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Restoring Faith: Crete's Ancient Minoan Civilisation (2009)
’s Ancient Minoan Civilisation At the end of the 19th century, British antiquarian Arthur Evans sought to ‘re-enchant’ the world with his utopian interpretation of Crete’s ancient Minoan civilisation. In 1830 Auguste Comte laid out his scheme of the three phases of human development, culminating in the 'positive' stage in which belief in demons and gods would be supplanted by an understanding of natural laws.
Horrified by the geopolitical catastrophes unfolding around him, he offered his war-torn age a scientific vision of life before the fall; Minoan society reconstructed as western civilisation's earliest blossoming, a gilded infancy suckled by a benevolent mother goddess, a time of peace and plenty on a beautiful island protected by the sea. As the 20th century launched conflicts of ever greater reach and ferocity, artists and intellectuals from many different walks of life began to celebrate the Minoan epoch as the pacifist precursor to Homer's militaristic age of heroes: a luminous, feminine, fairy-tale exception to an otherwise lamentable human record of violence and hatred. But despite, or perhaps because of, their paradoxes and delinquencies, Evans's Minoans left their footprints all over the wilder shores of modernist culture, tempting James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Hilda Doolittle, Sigmund Freud, Henry Miller and Robert Graves into the labyrinth of Cretan mythology in pursuit of answers to the riddle of human violence.
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