'At Knossos all shrines
are either house-shrines or palace-shrines. The divinities are
household and dynastic divinities having an ancestral character
and an ancestral reputation to maintain.' To put it in a word,
worship in the Minoan religion was essentially Family Worship. No
doubt there were public ceremonials also, in which the King, who
seems to have been Priest as well as King (if, indeed, he was not
viewed as an incarnation of deity), performed the principal part; but
there can have been nothing like the habitual publicity of parts of
the worship of the god which was contemplated in the great peristyle
courts of the Egyptian temples and the processional arrangements
of part of their service. 'At Knossos,' says Dr. Mackenzie, 'we
found, as a matter of fact, that there was a tendency for each
house to have a room set apart for family worship. Of such shrines
the palace was found to have more than one. Those shrines were
found to be in a very private part of the house, and usually to
have no thoroughfare through them.'

[Footnote *: _Annual of the British School at Athens_, vol. xiv.,
p. 366.]

What these shrines were like we may to some extent judge from the
fragmentary fresco found at Knossos, representing one of the
pillar-shrines where the Great Goddess was worshipped in her emblems
of the sacred pillars. The structure consists of a taller central
chamber, with a lower wing on either side of it. The material of
which it is built is apparently wood, faced and decorated in certain
parts with chequer-work in black-and-white plaster. The whole building
rests upon large blocks of stone, immediately above which in the
central chamber comes a solid piece of building, adorned first
with the chequer-work, and then, above this, with two half-rosettes
bordered with _kuanos_. Over this rises the open chamber of the
shrine, which contains nothing but two pillars of the familiar
Minoan-Mycenaean type, tapering downwards from the capitals. These
rise from between the sacred horns, which occur in practically
every religious scene as emblems of consecration (_cf._ the 'horns
of the altar' in the Hebrew temple worship). The lower chambers
on either side contain each a single pillar, again rising from
between the horns of consecration. A Minoan lady, dressed in a gown
of bluish-green, sits with her back to the wall of the right-hand
lower chamber, and the scale of the shrine is given by the fact
that, her seat being on the sa