The New Minoan Miniature: The Art of Nyani Martin

A Minoan Bull-Dance, by Nyani Martin (original 3 inches x 2 inches)

     I’m proud to call Nyani Martin a friend and colleague in the world of Minoan studies. This article introduces you to the extraordinary art that “Ny” has created out of her engagements with Bronze Age Crete.

     Just before the long final period of Minoan civilization (that is, for a generation or two before 1600 BCE), some fresco-painters at Knossos Labyrinth worked in a relatively “miniature” scale as they played their parts in Crete’s artistic and ceremonial life. These painters inherited old traditions: keen observation of nature and the body, vibrant color-choices, and cunningly asymmetrical arrangements of forms that endowed a whole scene with dynamic motion.

     And yet, beyond the usual Minoan lack of interest in grandiosity, no one explains why the expansive tableaus in these works—priestesses dancing before a huge crowd, a festival-gathering of ladies at a magnificent shrine, and other scenes important to Minoans—were packed with so much charm into such tiny forms. Maybe this trend was simply like the 17^th-century fashion in Dutch painting whose challenge was to lovingly detail whole towns and landscapes on a scale no bigger than a modern greeting-card.

     Each of these original (scanned) examples of Nyani Martin’s art is painstakingly etched (somehow!) into a hard plastic panel smaller than your average refrigerator-magnet. And all of them reproduce the extraordinary impact of their Minoan inspirations (you can see and study many throughout Calendar House). When you study the Minoan originals (for example, in Cameron & Hood’s Knossos Fresco Atlas), you can hardly believe the skill behind the human hand that can render such precisely-observed lines, of nature and the body, in their worlds of sensation and movement—and on such an absurdly tiny scale. The closer you look at Nyani Martin’s art, the more you wonder at the same.

An Egyptian woman in a translucent beaded dress, Nyani Martin

     She catches just the right fold of a woman’s beaded gown across her thigh, and it becomes as translucent as light fabric. Among the bull-leapers, every limb and muscle, every crooked leg or lifted hand is an explosion of response to the red plunging force of the wicked-horned bull who’s plowing through their midst: the lines of the leaper sailing over bull’s back have the tension and grace of a classic Minoan body in its consummate arch. The bull-leaper’s helpers at center and right have joyful faces and their bodies are celebration, uplift, style— for they’ve done their part. But the curly-haired catcher at left yet remains to do hers, and her face is a question now to be answered about herself.

      As in much Minoan art, here we have finely-detailed individuals whose subjectivities and expressions are caught up in a great rhythm of living and ceremonial action. This is a cultural trait that seems to me the very seed of what today calls the spirit of The Olympic Games—where competition is never more worthwhile because of the surrounding spirit of cooperation. Where individuals triumph most in the conquest of human limitations.

Nyani Martin's conception of Kiya, poss. Cycladic wife of Akhenaten (original one inch x 1/2 inch)

     Nyani Martin does the homework. She knows that Kiya, one of the wives of Pharaoh Akhenaten—the man who tried to reduce Egyptian religion to one god, the sun—was a post-Minoan woman of the future Greek Islands, and the elegant portrait of her here is the tiniest of all the original works which Ny so generously gave me over the years of our friendship (it’s an incredible one inch by ½-inch in size).

Allomai, Near the Sea, by Nyani Martin

     “Allomai, Near the Sea” is a tender evocation of a pensive Minoan woman, with a tiara and textiles that (as in Minoan art) mark a figure of standing and knock your eyes out. She has a “sister” in the forlorn and yet charming “Ariadne” here. “Young Minoan Lady and Pomegranate” shares with them the Minoans’ love of pure color. I know of only example of a naked Minoan dancer (she is part of the amazing cosmic tableau carved in gold on the sometimes-debated “Ring of Minos”). But Nyani Martin’s examples here are wild evocations of high erotic spirits in religious contexts—and those are aspects of a Minoan sensibility detailed in another article here.

Ariadne Abandoned on Naxos, by Nyani Martin

 

Young Minoan Lady with Pomegranate, by Nyani Martin

     Finally, a “Minoan Family Banquet” presents a dozen different people at the imagined presentation of a child to elite religious figures (and baby makes 13). From the vibrant designs of their textiles and jewelry to the tiny cups in their hands, from the three-legged cook-pot to the Libyan hairstyle on the man at left, and the right side’s lyre-player, this is indeed a Minoan scene—a rigorously-presented and wonderfully warm gather of individuals in a unified (and unifying) event, which in all its “ordinary” detail expresses something of exquisite charm about being alive.

A Minoan Family Banquet, by Nyani Martin (original 3 inches x 2 inches)

     Nyani Martin also wrote a short but wonderful “imagining” about what happened at this Banquet, and it follows herewith.

     I have had the luck to meet with Nyani Martin a few times over the years since she first enjoyed Ariadne’s Brother—a modest, shy and striking young African-American woman who never stops learning and sharing her amazing work with others. And I hope that these masterful examples of her Minoan inspirations will freshen your eye as they do mine, for many more appreciations of our heritage in Minoan Crete.

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Nyani Martin Describes the “Minoan Family Banquet”:

 

     Kylia sighed with happiness, and because her feet hurt; she leaned a bit against Tinea, who tightened her arm around Kylia’s waist,  holding baby Dyktis to her breast with the other so he could suck idly and stay quiet.

     Kylia was standing, despite being in her eighth month, because the family was having its feast of the winter solstice, in the Great Hall of their House, and was honoring its new mothers as it did at the quarter-posts of every year. Tulanis was carrying the ritual meal to them, carefully, slowly, trying with all her adolescent might to be stately, and Kidunatsa, the eldest and their Priestess (and Tulanis’  mother), was singing the private words to the Goddess before coming to  Kylia and Tinea to say the public ones.

     Kylia loved this ritual. During her childhood in a Mainland  fortress her mother and other Cycladic slaves had practiced a small smuggled version in secret. When she had come to the Family she lived with  them as a daughter before she married them, and had learned the fuller version and celebrated it for several mothers of the family, including Mother Elucea and Tinea on her first pregnancy. The eldest woman of the House or its Priestess and an adolescent girl, a “new” woman, offered a roasted liver and old-fashioned cereal paste cakes (made from toasted, crushed grain, rather than flour) to the household Goddess, on a stone plate, chopping the prescribed four herbs (for this time of year, fennel,  thyme, sage, and hyssop) with a ground stone knife. The liver was sliced  and sprinkled with the herbs, and then the ancient-style food was offered  to the mothers near birth and right after, as the Priestess blessed them. It nourished their souls and promoted their fertility and milk. It was ancient, as could be seen from the food and the equipment, no copper or  bronze used, only flaked obsidian and ground stone, and it was beautiful.

     Surrounding them were their family, the children watching  and wandering, the adults clapping and singing a hymn of cheer;  Tanaui Sti was strumming his harp as he leaned against the Mother Pillar. Aristion came up to stand with Kylia and Tinea, one hand on each  of their shoulders. This time, the liver was that of a fat duck, since that was what Elucea had chosen to roast, though they also had a joint of beef forequarter from the family down the mountain, who had slaughtered a  bullock and traded sections to all their neighbors; far more meat than they usually ate of a meal, but then it *was* a feast. People had their first cups of wine or broth from the stewed beef, and pieces of warm  flatbread to dip; soon, after this ritual, they would start in on the stewed beef with its vegetables and cooked dried milk-wheat, eating it  with flatbread and raw lettuce from the garden, eating the duck with yeast bread from the starter that had been Tinea’s dowry from her birth family, apples and grapes.

     Later they would have yogurt from cow’s milk, with rosehips  stewed in honey and put through a strainer, and fresh dark figs and  pomegranate seeds, and resinated wine with mead and small round balls of cannabis-honey-date sweetmeats to promote love and fertility and the return of the sunshine. Kylia was very hungry, still making up for the three  months of her pregnancy when she could barely eat, and looking forward to  the meal, as delicious scents wafted into the Hall from the courtyard and the kitchen behind it.

     Tulanis reached them, flushed and blushing and beaming;  Kidunatsa came up behind the girl to put a hand on her shoulder and sing the blessing to Kylia and Tinea, invoking the Goddess as Mother in them,  praising their fruitfulness. Kylia and Tinea took a piece each of liver and of cereal cake, kissed each other, and fed each other, as their  family cheered, and  the child within Kylia kicked to add its own  comment. She caught her breath, swallowwed, and felt as if even heavy with child as she was she could fly on her family’s love.

     Kidunatsa took the remaining liver and cereal cakes to the Ancestors’ pillar in the center of the room, its gray stone carved with a sixteen-pointed star and double axes. Tulanis scurried to her sister, who  was stirring the simmering tripod pot, to fetch a cup of broth, and hurried to catch up with her mother; together they sang to the  Ancestors, their voices haunting, strangely twining like snakes in the old ululating song, as Kylia listened with her head laid back onto Aristion’s shoulder. Kidunatsa laid a small piece of each food at the base of the pillar, and poured the cup of broth into the offering-hole. Then she turned to the family and grinned, as Elucea came in, right on time, bearing the roast duck on a broad painted platter. “Let’s eat!”  the two women said together, looking at each other, and the Family cheered. Kylia cheered too, and sat down to eat.

 

What Martin Luther King, Jr. Might Say to Americans Being Crushed by Profit

Excerpts from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last book of essays, “The Trumpet of Conscience,” 1968—This from “Nonviolence and Social Change,” 1968:

 

     …Of course, by now it is obvious that new laws are not enough. The emergency we now face is economic, and it is a desperate and worsening situation. For the 35 million poor people in America—not even to mention, just yet, the poor in other nations—there is a kind of strangulation in the air. In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society. Now, millions of people are being strangled that way. The problem is international in scope. And it is getting worse, as the gap between the poor and the ‘affluent society’ increases.

     The question that now divides the people who want radically to change that situation is: can a program of nonviolence—even if it envisions massive civil disobedience—realistically expect to deal with such an enormous, entrenched evil?

     …I intend to show that nonviolence will be effective, but not until it has achieved the massive dimensions, the disciplined planning, and the intense commitment of a sustained, direct-action movement of civil disobedience on the national scale….

     …The only real revolutionary, people say, is a man who has nothing to lose. There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.

      Beginning in the New Year, we will be recruiting three thousand of the poorest citizens from ten different urban and rural areas to initiate and lead a sustained, massive, direct-action movement in Washington, D.C. Those who choose to join this initial three thousand, this nonviolent army, this ‘freedom church’ of the poor, will work with us for three months to develop nonviolent action skills. Then we will move on Washington, determined to stay there until the legislative and executive branches of the government take serious and adequate action on jobs and income.

     A delegation of poor people can walk into a high official’s office with a carefully, collectively prepared list of demands. (If you’re poor, if you’re unemployed anyway, you can choose to stay in Washington as long as the struggle needs you.) And if that official says, ‘But Congress would have to approve this,’ or, ‘But the President would have to be consulted on that,’ you can say, ‘All right, we’ll wait.’ And you can settle down in his office for as long a stay as necessary.

     If you are, let’s say, from rural Mississippi, and have never had medical attention, and your children are undernourished and unhealthy, you can take those little children into the Washington hospitals and stay with them there until the medical workers cope with their needs, and in showing it your children, you will have shown this country a sight that will make it stop in its busy tracks and think hard about what it has done.

     The many people who will come and join this three thousand, from all groups in the country’s life, will play a supportive role, deciding to be poor for a time along with the dispossessed who are asking for their right to jobs or income—jobs, income, the demolition of slums, and the rebuilding by the people who live there of new communities in their place; in fact, a new economic deal for the poor.

     …I have said that the problem, the crisis we face, is international in scope. In fact, it is inseparable from an international emergency that involves the poor, the dispossessed, and the exploited of the whole world.

      Can a nonviolent, direct-action movement find application on the international level, to confront economic and political problems? I believe it can. It is clear to me that the next stage of the movement is to become international.

     National movements within the developed countries—forces that focus on London, or Paris, or Washington, or Ottawa—must help to make it politically feasible for their governments to undertake the kind of massive aid that the developing countries need if they are to break the chains of poverty. We in the West must bear in mind that the poor countries are poor primarily because we have exploited them through political or economic colonialism. Americans in particular must help their nation repent of her modern economic imperialism.

     But movements in our countries alone will not be enough….So many of Latin America’s problems have roots in the United States of America that we need to form a solid, united movement, nonviolently conceived and carried through, so that pressure can be brought to bear on the capital and government power structures concerned, from both sides of the problem at once. I think that may be the only hope for a nonviolent solution in Latin America today; and one of the most powerful expressions of nonviolence may come out of that international coalition of socially aware forces, operating outside governmental frameworks.

     …In practice, such a decision would represent such a major reordering of priorities that we should not expect that any movement could bring it about in one year or two. Indeed, although it is obvious that nonviolent movements for social change must internationalize, because of the interlocking nature of the problems they all face, and because otherwise those problems will breed war, we have hardly begun to build the skills and the strategy, or even the commitment, to planetize our movement for social justice.

     …In this world, nonviolence is no longer an option for intellectual analysis: it is an imperative for action.

Governor Patrick Proclaims May 1st Thomas Morton Day in Massachusetts!

Governor Patrick's Proclamation of May 1st as Thomas Morton Day in Massachusetts

Greetings! Governor Deval Patrick has issued a Proclamation declaring May 1st to be Thomas Morton Day in Massachusetts—in honor of this intrepid and good-humored Englishman who made a success of his trading post by treating Native Americans with respect, while his peers of Plimoth and Boston were starving behind the walls of their needless colonial forts. See the full Proclamation—plus, a bit of “How To Make Revels Happen in Your Community,” and some live music!—at AncientLights.org, on its “Revels at Merrymount Today” page….Drink and Be Merry!

COSMOS EROTICA: The Shapes of Minoan Desire

Cosmic Erotica: The Shapes of Minoan Desire

 

Agrimi or wild goats, Middle Minoan II sealstone

      “This is what we mean by ‘innocence’ and ‘naivete’; not that the child has no sexual feeling, but that this feeling has not yet been corrupted by [a] culture’s hatred and fear of nature, and that the child’s idea of self has not been reshaped to an humiliating image…

      …We move beyond speech. Our bodies move past all the controls we have learned. We cry out in ecstacy, in feeling….In this world, to touch another is to express love: there is no idea apart from feeling, and no feeling that does not ring through our bodies and our souls at once.

      This is eros. Our own wholeness. Not the sensation of pleasure alone, nor the idea of love alone, but the whole experience of human love. The whole range of human capacity exists in this love. Here is the capacity for speech and meaning, for culture, for memory, for imagination, the capacity for touch and expression, and sensation and joy….”

Susan Griffin, Pornography & Silence, 1981

      Enter ancient Minoan Crete—for at least 1500 years, the most peaceful and progressive center of Western civilization—and you find a people in love with their world. In love with nature; with the varieties and colors and delicate strength of plants; in love with the animal and human body; and, with the living connections among them all, so vibrantly clear across their arts and images.

        That’s what I mean by erotic in these reflections (many more examples at http://ancientlights.org). In the Minoan world, desire is more than just the urge to have sex and/or procreate. The Minoan Erotic is a visible awareness and joyful embrace of the overwhelming powers of nature that eternally drive, connect, and renew the worlds of life around and within us.

        Nobody since has so closely, lovingly observed and captured those powers in their arts. And I cannot find another people who so celebrate even their own defeats in trying to master and control those powers and their world.

        Minoan religion and arts are profoundly not interested in the self-perpetuating, power-hungry ego. What they celebrate is the opposite: the ritually-induced release from individuality, and an ecstacy of being that is overtly erotic and spiritual at the same time (ek-stasis, or “standing beyond oneself”)—a cosmos that both nurtures and ignores the individual, that vibrates with inseparable sexual energies and spiritual epiphanies.

Knossos Labyrinth in Crete (circa 1600 BCE), a ceremonial site inhabited since The Stone Age

        Maybe such a powerful Erotic shouldn’t surprise us in a culture so devoted to ceremony, feasting and drinking, to dance and music, socializing and sports—or, among people so devoted to just looking good, from their men’s beautifully-woven kilts to their women’s tight-waisted bell-skirts (which unfold to the shape of a double-axe), open-breasted garments, elaborate makeup, jewelry and coiffures.

A Minoan trader in Egypt and a Cretan woman in a flounced kilt

        Swaying trees, flowering plants, ramping animals. Soaring birds and darting myriads of fishes, busy honeybees, thundering bulls, the rippling bright blue waters of their seas and mountain streams—all these subjects in Minoan arts revel in existence and in relation with each other. The scenes below, exquisitely rendered on a pair of golden drinking-cups, can show us several levels of a Minoan Erotic.

Minoan-made golden 'Vaphio Cups' with scenes of a failed bull-capture

          The olive and palm trees themselves on both cups are alive with observed details, with rhythms and textures of their own (unmatched in later art). Into this garden baited with a trap walks a kingly bull. Instantly he’s being seduced into capture by a cow, set up in his path by cunning human beings with the muscle and nerve to take him on. These were the people called boukoloi or “herdsmen,” “worshippers of the bull god” (from whom we derived the word bucolic).

        The bait-cow lifts her tail with invitation (she must have been chosen for this dallying part when the moon was right), smiles and nuzzles the big boy sideways. The dope is already in a daze. But, before Bull can remember where he thought he was going, his hind leg is looped with a snare, and the lady who fooled him into it has vanished. So much for Minoan utopias.

           Yet look what happens on the matching (lower) golden cup. At center, the net snaps tight on Bull, and flings him ass over horns, too—yet, out of “the same body” you can see at left, he explodes right out of the net full-force, to toss and trample the clown who pulled this trick and stole his girl. At right, Bull takes off after her in his best flat-out flying gallop (the palm of victory his that day), and his back-hooves kick out some contempt behind him for those annoying human idiots. Now, where was I!

          This is the story that a powerful rich somebody wanted immortalized in solid gold? Why? Perhaps these cups of unmistakable Minoan workmanship commemorate people killed in such perilous pastimes. Yet, they were found not in a Minoan tomb, but on the Mycenaean mainland (at Vaphio)—as if they were in use “above ground” in Crete but eventually taken away as golden booty. We might also conceive of a master Minoan artisan working in mainland circumstances, on commission or in captivity. Whatever the case, these are literally cups of good cheer in the face of failure. What they communicate is anything but funereal. They satirize the human will to mastery and, in characterizing the most powerful and dangerous creature on Crete, portray it as charged with sexuality, not to be tamed, blithely destructive and, above all, magnificent.

          I don’t know who more than Minoans would devote such wealth, labor and acquired skill to a status-object engraved with the human farce—again and again, in sensuous rhythms that leap off the object into life, in laughter and unheard music that link and move every body in the scene. You can say, the more trivial the subject, the clearer the “message” that Somebody can waste such resources to show off. Or at least, you can say that.

Minoan lyra-player with dancers

  

Late Minoan Marine Style and a Vegetal Labrys-Wheel

          Even their most sacred symbol, Labrys the double axe, became a wheel of life sprouting shoots. (And you can explore the Minoans’ natural, religious and cosmic wheel of lunar/solar time in the chapters of Calendar House, at Ancientlights.org). The organic and the symbolic, the body and the quick flash through it that we call life, must have each other: they are inseparable. Sir Arthur Evans observed that Minoans much-identified themselves with plants—a very different idea and experience of life than the ones we inherited (after the Minoans’ burial) from Homer’s heroes, down to the current crop of walled-up doomed imperial citadels, where elite egos rival in destructive competition on a planet of plenty.

Spring corn poppies, Lasithi Plateau, Crete

Late Minoan gold ring from Archanes near Knossos

           The Minoan Erotic includes danger (ask Bull), suffering and loss. But even those images vibrate with a rhythm and life that is greater than their incidence. Minoan art sheds blood, yet every example flows in ceremonial context, with a meaning related to an aspect of life. All around them are natural and man-made medicines for pain, ways to share and celebrate the growth of a hard-earned knowledge—how the circles of their world fit into the cycles of the universe.

Minoan women and men on sealstones possibly of 'sacred marriage'

Clay model of a Minoan round-dance

        I hope these words and images lead you into Minoan civilization, and to find there a people and a way of being alive that is worthy of our learning and remembrance.

Minoan Festival scenes

Welcome! to Dr. Jack Dempsey’s Crazy Pages

Hello to Friends Around the World and Elsewhere!

***Click to hear something of the Cretan lyra, old wild mountain music ***

(because this too is a place to be free)

I’m Dr. Jack Dempsey, an American writer, historian, editor, producer and professor:

Are You a writer? A reader? A developing public speaker?

A citizen-scholar to whom the past is always present?

Poet, pundit, philosopher?

Feel Welcome to Post, Discuss and Dialogue 

about Anything Here or Original from You!

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The mountain you see up there with its red corn-poppy flowers

is Mount Dikte, on the Lasithi Plateau in central Crete—

and this is a place for us to share anything we wish to,

from facts and dreams to observations and intuitions,

understandings of existence:

where I for one can speak from the “less scientific” soul and brain,

around and/or beyond AncientLights.org

(a life’s work in language, in history, in film and facts and fables)…

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So here’s to creative sharing on a planetary scale

[Remember! Think! Play! Question! Teach! Show Off! Vent! Envision!]

and (naturally) be as creative as you like!

More to Come!

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What in the world ya thinkin’ of

Laughin’ in the face of Love?…

Why on Earth are we here?

Surely not to live in pain and fear!

(John Lennon, ‘Instant Karma’)

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Paleolithic Hand Stencils, Borneo cave