He was probably high-priest as well as
king, ruling his people chiefly through their religion. They worshiped a
female deity, the "Great Mother," the productive force of Nature, and
they symbolized this Mother by a sort of double axe which we find
stamped upon their ornaments and buildings. Theirs was a cruel worship,
involving public sacrifices of human beings made to savage bulls before a
crowd of people; or perhaps the sacrifice was to a bull-headed idol
such as the Moloch of the Phoenicians. The later Greeks who had been
tributary to Crete long remembered these sacrifices; and we come upon
traditions of the "Minotaur" or Minos bull in many places.
