The green tree was not always enshrined in a hypaethral enclosure. Sometimes the hewn pillar stood instead in a shrine of its own, which probably had a roof, and in that case female figures might be shown carrying foliage from the opposite side of the picture where some leafing plant stood unenclosed in opposition to the enshrined dry pillar. The ritual action in portrayals of this type was thus played out between the two extremes of greenery on the one hand and dead pillar on the other, in a manner highly reminiscent of fable:
There were also some cultic representations of the two trees that showed them singly; sometimes the green tree without the pillar:
In other instances the pillar stood alone without the green wood:
But no matter whether they were shown singly or together, the green tree and the pillar were simultaneous phenomena in Mycenaean and Minoan art. Boetticher made the same mistake in his theory of theological development in ancient tree-cult that Schliemann had made in supposing that the course of events in Homer’s Iliad was historical, when in fact it only followed a fabulous pattern in oral narrative tradition. Similarly, Boetticher mistook the developmental idea expressed in the imagery of the cult (movement from green wood to hewn pillar) for the historical development of a theology through successive generations of the cult’s practitioners. In the Aegean Bronze Age as in modern Africa, the two trees undoubtedly provided the two extremes between which the adherents of tree-cult could ritually enact those periodic changes in themselves and in their surroundings that were essential to the continuity of their lives. But today, one can only speculate, as Arthur Evans, Martin Nilsson, Axel Persson and others have done, what the ideological substance of Mycenaean and Minoan cults might have been. One cannot go to the Bronze-Age peoples of the Mediterranean as Victor Turner went to the Ndembu to observe and interpret their rituals.
And even if that were possible, there is no reason to think that tree cult in the Bronze Age would have been any more self-explanatory than was tree-cult among the Ndembu. As it is, all that survives of Minoan and Mycenaean cult is certain of its three-dimensional emblems and several dozens of ritual scenes on seals and in painting. If Turner’s Ndembu rites were only vignettes of a more complex pattern of motifs in fable, then the surviving scenes of Minoan and Mycenaean rites are only vignettes of vignettes. They do not even begin to describe ritual in the Bronze Age, not to mention any patterns of oral fable that might have informed such ritual.
