free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

Roman, Byzantine and Arab Crete
Professor Dawkins saw in Thrace in the early years of this
century. 1 In one of these, the men of the village parade in goat skins.
One of them goes through a marriage ceremony, after which he is
killed, mourned by his wife, and finally resurrected. In another, a
masked man dressed in sheep- or goat-skins is called king and
escorted in a cart led by boys in. girls’ clothing. His page distributes
wine. The king scatters seed and finally he is thrown into the river. The
connections of these crude vege-tation ceremonies with Dionysus are
obvious; they are part of the sub-merged nine-tenths of the iceberg of
belief and ritual which has survived right through the Christian era.
Christianity did not try to assimilate these Mummers’ Plays. Other
primitive rituals, however, turned Christian. There is a festival –
Thracian in origin, but since the exchange of populations in 1923 it
takes place in Macedonia – called the Anastenaria, where villagers
dance on red-hot coals in a state of semi-hysteria. They are attempting
to escape from normality, to enter a mystical communion with god,
like Euripidcs’s Bacchants. But they commune nowadays not with
Dionysus, the pagan god of the sap, but with SS. Constantine and
Elenc; and they claim that Elene goes before them, pouring cool water
on to the coals.
In this sort of way, all over Greece, Christianity did not so much
destroy as incorporate paganism. The same tiling happened in Crete,
though not so much with Dionysus and the gods of the east, for they
were never so powerful in Crete. Crete’s biggest stake was in the old
pre-Hellenic deities, and in Zeus, who was a local. His fortunes make an
interesting story. The Greek mythologers tell of the birth of Zeus;
luckily we know from other sources that he died as well.
Cronus the Titan, castrating his father Uranus and throwing his
genitals into the sea, usurped the power. But fearing that, according to
the prophecy, he in his turn would be dethroned by one of his children,
he swallowed each of them immediately after birth. His wife Rhea in
her despair hit on a resourceful trick. She bore Zeus secretly at dead of
night and gave the baby to her motherj Mother Earth, to be spirited
away. Then, wrapping a stone in swaddling clothes, she offered it to
Cronus, who swallowed it, suspecting nothing. Mother Earth took her
grandson and left him in a cave on Goat Mountain - probably the cave
of Psychro on Mt Dicte, the highest peak of the Lassithi massif in
eastern Crete.
In this cave the baby Zeus was cared for by two nymphs, daughters
of Melisseus, king of Crete. Around his golden cradle stood the Curetes,
dancing a leaping dance – and the leaping Pediktos of eastern Crete is
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