Waking the Moon

of the ancient Minoan civilization, which was an incredibly sophisticated and advanced civilization, even by our standards. Flush toilets, hot running water, and according to the frescoes and pottery they left, they had an absolutely fantastic sense of style. And they may have had optical lenses, for telescopes and spectacles, and wet-cell batteries—and this is four, five thousand years ago! Compared to the Minoans, the ancient Greeks were really just a bunch of pederastic misogynist thugs.”

“But then what happened to them?”

Fritz looked wistful, almost sad. “That entire part of the Mediterranean was blown off the map by a gigantic volcanic eruption on Thera around 1628 B.C. Fffft—” He snapped his fingers. “Like that. Utterly destroyed, all in one day.”

“But Crete wasn’t destroyed,” I broke in.

“It might as well have been. The island of Thera had been central to the Minoans, and Thera was completely obliterated—like Pompeii. So the Minoans lost one of their most important ports and cities. And their religion took a hit as well. The so-called labyrinth at Knossos, and all these other temples on Crete, had already sustained some pretty serious damage from earthquakes. They all had been rebuilt, but when Thera blew, that was pretty much the death knell for Minoa.”

Fritz sighed. “All that beauty! Crete could have rivaled ancient Egypt—and we’ll probably never know the extent of what we lost when we lost that culture.”

“What were they like? Were they goddess-worshipers?”

“Ha!” exclaimed Fritz. “You have been listening to your young friend’s mother! Yes, Virginia, they were goddess-worshipers, at least as far as we can tell. The Minoans left no literary accounts of their culture, but they did leave wonderful images: paintings, statues, temples, the entire marvelous temple- labyrinth at Knossos; and almost all of their religious images seem to be of goddesses or priestesses.

“The frescoes show that women were not only worshiped in Crete but probably also ruled there, and certainly played a major part in the political structure of the city-states. They seemed to have some sort of bull- worship, which was pretty common in the ancient world. It’s very likely that the bull-worship as well as the goddess icons originally derived from central Europe, where we’ve found numerous similar icons and images.”

“What about their religion—I mean, what did they do?”

He frowned. “What did they do?”

“You know, did they worship a golden calf, the Ark of the Covenant, stuff like that?”

“Who knows? The frescoes indicate they were real naturalists—there are beautiful, beautiful paintings of sea animals, of flowers and plants and trees. Sir Arthur Evans, who led much of the restoration at Knossos, liked to think they were flower children. You know, very airy-fairy, artsy-fartsy, wearing pretty clothes and jewelry, skirts for boys and girls and lots of makeup. A quote-unquote ‘feminine’ culture: fancy hairdos, ritual transvestism, lots of attractive young people doing aerobics in the stadia.”

“Sounds like Dupont Circle.”

Fritz smiled. “Well, Evans has been proved to be wrong, at least in part. It turns out that the Minoans, at least some of them, were actually more bloodthirsty than we first imagined. There is a famous fresco that shows women sharing communion in some kind of religious ritual—only women, which is interesting in itself—and some of the tablets we’ve deciphered in Linear B list as much as 14,000 liters of wine used in a single year at one major temple site.”

“Mass alcohol consumption.”

“To put it mildly. There’s also evidence that opium was very widely used. Some people have said that the labyrinth—palace, really—at Knossos looks like it was designed by an architect under the influence.”

Fritz laughed, somewhat grimly. “But some of them may have really needed a few drinks—

“Not long ago, archaeologists managed to decipher some of the script on one of the Linear A tablets that postdates the Thera eruption. It was a record of the hieros gamos, the so-called ‘sacred marriage’ that was supposed to appease the Great Goddess. Apparently these particular survivors believed that she had caused the volcanic eruption as punishment to them, for turning from her to these new young sky-gods from the north.

“But even before we learned that, we may have found evidence of the same ritual being performed. Back in 1979 another group of archaeologists discovered a small shrine overlooking Knossos— Anemospilia, on Mount Juktas. In addition to an arena where sacrifices were performed, and a sort of sacred rock—like those goddess-meteorites found in parts of old Europe—an altar was found, with the ossified remains of a seventeen-year-old boy on top of it. His legs were drawn up to his chest and might have been tied there, though of course we don’t know that. What we do know is that he was murdered—sacrificed, there was a very ornate curved dagger in the shape of a crescent moon found next to the skeleton. A lunula, they call it. Bone analysis indicates that the blood had been completely drained from the upper portion of his body…”

I gasped, but Fritz wasn’t finished.

“That’s not all. It seems that this particular sacrifice was being carried out at the exact moment of the terrible earthquake that leveled Knossos in 1700 B.C. So when archaeologists searched the area further, they found the bodies of three other people who had been taking part in the sacrifice—skeletons of temple servants. One of them was holding a shattered rhyton with a bull painted on it. There was also a man, possibly a priest or priest-king—he was wearing a sacred ring—lying on his back in front of the altar. Probably the guy who used the knife. And finally the body of a woman, a priestess, who appears to have been anemic—so there may have been some kind of ritual bloodletting going on with her as well. The earthquake must have struck minutes after this boy was killed—the rhyton had traces of blood on it, and it had probably been full when the whole temple collapsed and buried them all. Nice, huh? Kind of makes you long for the good old days.”

I stumbled down from the table and started for the door, my legs shaking so that I could hardly walk.

“What’s the matter?” cried Fritz. “Katherine! Are you all right? Here, sit down, you look like you’re going to pass out—”

“I can’t,” I whispered. At the door I turned and stammered, “Thanks, Fritz. I—I’m sorry, I don’t feel well, I have to leave—”

“The Minoans really were a highly sophisticated people!” he called a little desperately, as I fled toward my office. “Caligula’s Romans were much, much worse—”

But I turned the corner before I could hear any more.

The halls were empty, so there was no one to stare after me as I ran down the corridor, first to Dylan’s office cubicle, which was empty, and then to the tiny room off the main library where he had been archiving the Kroeber collection.

He wasn’t there. I stood for a moment, staring down at the digitizer and the neat stacks of photos, each appended with a number in Dylan’s careful, European hand. I drew several shuddering breaths and tried to calm myself—he was probably in my office looking for me, he could have gone downstairs to get a soda, or to the bathroom—

His battered motorcycle jacket was tossed over a chair. It had been there for weeks, after Dylan had worn it against the rain one morning and then forgotten about it. I picked it up, holding it close to my face as I inhaled, the cracked leather rough against my fingers and his smell still clinging to it. After a moment I let it slide from my hand to the floor.

I forced myself to walk back to my office, fixing in my mind’s eye just where he would be standing—there, by the window, his back to me as it was the first time I saw him—and how I would slip up behind him, slide my arms around his waist and pull him to me and whisper that we weren’t going to wait till four o’clock, it was too hot, too scary, it was his birthday, we were going to leave now…

My office was empty, the video screens black and dead as when I had left them a few hours ago. My whole body shook as I approached the desk and saw the note there. A page torn from some anthropological journal, one corner damp from where it had been weighted with a coffee mug, and the ink smeared so that Dylan’s careful hand looked rushed, almost frantic.