X. B (ii) (/), ANNEX

WAS THERE A RENAISSANCE OF MINOAN
RELIGION IN HELLENIC HISTORY?

IN the pre-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic history there were several
religious movements that were felt by the Hellenes at the time to be,
in some sense, exotic. The chief instances were the worship of Dionysus,
the rites, poems, and ideas associated with the name of Orpheus, and
the Pythagorean School of Philosophy. If some, at any rate, of the
elements in these divers religious practices, experiences, and beliefs were
un-Hellenic in reality, there were two different possible quarters
from which they might have made their way into Hellenic life. Either
they might have been introduced through the radiation of some living
contemporary non-Hellenic culture or cultures with which the Hellenic
World was already in contact in the pre-Alexandrine Age—as it is
notorious that a number of alien religious influences were introduced
subsequently, in the sequel to the overthrow of the Achaemenian Empire
by Alexander—or alternatively such un-Hellenic religious phenomena
in a pre-Alexandrine Hellas might have been, not importations from
living contemporary societies, but evocations of ghosts from the dead
past of an antecedent civilization to which the Hellenic was affiliated. The
hypothesis of an Hellenic renaissance of Minoan religion has been found
convincing—at least as far as the worship of Dionysus is concerned—by
one of the most eminent of the twentieth-century Western authorities
on the subject.

'The ecstatic cult of Dionysos, which spread all over Greece in the
Archaic Age, was a powerful religious movement. I venture to think that
its strength is better understood if we assume that it was not an importa-
tion of a completely foreign god and form of religion but the revival of old
Minoan and Mycenaean religious ideas, and perhaps also rites, which had
for a time fallen into the background. The ideas peculiar to the Minoan
religion were suppressed under the overwhelming onset of the gods and
religious ideas which the [Achaean barbarian] conquerors brought with
them; but, just as the old gods did not vanish but mingled with the new-
comers, so the old religious ideas persisted in secret. When the oppor-
tunity arose they emerged once more to cause a religious revolution, the
occasion being the acceptance of a foreign cult with kindred ideas of a
mystic character. This was the Thracian worship of Dionysos combined
with the Phrygian form of the same cult, which had already been trans-
f orrned through the influence of the native religion of Asia Minor, wHich
in its turn also contained elements of Minoan origin, identical with or
similar to Minoan ideas which still survived in Greece.*1

In the historical perspective of a latter-day Western historian, this
hypothetical renaissance, in Hellenic history, of supposedly repressed
elements of Minoan religion would have counterparts in the historic

1 Nilsson, M. P.: The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and its Survival in Greek Religion
(London 1927, Milford), p, 504.