(i) Design from a signet-ring from Mycenæ (after Evans, Fig. 34). If this be compared with the Egyptian picture (a) it will be noted that the Great Mother is now replaced by a tree: the Eastern Mountains by bulls, from whose backs the trees of the Eastern Mountains are sprouting. This design affords interesting corroboration of the suggestion that the Eastern Mountains may be confused with the cow's head (see b and c) or with the cow itself. Newberry (Annals of Archæology and Anthropology, Liverpool, Vol. I, p. 28) has called attention to the intimate association (in Protodynastic Egypt) of the Eastern Mountains, the Bull and the Double Axe—a certain token of cultural contact with Crete.
(k) The famous sculpture above the Lion Gate at Mycenæ. The pillar form of the Great Mother heraldically supported by her lioness-avatars, which correspond to the cattle of the design (i) and the Eastern Mountains of (a). The use of this design above the lintel of the gate brings it into homology with the Winged Disk. The Pillar represents the Goddess, as the Disk represents her Egyptian locum tenens, Horus; her destructive representatives (the lionesses) correspond to the two uræi of the Winged Disk design.
In his "Mycenæan Tree and Pillar Cult," Sir Arthur Evans has shown that all possible transitional forms can be found (in Crete and the Ægean area) between the representation of the actual goddess and her pillar- and tree-manifestations, until the stage is reached where the sun itself appears above the pillar between the lions.[346] In the large series of seals from Mesopotamia and Western Asia which have been described in Mr. William Hayes Ward's monograph,[347] we find manifold links between both the Egyptian and the Minoan cults.
The tree-form of the Great Mother there becomes transformed into the "tree of life" and the winged disk is perched upon its summit. Thus we have a duplication of the life-giving deities. The "tree of life" of the Great Mother surmounted by the winged disk which is really her surrogate or that of the sun-god, who took over from her the power of life-giving (Figs. 25 and 26).
In an interesting Cretan sarcophagus from Hagia Triada[348] the life-giving power is tripled. There is not only the tree representing the Great Mother herself; but also the double axe (the winged-disk homologue of the sun-god); and the more direct representation of him as a bird perched upon the axe (Fig. 25, f).
The identification of the Great Mother with the tree or pillar seems also to have led to her confusion with the pestle with which the materials for her draught of immortality was pounded. She was also the bowl or mortar in which the pestle worked.[349]
As the Great Mother became confused with the pestle, so, "the Soma-plant, whose stalks are crushed by the priests to make the Soma-libation, becomes in the Vedas itself the Crusher or Smiter, by a very characteristic and frequent Oriental conceit in accordance with which the agent and the person or thing acted on are identified".[350]
"The pressing-stones by means of which Soma is crushed typify thunderbolts." "In the Rig-Veda, we read of him [Soma] as jyotihrathah, i.e. 'mounted on a car of light' (IX, 5, 86, verse 43); or again: 'Like a hero he holds weapons in his hand ... mounted on a chariot' (IX, 4, 76, verse 2)"—(p. 171).
"Soma was the giver of power, of riches and treasures, flocks and herds, but above all, the giver of immortality" (p. 140).
Sir Arthur Evans is of opinion "that in the case of the Cypriote cylinders the attendant monsters and, to a certain extent, the symbolic column itself, are taken from an Egyptian solar cycle, and the inference has been drawn that the aniconic pillars among the Mycenæans of Cyprus were identified with divinities having some points in common with the sun-gods Ra, or Horus, and Hathor, the Great Mother" (op. cit., pp. 63 and 64).