Quick questions on Minoan religious ideology and practice: HSC Ancient History

The double axe (labrys) is the most repeated Minoan cult symbol: incised as a "mason's mark" on stone blocks at Knossos, and deposited as real bronze axes at cult sites, most spectacularly in the Arkalochori Cave, which produced a large hoard including gold and silver miniature axes too fragile for practical use, clearly votive rather than functional. The "horns of consecration," a stylised pair of bull's horns, appear as a monumental architectural feature (large horns once stood on the west facade at Knossos) and in miniature on rhyta, seals and shrine models, directly tying this symbol to the bull cult below. Sacred trees and pillars recur on seals and gold rings in what historians read as "epiphany" scenes: a worshipper, often a woman in a flounced skirt, dances or gestures before a tree or pillar within a shrine, sometimes beneath a small, apparently airborne figure interpreted as a divine appearance. Isopata-type gold rings, showing four dancing women amid flowers with a small descending figure above them, are the classic example historians cite for this reading, though the identity of the small figure (goddess, spirit, or symbolic representation of ecstatic vision) remains debated.

The most dramatic, and most disputed, evidence in this dot point comes from Anemospilia, a small tripartite building on the slope of Mount Juktas, excavated in 1979 by Yiannis and Efi Sakellarakis. The building was destroyed suddenly, apparently by the same earthquake that ended the Old Palace period, around 1700 BC. Excavators found four skeletons: a young man bound in a foetal position on a raised platform, with a decorated bronze blade lying across his body and staining consistent with drained blood; an adult man and woman nearby, seemingly killed instantly by falling masonry; and a fourth individual crushed near the entrance beside ritual vessels. The Sakellarakis team argued this captured a human sacrifice interrupted at the very moment the earthquake struck, a reading Nanno Marinatos treats as strong corroboration that Minoan ritual could, in extremity, involve a human victim.