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This research examines 44 images of Minoan tree cult as depicted in
sphragistic jewellery, portable objects and wall paintings from Late
Bronze Age Crete, mainland Greece and the Cyclades. The study also
compares the Aegean images with evidence for sacred trees in the Middle
and Late Bronze Age Levant, Egypt and Cyprus. The purpose of this
investigation is the production of new interpretations of Minoan images
of tree cult. Each of the chapters of the book looks at both
archaeological and iconographic evidence for tree cult. The Aegean
material is, in addition, examined more deeply through the lenses of
modified Lacanian psychoanalytic modelling, new animism, ethnographic
analogy, and a Neo-Marxist hermeneutics of suspicion. It is determined
that Minoan images of tree cult depict elite figures performing their
intimate association with the numinous landscape through the
communicative method of envisioned and enacted epiphanic ritual. The
tree in such images is a physiomorphic representation of a goddess type
known in the wider eastern Mediterranean associated with effective
rulership and with the additional qualities of fertility, nurturance,
protection, regeneration, order and stability. The representation of
this deity by elite human females in ritual performance functioned to
enhance their selfrepresentation as divinities and thus legitimise and
concretise the position of elites within the hegemonic structure of
Neopalatial Crete. These ideological visual messages were circulated to
a wider audience through the reproduction and dispersal characteristic
of the sphragistic process, resulting in Minoan elites literally
stamping their authority on to the Cretan landscape and hence society.
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This research examines 44 images of Minoan tree cult as depicted in
sphragistic jewellery, portable objects and wall paintings from Late
Bronze Age Crete, mainland Greece and the Cyclades. The study also
compares the Aegean images with evidence for sacred trees in the Middle
and Late Bronze Age Levant, Egypt and Cyprus. The purpose of this
investigation is the production of new interpretations of Minoan images
of tree cult. Each of the chapters of the book looks at both
archaeological and iconographic evidence for tree cult. The Aegean
material is, in addition, examined more deeply through the lenses of
modified Lacanian psychoanalytic modelling, new animism, ethnographic
analogy, and a Neo-Marxist hermeneutics of suspicion. It is determined
that Minoan images of tree cult depict elite figures performing their
intimate association with the numinous landscape through the
communicative method of envisioned and enacted epiphanic ritual. The
tree in such images is a physiomorphic representation of a goddess type
known in the wider eastern Mediterranean associated with effective
rulership and with the additional qualities of fertility, nurturance,
protection, regeneration, order and stability. The representation of
this deity by elite human females in ritual performance functioned to
enhance their selfrepresentation as divinities and thus legitimise and
concretise the position of elites within the hegemonic structure of
Neopalatial Crete. These ideological visual messages were circulated to
a wider audience through the reproduction and dispersal characteristic
of the sphragistic process, resulting in Minoan elites literally
stamping their authority on to the Cretan landscape and hence society.