68

RITUAL DANCES

Ritual
dance on
sienet.

Ecstatic
figures.

Gold Signet-ring, from the Smaller
Built Tomb, Isopata.

from the subject of a more or less contemporary gold signet-ring found in
the smaller built Tomb at Isopata near Knossos (Fig. 38).1

This displays a group of four female figures engaged apparently in
a ritual dance in a field of lilies. They have long flowing locks and are

attired in the same flounced robes
and short-sleeved jackets as those
of the fresco. Three of them
raise their arms as in the attitude
of adoration, while the central
figure, on a somewhat higher
level, holds one arm to her side
and lifts the other to the side of
her head. In the upper part of
the bezel, separated by a broken,
wavy line from the two dancers
below, is a small female figure,
short-flounced—an archaic touch.
The wavy lines here are the equivalent of the more elaborate waved
borders that in other cases delimit earth and sky, leaving a reserved space
for the divinity or the heavenly luminaries. Here we must recognize the
Goddess, one arm stretched forward to greet her dancing votaries—the tress
of hair that flies behind her head telling of her rapid approach from her
celestial realm.

In the same way we have seen on another Knossian signet the upward
flying locks of an armed male divinity brought down by the incantations of
his votary before a sacred obelisk.2

Here, however, it is not a baetylic pillar but the dancing human figures
themselves that are the objects of possession, the orgiastic dance, together
with the chaunts that accompanied it, being the obvious vehicles of incanta-
tion.3 The religious intention of the whole scene, moreover, is here brought
out by a remarkable though not unique feature. In the field behind the
dancers appears a human eye, which, like the ' Eye of God' so frequently
seen in old biblical illustrations, may be taken to symbolize the all-seeing
presence of the divinity.

On a clay seal-impression from the Little Palacei we have seen eyes,

1 See my Tomb of the Double Axes and
Associated Grotip {Archaeologia, 1914, p. 10
seqq.).

2 P. of M., i, p. 160, Fig- 115.

3 See A. E., Tomb of the Double Axes, <5w.
(Archaeologia, 1914, p. 12).

4 P. of M., i, p. 705, Fig. 529, d, and re-
peated, Vol. ii, Pt. II, p. 789, Fig. 515.