As to the forms of worship with which the Great Mother of Crete was
served, comparatively little is known. The most striking feature
is the seemingly total absence of what we should call temples.
In this respect Crete presents a curious contrast to Egypt: in
Egypt we have an abundance of vast temples, but practically no
surviving palaces; in Crete the case is exactly reversed, and we
have huge palaces but no temples. The reason of this appears to
be, as Dr. Mackenzie has pointed out,[*] that the Minoan religion
was of an entirely domestic character. 'At Knossos all shrines
are either house-shrines or palace-shrines. The divinities are
household and dynastic divinities having an ancestral character
and an ancestral reputation to maintain.' To put it in a word,
worship in the Minoan religion was essentially Family Worship. No
doubt there were public ceremonials also, in which the King, who
seems to have been Priest as well as King (if, indeed, he was not
viewed as an incarnation of deity), performed the principal part; but
there can have been nothing like the habitual publicity of parts of
the worship of the god which was contemplated in the great peristyle
courts of the Egyptian temples and the processional arrangements
of part of their service. 'At Knossos,' says Dr. Mackenzie, 'we
found, as a matter of fact, that there was a tendency for each
house to have a room set apart for family worship.
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