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BOOK REVIEWS WALTER PÖTSCHER, Aspekte Und BOOK REVIEWS WALTER PÖTSCHER,Aspekte und Probleme der minoischen Religion. Ein Versuch (Religionswissenschaftliche Texte und Studien, Band 4) Hildesheim- Zürich-New York: Georg Olms Verlag 1990 (VIII + 288 p.) ISBN 3-487-09359-6, DM 98.00 The interpretation of Minoan religion is notoriously difficult: given the lack of intelligible texts, scholars rely on mainly iconographical evidence; the correct assessment of images from a foreign culture is tricky even for the specialist. Analogies from other cultures may be called in, and so may theories about early religion-but the help could prove a trap and is not well received today: it has become increasingly clear how much Arthur Evans' concept of Minoan religion owed to the Cambridge Ritualists. Thus, a non-archaeologist who ventures into this maze may seem audacious; Professor Potscher's book will have to brave engrained iconographists. It proceeds in three steps. Part I discusses isolated objects-the well known double axes, bull horns ("horns of consecra- tion") and heads, trees and twigs, pillars, columns, birds and snakes (pp. 17-107). P. understands them as "Erscheinungsform" of a divinity, be it the (or a) female or the/a male god-the indecision in the articles arises from P.s stance in the question of Minoan polytheism: it is polytheistic in a rather peculiar way, the goddess and the god being both one or several, according to the intuition of the worshiper. The concept of "Erscheinungsform" is central, and P. distinguishes it carefully from the more usual "symbol": the column does not stand for the goddess, it is one of her forms. Part II treats combinations of these objects (pp. 109-169). Being forms of only two deities, they allow for only two meanings, a synonymous and a non-synonymous one. Synonymous combinations depict the deity in a more powerful form, non-synonymous ones have a sexual meaning (the sexual character of the objects follows from the concept of "Erscheinungsform"): they display the hieros gamos between goddess and god. The reasoning is stringent-on its own premises. Part III is less uniform. Chapter 1 analyzes the Haghia Triada sar- cophagus, another notorious problem (171-191). The solution is ingenious; P.s key is to take the different background colours as indica- tions of time-blue the night, yellow the morning, white the day; this brings the images into a ritual sequence, from a morning procession to the 262 epiphany of a Dying God. Chapter 3 looks back from Minoan religion to Qatal Huyuk, in the wake of Mellaart; P. contradicts only his interpreta- tion of the women with upturned arms and legs under whom is a bull's head: where the excavator had seen births, P. again prefers intercourse. After some general remarks on Aegean connections and the relationship between Minoan and Mycenaean religion, part III closes with a chapter on the "lustral baths"; P. ingeniously explains the enigmatic lack of drains from ritual. Some general considerations on the nature of Minoan religion, its polytheism and its mythology close the book. At least the present reader left the book with mixed feelings. Less because it is sometimes unnecessarily long-winded (e.g. the discussion about Epaphos on pp. 33-44) and because P.s method is often woolly (blatantly so when he argues against Mellaart by invoking realism on p. 199 and denying realism as an argument against himself by taking refuge to miracles on p. 200); less even because we are altogether back in the world of Sir Arthur Evans where Minoan religion is a fertility religion, with ritual gamoi to guarantee the growth of plants, animals and humans, where even the Dying God is resurrected and where religion concerns only the individual whose feelings may be, as P. does at the end, illustrated with verses from Eichendorff-such a thoroughly Romantic concept of religion calls for respect (even if the present reviewer fundamentally disagrees), as does the mastering of sources and bibliography. More pro- blematical is P.s concept of "Erscheinungsform" which looks rather like a personal hunch than a valid theory, and whose results (an obsessive amount of gamoi) decidedly speak against it. P.s assessment of Minoan polytheism is more original, though not without problems either: Minoan religion appears illogical and primitive, worlds apart from the distinctness of the other polytheistic religions of the 2nd millennium, though both P. s valid arguments for an Aegean background as well as his final considera- tions on Minoan mythology try to bring it back into its surrounding world. Universität Basel FRITZ GRAF Seminar für Klassische Philologie Nadelberg 6 CH-4051 Basel .
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