The pillars remained, as well as the sacred trees and the goddesses themselves. What was lost were the initiatory rituals dedicated to those goddesses, and linking death and journey into the afterlife with initiation into the religious tradition. I fear that Eliade is going to claim that some aspect of the “Aryan mind” rejected this part of the religion. It is interesting to wonder, however, what happened to these traditions. Unlike Eliade, we know that the Bronze Age collapse apparently did not involve a massive resettlement of Greece by outsiders. This begs the question of why and how this apparently central aspect of Minoan & Mycenaean religious belief was jettisoned during the Ancient Dark Ages and the Archaic Era of Greece. It was apparently something of an aberration because similar cults will be revived in the classical era. So, what gives?
