As we search out a vocabulary of gesture—articulate action—with which to embody our old-new worship, we turn both to the ways of the ancestors and to our own experience.
A gesture of reverence that occurs again and again in the glyptic art of Minoan Crete is the gesture known to scholars as the “Minoan salute.” The worshiper stands before the deity with right fist raised to brow, elbow held high. Generally the left arm is held at the side.
The gesture is clearly a formal act of reverent attention, perhaps of greeting. Sometimes the fist is held with the thumb up, sometimes with the thumb to the brow. The standard reading of the gesture is that the worshiper is shielding his or her eyes from the radiance of the deity. Try it out and see what you think of this interpretation. I do not find it personally convincing because one shades one's eyes with an open hand. This, I suspect, is something else.
Raising the clenched hand to touch the brow is not an everyday gesture, so its non-ordinary nature—like pouring out good drink onto the ground—gives its maker entry into the realm of the non-ordinary, the realm of symbolic action. Certainly to raise one's right hand thus is to show that one is unarmed: I come in peace.
But I think there's more to it than that. The gathering of fingers and thumb into a clench unifies and concentrates. The hand, like the pentagram, stands for the whole body (hence chiromancy). The center of the brow is a vulnerable and intimate part of the body, and in a sense could be said to represent the entire self. With my whole being, body and mind, I see you and I greet you, the gesture says.
That salutes remain culturally current for us today gives the gesture contemporary contextual resonance, but the different form of the fisted salute distinguishes it from the open-handed military version.
Minneapolis, old flour-milling town that it is, sits on both banks of the Mississippi River. (The standard expression would have it that “The Mississippi flows through Minneapolis,” but this is surely a perverse perspective.) Frequently in the course of everyday life I find myself driving on one of our many bridges to cross the Father of Waters.
The Mississippi is one of the great Powers of this landscape; in fact, at the end of the last Ice Age, the Mississippi created this landscape. In the divine economy of the ancestors, rivers were gods, and this River—great among its kind—is surely a very great god indeed. To pass by so mighty a being with neither acknowledgment nor greeting seems uncouth—one might even say, unpagan—but there's a limit to what one can do reverentially while driving a car.
The basis of all ritual is meaningful action paired with meaningful speech.
Now when I cross the Mississippi, I raise my gathered fingers to my forehead and say, “Father of Waters, I touch my brow to you.”
And if I'm feeling particularly pious that day, I chant it.
For more on Rivers as gods:
M. L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth (2007). Oxford, pp. 274-9.
Harry Brewster, The River Gods of Greece: Myths and Mountain Waters in the Hellenic World (1997). London.
For more on the Minoan salute:
Nanno Marinatos, Minoan Kingship and the Solar Goddess: A Near Eastern Koine (2010). Springfield, pp. 83, 210n17.