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Evans, Arthur
The Mycenaean tree and pillar cult and its Mediterranean relations: with illustrations from recent Cretan finds — London, 1901

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https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.8944#0037
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MYCENAEAN TREE AND PILLAR CULT.

135

familiar, in order to bring home something of the inner spirit of what once
equally existed on the Aegean side. But over and above the more general
points of comparison, such as those already indicated, there are correspond-
ences in the details of the Mycenaean cult which make it necessary to bear
in mind the fact already insisted on, that what has come down to us on the
other side in a Semitised guise may itself be largely due to the former
existence on the more Eastern Mediterranean shores of indigenous ethnic
elements akin to those of prehistoric Greece. Into these more special points
of conformity it is unnecessary to go minutely at this stage. The idea of
the dual, triple and multiple representation of the same divinity in columnar
or arboreal groups, external features, such as the shape of the altar base or
' the horns of consecration,' the conception of the sacred pillar itself as
performing an architectonic function and serving as an actual ' pillar of the
house,'—these and other similar points of coincidence in the Semitic and
Mycenaean cults may be cited as showing that the parallelism implies a
very close inter-connexion and at times, perhaps, even an underlying
ethnic community. In some cases, however, these correspondences receive
a simple explanation from a common Egyptian influence, which, as will be
shown, has left its mark as clearly upon the externals of the primitive
Aegean cult as it did on that of Phoenicia and on the monuments of the
'Hittite' religion that are found throughout a large part of Anatolia and
Northern Syria.

§ 15.—The Horns of Consecration.

The piece of ritual furniture already referred to above, by anticipation,
as ' the horns of consecration,'1 plays a very important part in the Mycenaean
cult. It is a kind of impost or base terminating at the two ends in two horn-
like excrescences. At times these terminations have the appearance of being
actually horns of oxen, but more generally they seem to be a conventional
imitation of what must be regarded as unquestionably the original type.
This cult object is evidently of a portable nature. Sometimes it is placed on
an altar. Upon the remarkable fragment of a steatite pyxis from Knossos 2 it is
laid on the top of a large square altar of isodomic masonry. On the summit
of the 'dove shrines' from Mycenae it is superimposed in a reduplicated
form on what appears to be the more usual altar-block with incurving sides.3
At other times it rises above the entablature of an archway4 connected with a
sacred tree or on the roof of a shrine. It is frequently set at the foot of sacred
trees. On a crystal lentoid from the Idaean cave8 we see it in its most
realistic and horn-like aspect immediately behind an incurved altar in front
of a group of three trees. On a gem from Palaeokastro in Eastern Crete 0 it
appears at the foot of a palm-tree. On the vase from Old Salainis it is set

1 See p. 107.

- See Fig. 3, p. 103.

3 See Fig. <>.">, p. 191.

* See Figs. 56, 58.
' See Fig. 25, p. 142.
0 See below, p. 154.
 
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