explain it to me, then?”
“Unlike all the other villages we’ve seen, Karfi is located some distance above the plateau. It lies in the saddle between two mountain peaks which means we have quite a climb ahead of us.”
Erik looked at his watch. “It’s going to take us close to an hour to get there. I don’t want to have to navigate these trails after dark so we’d better get going now.”
He hoisted the pack on his back and walked toward a trail marker.
The other two fell in behind him.
“So Karfi was the end of the line for the Minoans?” Cassie asked Griffin.
He nodded. “Sadly, yes. The Dorian invasion spelled the demise of their civilization in the lowland areas of the island. To their credit, the Minoans tried to carry on and maintain their traditional culture after the collapse. They chose Karfi as their final retreat partly because of its strategic location and partly because it had been a peak sanctuary for a thousand years before the Dorians arrived.”
“What’s a peak sanctuary?”
“It’s the counterpart of the cave shrines, only on mountaintops. A place where offerings could be made to the goddess. There are many across the island but Karfi is one of the oldest.”
They climbed in silence for about half an hour. The trail switched back on itself before straightening out and running upward in a northeasterly direction. The plateau emerged below them and Cassie caught a glimpse of the sea off in the distance.
The higher they climbed the more barren the landscape became. Nothing but rocks jutting upward through sparse patches of grass and a few struggling olive trees. Eventually they reached a stone alcove built around a spring. A sign posted there announced that they were nearing the archaeological site.
“Stop, stop,” Cassie commanded. “I need to sit down for a minute. Jeez, I wish I’d brought a bottle of water with me.”
“You’re sitting right next to a mountain spring,” Erik observed coldly.
Cassie looked over her shoulder at the water trickling out of the rock. “I’m not drinking that!”
The Security Coordinator removed his pack. She could hear him mutter a curse under his breath as he rummaged around in the depths of the bag. Pulling out a canteen, he handed it to her. “I’ll give you five minutes. After that we have to keep moving. Unless you want to try climbing down the mountain in the dark.”
Cassie smiled sweetly through gritted teeth. “You see. Being nice didn’t kill you.” She took a deep draught from the canteen. The water was lukewarm but she didn’t care. At least she knew it came from a tap. She handed the container back to Erik. Making an effort to sound civil, she thanked him. “I just need a couple of minutes to catch my breath is all.”
The late afternoon sunshine was burning the top of her head. Cassie shaded her eyes and wished for a cap or a visor but she didn’t think Erik had one in his magic back pack so she didn’t ask. A blister was starting for form on her left heel. Ignoring it, she stood up and dusted off her jeans. “OK, I’m good.”
Erik slung his pack over his shoulders and resumed the march upward.
About ten minutes later
, Cassie heard Griffin announce, “There it is.”
The trio paused to take in the sight.
She looked off in the distance at a green space between two mountain peaks. Stones were jutting out of the ground but they weren’t arranged randomly. They formed a series of squares connecting to one another – the foundations of buildings partially buried underground.
“Take a look at the configuration of the mountains. Anything familiar about the shape?” Griffin regarded her with a quizzical expression.
She squinted in the sunlight and studied them for a moment. The two vertical peaks were close to one another. One of them seemed to curve inward slightly. “It looks like horns of consecration!” she exclaimed.
“Well spotted,” Griffin said approvingly. Probably one of the reasons why the Minoans chose this location as a peak sanctuary in the first place.”
“But I don’t see much of a town,” she observed in a disappointed tone as they approached the ruins.
“That’s because the excavation was never completed. It’s estimated that the actual settlement is six times the size of what was unearthed in the 1930s. There were paved streets and squares, a temple and several other large public buildings.” Griffin looked disconsolately around at the rubble. “The excavation might have been handled in a more systematic manner. The structures were never reinforced afterward, leaving them at the mercy of wind and weather. As you can see, most of them have collapsed. Anything of note was carted off to museums in Heraklion and England decades ago. Now the site is a goat pasture.”
“But you said yesterday that you wanted to look at some tombs, right?” Cassie prompted.
“Yes, quite so. Your vision of the chrysalis suggests that the burial crypts, the tholoi, might be our best starting point. When I stopped to think about it, Karfi really is the most logical spot to find our elusive symbols.” Griffin’s eyes travelled across the ruin.
The Granite Key (Arkana Mysteries) Page 24