Epiphanies and Signs of Power: Minoan Suggestions and Comparative Evidence

Abstract

Hateruma, an isolated and relatively primitive island of the Ryukyu Group, encountered a strange custom: one day of the year people would assemble and go to a certain place at the seashore and stay there for hours, looking out into the sea. They would remain there, staring into nothingness, until something would appear on the glimmering surface, a ship, a boat, orjust a drifting log, an uncommon splash of water, a fish or a seal. When this had happened, they would quietly go home.1 This may be more than a curiosity. These island dwellers, surrounded by the infinite ocean, are not satisfied to live on a possibly blessed island within their own closed circle of life, even if the soil is granting the basis of livelihood and they have no pressing needs. There is this longing that something should arrive from without, to break into their eventless paradise. Hope for the unhopeable, Heraclitus enjoined (DK 22 B 18). I

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