Introduction Recent biographies of Sir Arthur Evans and histories of his excavations at Knossos have made it clear that much of what Evans had to say about the nature of Minoan religion was not solidly based on the materials he uncovered during his excavations on the island of Crete. By the standards of today’s archaeology, not only Evans but most of his colleagues granted them- selves remarkable interpretive license. Observa- tions quickly became speculations—sometimes Two Knights and a Goddess: Sir Arthur Evans, Sir James George Frazer, and the Invention of Minoan Religion Cynthia Eller Department of Philosophy and Religion, Montclair State University, Montclair, New Jersey, 07043 USA E-mail: ellerc@mail.montclair.edu Abstract Recent biographies of Sir Arthur Evans and histories of his excavations at Knossos have made it clear that Evans’s description of Minoan religion was not solidly based on the material evidence at Knossos. By the time Evans wrote he Palace of Minos he was fully committed to the belief that the Minoans worshipped a single Great Mother Goddess in many guises, along with a subordinate male deity, her son. here are two key questions about Evans’s vision of Minoan religion: irst, when did Evans arrive at the conclusion that the Minoans’ principal deity was a goddess? And second, why did he prefer this goddess-centered explanation of the material facts when so many other stories could be told about the religious meaning of the same objects? he most common answers to these questions are that Evans thought Minoan religion was goddess-centered from the time he irst began to explore Bronze Age Crete, and that he was drawn to the igure of a Mother Goddess because he lost his own mother when he was only six years old. Both of these suppositions are almost certainly mistaken. Evans did not bring the goddess thesis with him to Crete, and whatever his lingering feelings about his mother’s death, they were not responsible for his conversion to the goddess thesis for Minoan culture. his paper argues that by far the most signiicant factor in Evans’s creation of the Minoan Goddess was his exposure to the work of Sir James George Frazer, both directly and through the auspices of classicist Jane Ellen Harrison. Keywords: Minoan Crete, Minoan religion, Arthur Evans, James George Frazer, goddesses, matriarchy, Jane Ellen Harrison Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 25.1 (2012) 75-98 ISSN (Print) 0952-7648 ISSN (Online) 1743-1700 © The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2012 http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/jmea.v25i1.75 quite detailed and fantastic—which then just as quickly became acknowledged truths about prehistory, at least for the general public. Pro- vided early archaeologists spoke with sufficient charisma and confidence, they could easily be regarded as having a mysterious yet piercing insight into the shadows of prehistoric times. After all, they had uncovered, touched, seen and examined the objects using their own senses: they were there. Evans had charisma and confidence; he sold his story well. But there is now general agree-