Whether, as in fable, the subduer of manslaying ogres and lions (Figures 30-32) was also the hewer of the columns and rods cannot be surely decided from the extant iconography. But there are suggestions of that correlation. Following earlier writers (Brunn, Perrot, and Chipiez), Evans conceded that the docile lions and pillar over the gate at Mycenae might have had military and political meaning:
The lions have...been recognized...as symbolic figures of the military might of those who held the walls of the citadel, and as a challenge to their foes. The column itself and the architrave and beam-ends that it supports have been taken, with the altars below, to stand for the Palace of the Mycenaean Kings.48
The male anthropomorph who took the place of the pillar in Figure 32 might also reasonably be thought to symbolize political power as did the pillar, since he and the pillar alike subdue and control the two fierce mascots of the city-state (compare Figures 31 and 32). Thus both the pillar and its male anthropomorphic double may have been military and political symbols.
If so, they were not the only such symbols. The famous Cretan double ax shown above in the ritual scene on a gold signet ring from Mycenae (Fig. 21) was also a prominent emblem by itself at seats of political authority in Bronze-Age Crete. It was associated especially with the so-called ‘Cretan Zeus,’ who was worshipped inter alia at sanctuaries in caves high on Mounts Ida and Dikte, locations particularly in keeping with his character as a ‘high’ or sky-god. He was apparently the supreme male person in Cretan cosmology of that time, and the frequent occurrence of his double ax emblem at centers of government suggests that he was supreme too in the political hierarchy of men and gods. As the ultimate protector of political order in Minoan Crete, this Zeus of the double ax may well have been the same type of politically significant hewer as was Moses, maker of the Ark, Tabernacle, and Altar of acacia-wood in Hebrew legend (Exodus 25-27), or Beowulf, the protector of Heorot in the Old English epic. The possible simultaneity of the double ax and hewn column as symbols of political authority imparts special interest to the offertorial scene on a painted sarcophagus from Hagia Triada in the Messara, where several double axes surmount round wooden pillars (Fig. 34):
If, like the pillar on the Lions’ Gate of Mycenae, the pillars on this sarcophagus were also transmutable into male figures according to the laws of substitution in Minoan iconography, then we would have before us the missing hewer of oral narrative tradition, whose axes, pillars, and rods are otherwise so common in Mycenaean and Minoan art. At least one of his multiforms would certainly be Cretan Zeus, god of the fig and plane-tree in Minoan times, and later in classical Greece god of the oak, the best of all architectural woods.
In a subject where there are so few incontestable facts as there are about Mycenaean and Minoan cults and religion, speculation and guessing must come into heavy play, and the best scholarship is that most nearly abreast of current thinking about the cults and religion of other peoples whose cultures are better documented. Because there is extraordinary scope for surmise, disagreement about the reconstruction of this or that feature of Aegean religion in the Bronze Age may continue indefinitely even when all parties are equally well informed.
But it is also generally true that the narrative correspondents of Mycenaean and Minoan cultic motifs have not been adequately known or appreciated among the various authorities on this subject. Arthur Evans, for example, did not see the lion-tamer in the male anthropomorph that replaced the hewn pillar between two lions (Fig. 32). To him it was only an aniconic pillar-deity that had somehow become iconic (he did not say how) and assumed the pillar’s function as a tethering-post for the lions. Here again the idea of aniconism which he owed to earlier German scholarship played him false, for while he believed that the pillar and the male anthropomorph were the same motif, i.e. identical with each other, he could not explore the possibility that the male figure and the column were only concomitants of one another as they are in oral fable. Without a proper knowledge of narrative, he fled from that idea even when it presented itself to him quite forcefully in his own métier, the iconography of the Bronze Age:
These religious schemes in which the divinity simply replaces the pillar must be distinguished from some other designs, also exemplified by Mycenaean signets, bearing a certain superficial resemblance to them, in which a male hero is seen in the act of grappling with a pair of lions. These have another origin and should more probably be regarded as adaptations of the familiar Chaldaean type of Gilgames.49
The operative words in this statement are: "also exemplified by Mycenaean signets." What Evans meant to say by these words, or had to admit, was that the figures of lion-tamers and other subduers of dangerous predatory beasts in both Minoan and Mycenaean iconography were in no formal or stylistic way distinguishable from the rest of the imagery in that art. Only he thought that the pillars and the lion-tamers had different origins; the one ‘native’ to the Aegean, and the other originally Mesopotamian. There was not then, nor has there been discovered since then, any basis in fact for such a distinction, but not to have made it would have meant abandoning the idea of the pillar’s aniconic divinity and accepting that the pillar was only a concomitant of the male deity or hero, not identical with him. In the event Boetticher’s authority was too great for Evans to resist, for knowing nothing systematic about narrative, Evans had nowhere else to turn than to such speculations about cult as Boetticher’s for an explanation of the obviously close relationship between the pillar and the lion-tamer. It is of course an old if disreputable procedural rule of humanistic scholarship that when one does not understand the pertinency of something in culture, one should call it foreign, dismiss, and forget it. Not even Arthur Evans was above occasional compliance with that rule.
