Minoan priestesses had numerous duties. Some—the younger ones it seems—leaped over bulls in this same outfit—yes, a topless MMA babe somersaulting over the horns of a charging rodeo bull.

Others handled snakes. There are hints in this legacy in the behavior of Alexander’s snake-charming mother and of the mysterious Thracian priestess who advised Spartacus.

This babe carries a box containing a relic of her cult across the same finely polished wood plank floor that the boxers of Knossos fought upon. Crete, was then a richly forested land, as was much of the Middle Sea basin at the dawn of Western Civilization, so the interior of the halls resembled as much the rich woodwork of Beowulf’s hall as some painted stone Egyptian temple, as is normally imagined from our scorched vantage. Some carried the rhyton, the pottery drinking horn filled with opium-laced wine for the men they managed. And ultimately it was their duty to drain the King’s energy for the eight years of his reign by obvious means.

An echo of this remains in our presidential cycles of eight years—unless one is an apostate king and defies the Goddess…