ater Greeks came into the island and found
this deity in possession, she became identified, in the various
aspects of her many-sided nature, with various goddesses of the
Hellenic Pantheon. Foremost and specially she became Rhea, the
mother of the gods, who had fled to Crete to bear her son Zeus.
Otherwise she was Hera, the sister and the spouse of Zeus, and
in this case the story of the marriage of the great goddess and
the supreme god probably represents the fusion of religious ideas
on the part of the two races, the conquerors taking over the deity
of the conquered race, and uniting her with the Sky God whom they
had brought with them from their Northern home. She also survived
as Aphrodite, as Demeter, and, in her capacity as Lady of the Wild
Beasts, as Artemis.

The suggestion of the association of Zeus with the Minoan goddess
may have been given to the Northern conquerors by a feature of the
Cretan religion which they found already in existence. On certain
seal impressions and engraved gems there are indications that the
great Nature Goddess was sometimes associated with a male divinity.
This being, however, seems to have occupied an obscure and inferior
position. In most of the scenes in which he is represented he, is
either in the background, or reverentially stands before the seated
female divinity. It would appear that the Achaeans appropriated this
insignificant god as the representative of their own Zeus, attributed
to him birth from the Great Goddess in her own cave-sanctuary of
Dicte, and endowed him with many of the attributes which she had
formerly possessed, including the Double Axe emblem of sovereignty,
so that in Hellenic times the supreme deity of the island was always
the Cretan Zeus, Zeus of the Double Axe, though in reality he was
no Cretan god at all, or at best a secondary divinity, dressed
in borrowed plumes and with greatness thrust upon him.

As to the forms of worship with which the Great Mother of Crete was
served, comparatively little is known. The most striking feature
is the seemingly total absence of what we should call temples.
In this respect Crete presents a curious contrast to Egypt: in
Egypt we have an abundance of vast temples, but practically no
surviving palaces; in Crete the case is exactly reversed, and we
have huge palaces but no temples. The reason of this appears to
be, as Dr. Mackenzie has pointed out,[*] that the Minoan religion
was of an entirely domestic character.