Morris, Christine "Rejecting the Embrace of the Goddess? Minoan Archaeology and the Divine Feminine." Paper presented at the Shaking the Tree, Breaking the Bough: Frazer’s Golden Bough at 100, Melbourne, Australia, February 11, 2023. In New Age Movements, Occultism, and Spiritualism Research Library. Archives and Special Collections. Valdosta State University. Valdosta, GA.

This paper is a point of departure from the Cretan Bronze Age ideas about Minoan female divinity strongly shaped by Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of the palace of Knossos. Evans, in turn, was influenced by contemporaries such as James Frazer and, to a greater extent, by Jane Harrison; but - equally importantly - his ideas were shaped by his lived experience: the wider historical, political and intellectual context, for example, conceptualizations of women’s bodies, reproduction and motherhood, and the changing political configurations of colonialism, nationhood and war. Study of this intellectual past should not be thought of as an arid scholarly exercise, since through it we can explore Evans’ vision of the Minoan divine world and gain a clearer understanding of the influence of his modes of thought on contemporary scholarship. The study of Minoan ritual and religion has, of course, not remained static since Evans; new finds and different approaches have provided opportunities for reframing the Minoan sacred landscape, but at the same time the older or traditional ideas of a Mother Goddess, a focus on fertility, vestiges of matriarchy, and a goddess-son/lover constellation remain part of the conversation. In this paper, Morris proposes to explore and revisit some of Evans’s ideas about female deities, touching on several intersecting themes with the aim of disentangling further the labyrinth of Goddess-related ideas which emerged from Evans’s work while also paying close attention to key archaeological evidence and considering why it seems resistant to consensus in interpretation. The themes will include consideration of the fluidity and development (even inconsistency) of his ideas which are much less fixed than they are often represented; his conceptualization of a Mother Goddess in the context of contemporary ideologies of motherhood; and how he explores ideas of monotheism in relation to modern Christian religion, with both of these threads of thought continuing to impact on tendencies to see a Minoan Goddess who is "one" rather than "many."

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