Secret_History

Chapter 8: The Culture of Stones 301
even border on an outside wall. There is something very odd about the idea of
constructing a luxurious building in whose interior people would necessarily feel as
if they were inside a cave. Yet they had the means to build in totally modern
windows, perhaps even glazed windows.
In a state of devastation the place must have looked like a tangle of artificial caves
in which nobody could find his way about… and the impression of mystery,
vastness and confusion must have been complete.
No materials were carried away from Knossos to be used for peasant villages…
The place was avoided with superstitious fear. What exactly happened, why
Knossos was avoided like the site of a gallows or a witches’ dancing floor, remains
to be clarified. 207
In the end, Wunderlich came to the realization, based on the objective evidence,
that the “palace” of King Minos, so identified by Evans, was nothing but a
necropolis. It had never been intended for the living, but was a place where a
powerful cult of the dead practiced elaborate sacrifices, burial rites, and ritual
games of death. He realized that the legend of Crete was essentially accurate, and
that legend said that it was not a “home to a wise sovereign who fostered arts and
sports”, but that it was a sinister place belonging entirely to the underworld and a
devouring god. In other words, it had the equivalent reputation among the
civilizations of the Mediterranean that a graveyard and mausoleum have in our
own society. Just as our society has a tendency to tell “ghost stories around the
campfire”, about terrifying apparitions of the dead in our own cemeteries, or
“cities of the dead”, so were similar tales told about Crete, where the only living
inhabitants were the “resident undertakers”, the “embalmers”, and experts on
death and the afterlife. Crete didn’t need defensive walls because it was the place
that the other cities and countries brought their dead for “cult care”. It may also
have been the site of human sacrifice for cult reasons as well. Wunderlich wrote
his own observations:
I had visited the Minoan sites to explore the traces of early geological catastrophes,
but what I found were curious contradictions. Were the excavated labyrinthine
complexes really the palatial residences of glorious kings, of the legendary Minos
and his brothers Sarpedon and Rhadamanthys? In fact, could these places be
regarded as residences at all? My geological observations argued against any such
assumption. Places of worship, shrines, sanctified earth, yes, but not places of
human settlement. Comparison with other Mediterranean cultures suggested a cult
of the dead […] that would mean, however, that Minoan culture, to the extent that
we now know it, was almost entirely a funerary cult. 208
207 Munster, quoted by Wunderlich, The Secret of Crete, (New York: Macmillan 1974) p. 85.
208 Ibid.