When The Drummers Were Women
Excerpt from Chapter Eight
by Layne Redmond
This information particularly relates to Crete and the tradition of the Bee Priestesses.
The Goddess of Catal Huyuk
The Neolithic goddess of Catal Huyuk survived the city's extinction to become Cybele, the major deity of ancient Anatolia. Historians next find her among the Hittites of the second millennium B.C.E. under the name of Kubaba. Mellaart reports a concentration of shrines to the ancient Anatolian goddess around the Hittite Midas City in west central Turkey and adds, "The Goddess and music is an ever-recurring combination." In these religious centers a number of representations of Hittite women playing frame drums have been found. In particular there is a representation of a sacred marriage rite in which women are drumming.
Kubaba, Cybebe, Dindymene, Rhea (of Crete), Dictynna (also of Crete), Berecynthia are all regional variations of Cybele, whose rituals traveled with the trade winds throughout the Mediterranean world. At Catal Huyuk she was depicted seated on her throne flanked by two felines -- a descendant of the Paleolithic Venus, Great Mother of gods, humans and animals. In the classical world, she was worshiped as "Cybele, the All-Begetting Mother, who beats a drum to mark the rhythm of life." Her frame drum was one of her most important symbols. It is the ancient symbol of the moon, and of the primordial egg of creation, whose beat is the pulse of life.
Her throne was the high mountain peak where heaven meets earth; The Lady of the Mountain was one of her epithets. In her left hand she holds her frame drum, painted red; with her right hand she pours forth a libation from her lotus bowl. Her lotus bowl, the patera, was the great cosmic vulva which poured forth the water of life -- honey, milk, wine or blood.
BIRDS OF THE MUSES, the Bee Priestesses
An omphalos is typically shaped like a beehive, though some are conical or egg-shaped. Bees have an ancient reputation as the bringers of order, and their hives served as models for organizing temples in many Mediterranean cultures. Priestesses at Cybele's temples in Asia Minor, Greece and Rome were called Melissai or Melissae, the Greek and Latin words for bees. Deborah was the ancient Hebrew name for the bee priestess.
Bees, familiars of the goddess since Catal Huyuk, appear frequently in classical mythology. They are called "the Birds of the Muses" and are attracted to the heavenly fragrances of flowers, from which they make the divine nectar, honey. Melissa, the goddess as Queen-Bee, taught mortals how to ferment honey into mead. In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, the Melissai feed on honey and are "inspired to speak the truth." These traditions made the omphalos the place of sacred utterance -- the oracular power associated with the buzzing of bees and the buzzing vibration of life.
Honey is antibacterial, and its mildly laxative properties and sweet taste made it a primary ingredient in ancient medicines. It was widely believed to be a source of divine nourishment. In the myths of the ancient world, honey often nourished a divine child raised in secret by a goddess in the depths of caves.
In The Georgics, Virgil relates one of these stories. Cybele defied Saturn -- who routinely devoured their sons at birth to protect his sovereignty -- by hiding the infant Jupiter (Greek Zeus) in a cave on Crete. She instructed her Corybantes (young warriors who danced for her) to clash their cymbals and beat their drums, making as much noise as possible in order to hide the child's cries. The bees came and nourished Jupiter on their honey, enabling him to survive. When he grew to manhood, he overthrew the Titan gods. The advantages of civilization ("the civility of law, prosperity, the grandeur of cities and delights of the countryside") are his gifts, dedicated to the bees.
Virgil also described a means to attract a swarm of bees to a new hive baited with scented herbs and flowers: When a column of bees floats by, the frame drum and cymbal of Cybele should be played to attract them.
Rebirth
The omphalos was also egg-shaped, often with a bird perched on it and a snake wrapped around it. It represented the hive of the bees, the egg of the bird and the egg of the sacred snake -- all transformative symbols of birth and regeneration.
From Mycenaean times, omphalos was also the name of a beehive-shaped tomb. It was revered as the mound of the goddess, marking the point where the forces of the underworld, earth and heaven intersected. Harrison called it "a grave-mound, an omphalos-sanctuary, and she who is the spirit of the earth incarnate rises up to bring and be new life."
The Tree of Life
The Tree of Life was said to grow at the site of the omphalos. It represented the vertical passageway between spiritual worlds, where the dead can move from the underworld to the heavens. In many creation myths, it shoots up from the navel of the earth, often with a pure spring at its base that flows with honey or milk. At the root of the Tree lives a goddess with the power to regenerate life through her gift of life-giving fluid -- milk from her breasts or the honey-like sap of the tree.
In Sumerian mythology, Lilith, a variation of the Mistress of Wild Beasts, lived in the Tree of Life, and the Biblical story of Eve is a distortion of this tradition. In the Odyssey, Homer says that Calypso lived in a cave in a sacred forest on an island at the navel of the world.
In many versions of this legend, the wise serpent dwells at the foot of the tree and in its upper branches lives the sacred bird. The image recalls the Hindu kundalini, often visualized as a serpent, coiled at the base of the spine. This correspondence is strengthened by the fact that the sign associated with the concept of the omphalos is a small circle or dot within a circle -- in Hindu cosmology, the most primitive form of the yantra, ancient symbol of the bindu, lotus or chakra. This sign was often painted on the skin heads of frame drums. The Honey Doctrine of Hinduism delineated the secret knowledge of the seer, and the kundalini's sound is described in the Sat-Cakra-Nirupana as "the indistinct hum of swarms of love-mad bees."
The bendir, a contemporary North African frame drum, has several strings strung across its head that buzz when the drum is played. It may well be a descendant of the ancient bee priestesses' frame drums.
The omphalos was the place where libations -- sacrificial offerings of liquids like water, milk, wine, honey and oil -- were poured. They were offered in gratitude to the Goddess, the source of all sustenance. In the ancient world, there was no prayer without ritual, and the simplest ritual was a libation of wine and sprinkling of frankincense in the flame. Ritual behavior was a means of focusing the mind. The process of invoking the Goddess through ritual and prayer, often accompanied by the powerful music of flute and frame drum, was a means of visualizing what was hoped for. The use of creative visualization in contemporary therapeutic practices as a means of programming thought processes is very much the same technique.
Crete
Like Egypt, Crete was the site of a very early, very advanced society. Arthur Evans, whose excavations of the palace at Knossos uncovered the existence of the Minoans, considered their civilization "in some respects more modern in its equipments than anything produced by classical Greece." In particular their achievements in government and the peaceful arts set them apart from the rest of Mediterranean cultures. Minoan women were powerful leaders in religion and society.
The Minoan civilization was the full flowering of a culture with a sacred female presence at its center. Crete, a Greek word, means "strong, or ruling, goddess." Of all the ancient civilizations, the Cretan goddess ruled the longest as a goddess who was One in Herself, without losing all or part of her power to a divine husband. No comparable Cretan male deity has been identified.
Minoan culture shares many symbols with predynastic Egypt, including the ankh and Hathor-like images such as cows suckling calves. Evans remarks that the Minoan snake goddess and her attributes show a remarkable resemblance to Wazet, a manifestation of Hathor who sometimes appears as a serpent and carries a papyrus scepter with a snake wound around it. The orientation of the palaces on Crete was determined in relation to Sirius, as was the position of Hathor's temple on the Nile. Like the Egyptians, the Cretans celebrated the New Year at the early rising of Sirius in July. Evans speculates that during the unsettling time of the military unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, refugees from Lower Egypt may have immigrated to Crete.
But there is also an influx of West Asian imagery, possibly arriving through Cyprus. In Anatolia, Cybele is the goddess of Mt. Ida; the Cretan Mt. Ida is a sacred mountain. Dikte is the name of sacred places in both areas. Remarkably similar Neolithic clay figures, mostly of women, are found in Crete as in Asia Minor.
This powerful Cretan goddess, honored in dance and in the bull ring, was called Rhea or Ariadne by the later classical Greeks. Rhea sat before the sacred cave "playing on a brazen drum, and compelling man's attention to the oracles of the goddess." Her drum dispelled all evil influences and served to summon and dismiss the sacred bees. Her symbols were the bull, the dove, the serpent, the sacred tree, her double axe and the labyrinth. From the oldest of times, her rites were celebrated with orgiastic dancing and singing.
The Labyrinth
The story of Ariadne and Theses is among the better known myths. In order to win Ariadne, Theses must kill the Minotaur -- half man, half bull -- who lives at the center of a labyrinth. Ariadne gives him a ball of string so that, having accomplished this, he can safely return to her. They marry, but later, when Theses leaves her, returning to Greece alone, Ariadne becomes the beloved of Dionysos.
The labyrinth is a widespread symbol of initiation. Ariadne is the goddess of the labyrinth; her name in Greek means "very holy." She is the daughter of the moon goddess, Parsiphae - "the all-illuminating". By offering Theses her ball of thread, Ariadne guides him through the experience of initiation. In shamanistic ritual, the beat of the drum is the thread guiding the shaman back to the natural world, and it can hardly be coincidental that Ariadne is often pictured with a frame drum. Both her marriage with Theses and her union with Dionysos are versions of hieros gamos, the sacred marriage at the heart of earlier religious traditions as well as the mystery cults of the classical world.
The classic labyrinth is a single path meant for meditative circumambulation. It was originally a spiral, but slowly evolved into the maze of angular turns familiar to us today. To enter it is to experience a ritual death; to escape from it is to be resurrected. In the ancient world, prayer was an active, trance-inducing combination of chanting, music and dance, and it is most likely that initiates danced the sacred spiral. The danced line into the labyrinth was a sacred path into the inner realm of the goddess. The Genaros dance performed at Delos in Greece commemorated Theseus's initiation rites. Dancers holding a rope signifying Ariadne's thread followed a leader into the labyrinth, spiraling right to left, the direction of death. At the center they turned, dancing out in the direction of evolution and birth, all to the rhythms of the frame drums.
Ancient labyrinths are almost always associated with caves, often appearing at the cave's mouth. Caves were the first Paleolithic temples, and the association of caves with sacred ceremonies consecrated to the goddess continued in Crete and Anatolia. In Greece and Rome, the mysteries were often revealed in cave-like grottoes or structures built to resemble artificial caves.
The labyrinth also represents descent into the unconscious structure of the mind, in search of wisdom and enlightenment. The Hindu mandala, used for concentration in Yogic meditations, is labyrinthian in design. Here the beast that must be slain becomes the forces of the unconscious. At the center is the goddess in her lotus, radiating light.
Initially the early Christian fathers rejected the use of labyrinths because of their connection to the earlier goddess traditions. Yet around the 11th century C.E., labyrinths began appearing in European cathedrals dedicated to the Virgin Mary. There is one at Chartres measuring exactly 666 feet -- the number sacred to Aphrodite. At its center is a six-petaled flower, the ancient symbol of the goddess. In the center of the flower, the medieval Master Builder of the cathedral identified himself as Daedalus -- the name of the legendary creator of the Cretan labyrinth who lived at least 2400 years earlier. But at Chartres, the devout crawled through the labyrinth on their knees - a far cry from dancing the maze to the rhythms of the drum.
Fabulous site on the Snake Goddess -- a Must Read!
Great Minoan Art Links:
Jeremy Rutter's History of the Bronze Age
Frame Drum History 
