Daughters of the Inquisition

by Christina Crawford

  To witness women spinning raw material, turning it into thread or yarn before your very eyes, a magical and transformative process begins. Many stories revolving around the ritual magic of spinning, an allegory about women spinning the web of life and death, the spider and her web, came into being across many cultures. And because women of all socio-economic strata needed to spin constantly from girlhood to old age in order to produce the thread or yarn needed to weave cloth for the world populations, these myths were perpetuated across many different cultures, over thousands of years. They come to us today mainly in what are called “children’s fairy tales.”

  To progress from simple costume consisting of string skirt, belt or sash and hairnet to woven aprons, tunics, capes and chemise was a process that took millennia, during the entire Neolithic from about 8000 BCE to perhaps 4000 BCE. But now we arrive at the Minoan civilization, on the island of Crete, starting about 5000 BCE and the entire picture changes.

  MINOAN CRETE

  The Minoans are the zenith, the epitome, the miraculous fruition of ancient Great Goddess matrilineal society at its peak of knowledge, tradition, expertise, culture, joy and beauty. The Mediterranean island of Crete between Greece and Africa was inhabited as early as 6000 BCE by an agricultural people who developed fruit orchards, extensive hillside vineyards, olive groves, irrigated gardens, swimming pools and domesticated sheep. Some say that these people have cultural ties with those at Catal Huyuk in Anatolia (Turkey). Certainly they share the agricultural knowledge and sacred ritual understanding.

  In about 3000 BCE, navigators from the Cyclades intermingled with these island people, bringing their advanced systems of navigation and boat building, and turned this beautiful island nation into a major trading power. Trade with Egypt and all of the other Mediterranean ports brought Crete not only wealth and power but also distributed their Minoan cultural influence, teaching others their beliefs and traditions. At one time, the influence of the Minoans equaled both Egypt and the far off Babylon located in present day Iraq. Strangely enough, there is little mention of this enormous popularity and power wielded by the matriarchal nation, nor of how widespread was her influence on costume, culture, art and commerce. Perhaps it is because her written records have not yet been fully decoded; whereas, the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians have been. But it is even more likely that this neglect is part of a larger problem, which is not giving the Herstory of women’s civilizations the relevance they warranted by virtue of their accomplishments.

  By 2000 BCE the Greek mainland was invaded by the first Aryan migrations from the Middle East and Persia, but Crete and the Minoan people were not touched, except for the major dislocation in trade.

  As Minoans recovered economically, their culture flourished as never before. Much of this information is recovered by writings of their contemporary neighbors, the Greeks, and more recent archeological excavations reveal exact details on this beautiful time. It is the four or five hundred years from 1750 BCE to 1250 BCE that our concept of gorgeous costume and lavish culture of Minoans evolves. “Cretan art represents Minoan feminine beauty in a lively, realistic form.”29

  This realism is in contrast with the Neolithic art, which was not as concerned with realism as with sacred allegory. It was the essence of what was artistically created along with sacred inscriptions that represent the Neolithic. In Crete, we are treated to artistic realism that is detailed and obviously done from life models.

  During the second period of Cretan prosperity its influence spread to the Cyclades, Greece, Cyprus, and into Syria in the Near East. Eventually, Crete was conquered and became a territory of distant Mycenae, though it continued to exert a lasting influence on mainland Greece through art and women’s costume, if not in religion or form of government or on the rights of women, which were subsumed.

  As late as 900 BCE to 700 BCE (when Rome was founded), Crete experienced an artistic renaissance during which time the island became an important artistic center. This occurred well into Roman times and centuries after it had ceased being a major trading power as an independent matriarchal nation.

  Therefore, from 3000 BCE to past 700 BCE, a culmination of 2,300 years, this island of Crete and its advanced civilization of Minoans influenced the entire Mediterranean, including Egypt. The Minoans accomplished this through vast trading capability in export of wine, extraordinary and unique woven cloth in remarkable colors and patterns, in art, jewelry and completed clothing for women that was completely original and almost entirely due to the talents of Minoan women.

  How did this extraordinary clothing evolve?

  “Before the eighteenth century BCE (Middle Minoan: 1750 to 1580 BCE) Cretan women seem to have worn the loincloth common to both sexes … no doubt arranging it in the form of a skirt (or apron) … a long dagger slipped through the belt can be seen on terra cotta figures of women from Petofa (2100 to 1900 BCE).”30

  Most of the Middle East, Greece and Egypt were wearing white linen tunics, sometimes draped and fitted as in Egypt, but more often just wrapped around the body (male or female), making people look as though they were swathed in bedsheets.

  Minoan women, approaching the problem differently, based their clothing on cutting and tailoring, traits especially visible in the tightly fitted sleeved bodices and rounded aprons, which became the incredibly complicated bell shaped shirts with layers of fabric and eventually fitted over rigid frames to make them stand away from the body, accentuating the tiny waist and the bare breasted upper torso.31

  Goddess and priestess were often pictured naked above the waist and women at Court displayed bare breasts held upright by tightly fitting bodices above a slender waist, in vivid contrast to the shapeless tunics worn by their contemporaries in neighboring countries. Minoan women wore sandals most of the time, but are also seen wearing high-laced leather boots, colored red or white. Hair styles were complicated: coils, tiers, side curls, often covered, but on Goddess/Priestess statues, long hair can been detailed as falling loosely about their shoulders.

  “Cretan women’s costume furnishes the first models of hats in the history (Herstory) of fashion.”32 Hats of extraordinary size and fantasy grace female heads. “Hats as turbans, high caps, pointed hats (of several feet in height), tricorners, perhaps of ritual significance decorated with rosettes and crowned with a curled plume or ribbon. Certain hats have white trimmings while others have black.”33

  Women also decorated their hair with gold bands or diadems, sometimes gold, or wore leaf-shaped gold plates or chains attached to the elaborately coiffed hair. Gold earrings, made out of wire and shaped into rosettes or spirals, and arm bracelets are worn by most women.

  “Examination of divine costume reveals some curious facts about Cretan costume in general: the two types of Goddess which have always existed side by side are particularly significant … The Cretan fashion for the bodice that left the breasts bare could not have become established nor lasted so long had it not corresponded to some religions idea; it was created for the Goddess, and this ceremonial costume was at first a ritual costume.”34

  This ritual costume becomes a ceremonial costume and then a secular costume worn by the elegant women of the Palace at Knossos. It was then copied onward to women throughout the Mediterranean, when and where they were still free to choose how they dressed and what type of clothing they wore.

  Finally, the Minoan Serpent Goddess of Crete, so famously depicted as a beautiful young woman dressed in the height of fashion, holding snakes in her upraised hands with a bird perched on her hat, or with snakes entwined around her arms, across her breasts or around her head, tells us that the milk from her breasts and the milk from the snake are healing and nourishing us. These bare-breasted women, Goddesses, embody the idea that “the emanations of the Goddess could more easily produce the desired effect if nothing was placed between her and the person.”35

  The Snake Goddess of Crete has counterparts in Africa and Old Europe, from which the tradition has probably been handed down for
many thousands of years.

  There is also a traditional costume worn during religious rites which is like “long gowns or divided skirts, stiff and often full, made of cloth spotted to imitate animal skins (leopards) and ending in a point like a tail, or some similar appendage, a clear evocation of the pre-historic garment, perpetuated by religious tradition.”36

  In fact, these leopard-spot costumes worn in religious ceremony are probably directly related to the leopard spotted decorations used in clothing, painted on interior walls of houses and temples and on actual animals seated by the Goddess on her throne chair way back in time to Catal Huyuk, Anatolia, 6000 BCE Neolithic, and have been transmitted over nearly 5,000 years to the women of Crete.

  “These people (of the Neolithic: 10000 BCE to 4000 BCE and later) also knew of the intoxicating mushroom, which they most certainly collected from time to time for ritual purposes. Narcotics of all sorts seem always to have been in demand for hallucinogenic rituals. By their means the participants could quickly come to see the inhabitants of the spirit world – dead ancestors and the like – of whom they could inquire about the future, cures for illnesses, lost objects or other mysteries.”37

  Whether Minoan women had access to the sacred mushroom drink that produced visions of great spotted cats, or whether the tradition, now thousands of years old, was simply carried forward from the past without the mushroom experience we may never know. We only have proof that the tradition and the clothing design persisted and survived.

  The Minoans had discovered a way to breed sheep that produced softer wool. Wool has the ability to hold dye color far better than the materials used previously, such as flax for linen or hemp or nettles. It is that new property to hold vivid color that finally distinguishes the brilliance of Minoan women’s clothing. The women weavers created intricate patterns, spirals, rosettes, plaids and checkerboards, opposing heart patterns, the “lozenge” intended to represent the female vulva. All these patterns harken back to the Neolithic tradition of inscribing symbols asking the Goddess for protection, as prayer and invocation. For Neolithic women, these symbols were painted or tattooed directly on the body. For the ladies of Crete nearly 6,000 years later, these same inscriptions are woven into fine woolen cloth and worn with equal pride. These patterns were not randomly chosen secular patterns or designs. They were the language of the Goddess worn for all to see and know the significance of woman’s dedication to the deity, female through and through for all eternity, so far.

  “In general, Cretan women’s costumes show a pronounced taste for vivid colors, their brilliance and variety enhancing the richness of decoration. The harmonies and dashes of reds, yellows, blues and purples have been preserved almost unchanged in palace frescos.”38

  The contemporaneous culture of Egypt never adopted wool, probably because of the extreme heat of their sandy desert homeland. Their clothing remained primarily white linen. Any decoration or status symbols were supplied by jewelry and hair dress.

  The colors themselves were symbolic: Red was life, lifeblood; blue (from the woad plant) was water and sky; white was initially the color of death; purple was royal because it was so difficult and costly to produce, coming originally from a tiny seashell that only gave one drop per shell.

  Some colors carry additional mythology. Such is the case with the color yellow. “Yellow in classical (Greek) times was considered appropriate only for women’s clothing, including Goddesses like Athena.” Because the saffron stamens were also used as a medicine specifically to ease women’s menstrual pain, which made saffron a multi-dimensionally desirable plant, and is well known as a delicious spice for food. In fact, the color yellow was so thoroughly indoctrinated as being a color “for women only” that “the comic poet Aristophanes got a lot of mileage out of this by jokingly portraying the more effeminate Athenian politicians as dressed in yellow.”39

  The Minoans are quite remarkable for their transmission of the female tradition brought to new heights of elegance, art, culture, luxury, ecological balance, artistic expression, sporting prowess through the magical performances of the beautiful young bull leapers and the labyrinth. They loved their fish, fruit, olives, honey, vegetables and wine. They loved their mountainside gardens, waterfalls, vineyards and orchards, all made possible by irrigation engineering. They blessed themselves with heated water for bathing, running water for drinking and gardening, and a sewer system for sanitation that would not be rivaled in Europe for thousands of years.

  Their male companions, brother, uncles, fathers, tended sheep, built sailing boats, were accomplished navigators and traders throughout the Mediterranean. These men sought to protect the people from uninvited wayfarers. While cordial to the stranger himself, the Minoans apparently did not welcome intruders who wished to settle among them. Instead, the stranger was firmly but graciously given safe passage home to his own shores.

  The culture was governed by Goddess representatives and her priestesses. The society centered around Palace life at Knosses. Women were free to move about the island, and for this they had boots and cloaks and chariots. It was a matriarchal inheritance system where property and possessions passed through the mother’s line to her daughters and their children. Incidentally, it is noted that the Minoan woman was careful not to get too much sun on her skin and is depicted with a pale face by foreigners, as opposed to her bronzed male relatives who worked outdoors and at sea.

  She is fanciful, petite, long-legged, small waisted. She is beautiful, sexually free, and spiritually powerful, guiding her people and her country through thousands of years. Due to the gift of dedicated archeologists and good preservation, the Great Snake Goddess of the Minoans stands with us today, teaching us still. As do the mysteries of the bullcrania and the Temples of Catal Huyuk, the Neolithic language of the Goddess inscribed on pottery, written on the body of Her statues and dancing ecstatically in rock paintings, Her energy spiraling toward us from Her belly and Her breasts.

  Sir Leonard Woolley says the Minoans had “the most complete acceptance of the grace of life the world has ever known.”40

  But today what the world may know best is the Minoan labyrinth, referred to as “House of the Double Ax” from the word “labrys” – the ceremonial ax used to sacrifice bulls to the Moon Goddess of Crete. The classic labyrinth was in the Palace of Minos the “Moon King,” whose spirit lived in the sacred bull. This was the Cretan form of Apis, similarly sacrificed in Egypt. Minos was a Lord of Death, a Western counterpart of the Hindu Moon Bull, Yama.

  The Mystical spiritual meaning of the labyrinth was to journey, usually by walking into the earth womb and return reborn. Many labyrinths were in caves or at cave entrances. The double ax is also the queenly scepter of the Amazon Goddess known by the names Gaea, Rhea, Demeter or Artemis. By the time of Minoan culture, it was a ceremonial accompaniment, no longer an ax of battle.

  In her book Walking the Labyrinth Dr. Lauren Artress, a canon for Special Ministries at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, calls the labyrinths “divine imprints … created in the realm of the collective unconscious.”41

  The exact origin of the labyrinth is unknown. Some forms of labyrinth, however, have existed in many cultures. The Kabbala or Tree of Life found in the Jewish mystical tradition is an elongated labyrinth based on the number eleven. The Hopi medicine wheel, based on the number four, is a Native American example.

  Andress says further that the labyrinth “is a large, complex spiral circle which is the ancient symbol for the Divine Mother, the God within, the Goddess, the Holy in all of creation. Matrilineal spirituality celebrates the hidden and the unseen. It is often symbolized by the cycles of the moon that guide the growing seasons as well as the inner map of knowing in women.”42

  In Sardinia the oldest rock carving labyrinth can be seen at Luzzanas, dating 2500–2000 BCE.

  Cretan/Minoan labyrinths were used on coins of the realm, painted on pottery and other sacred objects. Interestingly, one major archetypal design of the labyrinth evolved,
despite cultures that were separated by miles and centuries. And that design is the seven-circuit labyrinth, remains of which can be seen on Mount Knosses, on the island of Crete.

  But other evidence of ancient labyrinths exist: on a “ceramic vessel, 1300 BCE in Syria, on a clay tablet c. 1200 BCE in Pelampomisos, Greece; and a giant structure in Fayum Egypt built about 1800 BCE was the first known to be walked through.” The first writer to use the term “labyrinth” was the Greek historian Herodotus in 484 BCE.43

  The materials from which labyrinths are made vary greatly. Some have stone paths; Roman ones have mosaic tiles; in England, Germany and Scandinavia they are made as turf-covered mounds.

  The communities on the island of Crete were relatively small scale with the largest population at Knossos near the end of 3000 BCE approximately 18,000 people.

  When the temple palaces of Minoan Crete were rediscovered in the early 1900’s, what archeologists found were frescos of “beautiful elegant women dressed in exquisite costumes (long skirts of elaborately woven fabric or intricate design) frequently naked above the waist. The frescos also depict the women socializing with men at festivals, riding in chariots driven by female charioteers, participating as athletes in ritual bull games.”44 Women preside at naval festivities, launching boats and welcoming home voyagers, and are predominantly shown as priestess and Goddess, maintaining a central position in government, arts and religious practices.

  The Throne room at the Palace in Knossos was decorated with a circle and crescent (moon); guardian Griffins were painted on the walls and on either side of the Throne itself. Men were painted in frescos but identified as attendants, musicians, farmers, craftsmen, sailors and cupbearers, not as priests or king/consorts.