MINOAN GODDESS AS LADY OF UNDERWORLD 153

moment itself largely corresponds, and the spouse on the ring might well
exclaim with Wordsworth's Laodamia :

' No spectre greets me,—no vain shadow this ;
Come, blooming hero, place thee by my side !
Give, on this well-known couch, one nuptial kiss
To me this day a second time thy bride !'

Fig. 104. The ' Ring of Nestor ': Design enlarged 4 diameters. By E. Gillieron, fils.

Of the specially chthonic aspect of the Minoan Goddess, in which she Chthonic
appears as guardian of the abode of the dead, we have ample evidence. In Minoan
the case of the ' Tomb of the Double Axes' at Knossos the chamber was soddess'
also a shrine, the furniture of which, including the ritual Double Axes of the
divinity between the Sacral Horns, was placed on a ledge at the head of
the sepulchral cell, which itself was hewn out of the rock in the symbolic form
of the sacred weapon.1 On the other hand, gold butterflies of funereal fabric
have in more than one case been found associated with the dead, while the
gold balance of the same light character, found with such in the Third Shaft
Grave at Mycenae, and showing butterflies embossed on their scales, point to
the idea of the weighing of souls. That in Minoan, as in later times, the

1 A. E,, Tomb of the Double Axes, &°c. {Arch., lxv, and Quaritch, 1915), p. 33 seqq.