Erik nodded wordlessly and moved to the opposite end of the chamber. He trained his flashlight on a large stalactite and allowed the beam to travel down its length.
Cassie moved off to the opposite end of the room. She followed Erik’s method by beginning with the upper edges of stalactites and tracing them down. After about ten minutes, her eyes began to blur. She started seeing faces and forms in the rock. Quite a few of them looked like Casper the Ghost. At least they were friendly. She shook her head to clear away the mirages.
Walking back to Griffin, she announced, “It’s hopeless. I can’t find anything.”
“Nor can I.” Griffin turned to her. “Perhaps it’s time we proceed to the lower chambers.”
“There’s more?” Cassie cried. She couldn’t rally much enthusiasm for the idea of spending time in a space that was bound to be even darker and damper than where she already was.
“Erik?” Griffin called questioningly.
The security coordinator rejoined them. “No dice,” he said. “I didn’t see anything like the symbols in those photos you gave me.”
“Then it’s unanimous,” the scrivener announced. “We descend.”
Cassie looked upward wistfully toward the bright gap in the earth several hundred feet above them. Then she turned and followed the men into the depths of the cavern. “I don’t get it. Why wouldn’t they just build a temple like the Hellenes did? Why climb all the way down here to do their rituals?”
Griffin paused and turned to answer her. “It might seem easier to build a structure for cult purposes, but the ancient peoples of old Europe saw a cosmic connection between caves and the goddess. In fact, they would have seen a space like this as the womb of the goddess—the place where birth, death, and rebirth occur.”
Cassie cast a doubtful look in his direction.
For once, Erik contributed to the conversation. “The Minoans used to bury their dead in caves like this for about a thousand years before they started building tombs above ground.”
“Tomb maybe, but womb? Where do you get the idea that they viewed this place as an incubator too? I mean even Freud said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
Griffin smiled before turning to descend further. “I believe the proof you seek waits below.”
They found themselves in a chamber that was even larger than the one above. Erik immediately strolled off to one side to sweep the walls with the beam of his flashlight.
“Yikes, how big is this room?” Cassie asked when she reached the bottom.
“About twice the size of the one preceding it. I’d say two hundred by one hundred feet.”
The pythia could hear water dripping off in the distance. She swung her flashlight. There was another room off to the right. “Is that a pool?”
“Yes. The Minoans placed votive objects in the pool and on the stalagmites around it: bronze double axes, knife blades, clay figurines, even jewelry. But the pool is less interesting than what’s supposed to be over here.”
Cassie followed Griffin to a small chamber on the left side of the main room.
He shone his flashlight around the space. “This is called the cradle of Zeus which proves my point that the ancients thought of this cave as a place of birth as well as death.”
“Zeus!” Cassie exclaimed incredulously. “You mean the Hellene god? What’s he got to do with a Minoan shrine?”
“Everything,” Griffin hinted cryptically. “According to the ancient Hellenes, Zeus’ mother Rhea hid him in this cave to protect him from his father, Kronos. You see, Kronos had a bad habit of eating his offspring, and Rhea apparently grew tired of giving birth to her husband’s dinner. She was determined that at least one of her children should live. So, she enlisted the help of a goat named Amalthea to nurse the infant and raise him in secret in this place.”
There was a long silence as Cassie considered the tale. “OK, you’ve told me the official version of the myth. Now, what’s the real story?”
Griffin laughed out loud. “You are catching on, aren’t you? I suppose you might consider the Zeus myth to be propaganda. A way to capitalize on an existing legend and exploit it to serve the purposes of the overlord invaders.”
Cassie trained her flashlight beam on the cradle of Zeus, studying the space for a few moments. “You’re saying the Minoans had a god of their own who mythologically hatched in this cave before the Hellenes got here.”
“Quite so. We know the Minoans recognized a male deity because we have seals which show a goddess and a youth as her companion. He is usually depicted as smaller than she and in an attitude of adoration toward her. He would have been her consort—a year god whose life cycle symbolized the passage of the seasons. The goddess gave birth to him in the spring. He matured and became her lover in the summer which resulted in the fruitfulness of the land. In the autumn he died as the crops were harvested, and the goddess mourned for him in the winter when nothing would grow. The cycle began again in the spring.”
Cassie felt shocked. “I guess they didn’t have a problem with incest.”
Griffin hastened to explain. “You have to understand that the ancients believed that all life proceeded from the goddess. In that sense, every part of creation was a child of hers. And it wasn’t the Minoans who invented the myth of the goddess and her consort. It exists in nearly every culture in this part of the world. In Sumer, it was Innana and Damuzi. In Babylon, it was Ishtar and Tammuz. In Egypt, it was Isis and Osiris. In Canaan, it was Anath and Baal. Even Hellenic myth offered a counterpart in Aphrodite and Adonis. This commonality suggests that the prototype for the tale originated in old Europe and was carried here by successive waves of immigrants.”
Cassie glanced over to Erik who had already searched more than half
