This is my new book, The
Cultic Life of Trees in the Prehistoric Aegean, Levant, Egypt and Cyprus.
Published by Peeters: Leuven. It is 314
pages, and its dimensions are 30 cm x 21 cm.
Summary:
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 self
representation 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.
