Otherwise she was Hera, the sister and the spouse of Zeus, and
in this case the story of the marriage of the great goddess and
the supreme god probably represents the fusion of religious ideas
on the part of the two races, the conquerors taking over the deity
of the conquered race, and uniting her with the Sky God whom they
had brought with them from their Northern home. She also survived
as Aphrodite, as Demeter, and, in her capacity as Lady of the Wild
Beasts, as Artemis.
The suggestion of the association of Zeus with the Minoan goddess
may have been given to the Northern conquerors by a feature of the
Cretan religion which they found already in existence. On certain
seal impressions and engraved gems there are indications that the
great Nature Goddess was sometimes associated with a male divinity.
This being, however, seems to have occupied an obscure and inferior
position. In most of the scenes in which he is represented he, is
either in the background, or reverentially stands before the seated
female divinity. It would appear that the Achaeans appropriated this
insignificant god as the representative of their own Zeus, attributed
to him birth from the Great Goddess in her own cave-sanctuary of
Dicte, and endowed him with many of the attributes which she had
formerly possessed, including the Double Axe emblem of sovereignty,
so that in Hellenic times the supreme deity of the island was always
the Cretan Zeus, Zeus of the Double Axe, though in reality he was
no Cretan god at all, or at best a secondary divinity, dressed
in borrowed plumes and with greatness thrust upon him.
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