"The Lovely Works of Marriage": Goddess Veneration and Female Initiatory Ritual in Ancient Crete

During the 2nd millennium BCE Aegean Bronze Age, the people of Crete venerated an “erotic” goddess who was associated with marriage, sexuality, and the carnal pleasures of intercourse. As a syncretized version of the Mesopotamian Inanna and Ištar and their later eastern derivatives, her arrival on the island is attributed to an increased exposure to Levantine cultures, which was facilitated by the extensive networks of international exchange (trade, diplomacy, and population shifts) that linked the Mediterranean with the Near East. The presence of the “erotic” goddess in Crete fulfilled a distinct function: she guided elite female initiates through premarital and wedding-related rites of passage that were modeled from sacred marriage, a mythology that described the marital union of two deities or a king and the “erotic” goddess. To compensate for the lacunae in texts on this matter, this study draws from literary and cultural comparative material from the Near East and eastern Mediterranean to reconstruct the structure and metaphorical significance of female premarital initiation ceremonies in Crete and Thera, a Cycladic site with a strong Cretan cultural influence. The symbolism in Mesopotamian and Canaanite love songs and erotic poetry provides analogues to the iconography within Aegean frescoes produced in elite contexts between the Middle Minoan (MM) IIIB and Late Minoan (LM) IA periods. These paintings, which suggest a heightened sociocultural and political importance placed on matrimony, coincide with a time of increased factional competition among Crete’s elite. Wedding-related rites of passage facilitated such rivalries by cementing alliances between kin groups and advertising the perpetuation of dynastic lineages, both of which were processes in which females played key social and biological roles. Images of fine clothing, copious amounts of adornment, and floral symbolism communicated to the initiates the social and sexual expectations of women as brides and wives, while reinforcing strategies of gender-specific expressions of elite identity. The Cretan “erotic” goddess encouraged women to enact their sexuality, which enabled their active participation in Crete’s cultural and political systems, while her connections to sacred marriage underscored the ways in which marital unions could be effectively used to legitimize power.