Welcome to my decipherment of the Phaistos Disk. (Note: The Phaistos Disk cannot be deciphered because it is not a script. It can, however, be solved because it is a puzzle, specifically a maze pattern recognition puzzle. My solution is here. CGW, 2015)

As you probably already know, many people are trying to decipher this artifact. My decipherment is in the process, and has been for the most part of the last 10 years. (22 years now, 2015) I keep adding to it everyday as my researches turn up more information, but it is a completed book at this time. You can read it from beginning to end, just bookmark this page so that you can return and see what else has been added. About 12 to 14 hours a day are spent on this project.

While my decipherment is influenced by turn-of-the-last-century archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, historian Will Durant, and writers H.G. Wells and Donald Mackenzie, I never read those writers until after I had written my book. Then, I went back into my book and made the necessary adjustments to compensate for learning a few new things about a very old artifact. With this decipherment I suggest that the Phaistos Disk is a true and authentic artifact of the time and place in which it is supposed to have been created and that it can be used as the key to decipher other artifacts containing Cretan pictographs. It may even be the key to reconstructing Linear A, the oldest Greek language. I have used it to decipher Cretan pictographs, and I include those whereever I can.

Held back at this time is information regarding the prophecies of the Oracle of Dodona. I have yet to learn what those prophecies may have been, so if anything is inconclusive as regards the information in this book, then this is it. I mention this because my work on this project began after I had a series of dreams about Bronze Age Crete. In my dreams, I was a man living there who was also a Dactyl (Warrior).

I want to understand what my dreams have to do with this disk. I believe the disk and my dreams are connected to the Oracle of Dodona, which is the oldest of the Greek oracles. I want to come forth with some information about this that cannot be had by researching and that probably is not scientifically verifiable and so I keep going on this project for that is my goal. This book is part of the path to the goal and is not the goal itself. I mention this because I find information on the Phaistos Disk that points to the Oracle of Dodona. I consider the dream world to be as real as the Oak tree in my back yard - as real but in a vague and mysterious way like the talking psychic Oak at Dodona. I believe I have access to the past through dreams and that, if I try hard enough and stay after it long enough, I can gain access to an ancient past.

I hope this Jungian confession does not dissuade the scholar and/or the scientist from reading my decipherment, but at the same time I declare myself to be an independent researcher of the Phaistos Disk for reasons of my own that are highly subjective. However, I hope my decipherment is entirely objective, and I research constantly because I am just as interested in accuracy as any scholar would be. I am not, therefore, putting myself forward as some great scholar, like Evans, although I have a Master's degree in English Education with a concentration in myth and saga. I have written 30 metaphysical books, which are on my web site.

I am also a graphic artist, so I cannot help but play around with these ancient images and reproduce them as what I call Pre-Classical art. This is like Neo-Classical art but involves taking images from Greek prehistory and reworking them in the Neo-Classical art style. My inspiration comes from John Duncan, A.R.S.A., who produced the color plates in Donald Mackenzie's book, showing how well-suited is Minoan art to a Neo-Classical setting.

Although its meaning is veiled, and probably because of it, the Phaistos Disk captures the imagination and interest of just about everyone who sees it. This small red clay disk with images that seem to be stamped all over it, front and back, is supposed to come from Bronze Age Crete about 1600 B.C.E. People are fascinated by it. They wear it as necklace pendants and earrings, they post images of it on the internet, and they turn up 1,500 mentions of it when netsearching. Since 1908, when it was unearthed in Phaistos, Crete, someone somewhere has been trying to decipher it. Now, more people than ever are trying, and just about every approach has been taken to understand the images that cover it, but the disk remains veiled. The image above shows my idea of the veiled nature of the disk - you can see it clearly but not quite. This image was created by combining my drawing of the disk with a modification of the image on the title page of Mackenzie's book, Myths of Crete and Pre-Hellenic Europe. I fell in love with this metaphorical image, which is why you see it so much.

I am suggesting that the reason people are so curious about the disk is that they innately love a mystery, especially one that is heavily veiled, and they do not necessarily want the mystery solved. But no such worries are attached to the Phaistos Disk. It has been my experience that lifting the veil on one part of the disk only creates another veil to lift. It may well be that the Phaistos Disk can never be solved. But I have found some things about it that I feel are irrefutable and so I am publishing my findings regarding the disk with the intent of publishing rather than with the intent of implying I have absolutely solved the mystery of it. I doubt it can be absolutely solved.

The decipherment efforts of others are interesting to me and, to quote Mackenzie out of context, they are "mingled at times with their pseudoscientific deductions and brilliant imaginings," ¹ unveiling instead the interior world of themselves. Mackenzie is a satirical kind of writer who appeals to me, so you will pardon me if I quote him frequently. Evans, on the other hand, is very dry and lacks humor but is brilliant in discovering civilizations and collecting Cretan pictographs. He also is lacking in spiritual understanding of Minoan Crete, but then he is a scientist and not a dreamer, like me.

Some confuse Duncan Mackenzie with Donald Mackenzie. It was Duncan and not Donald who was co-excavator with Evans in Crete. And although Donald writes as though he was there clearing away debris and picking up seal-stones, he resolves this confusion himself in Chapter 6 ² of his book when he writes, Sir Arthur Evans went to Crete as a trained and experienced archæologist, and was assisted from the beginning, in March, 1900, by Dr. Duncan Mackenzie, who had already distinguished himself by his excavations on the island of Melos, and Mr. Fyfe, the British School of Athens architect.

To continue with my main metaphor, veiled also is the Bronze Age and ancient Aegean World from which the disk comes, but lack of knowledge about the Neolithic and Bronze Ages is really no excuse for far-fetched decipherments that have little to do with what we already know about Minoan Crete. As Mackenzie ³ reminds us, ...it would be rash to draw far-reaching conclusions from negative evidence. In contrast to this statement, and strangely, Evans says, ...it is right that the imagination should supply the deficiency of existing evidence.³

As far as my experience with Evans goes, he has not used his imagination at all in the same sense that Mackenzie means it. I think Evans' idea of using his imagination is to compare a Cretan pictograph with a Hittite or Sumerian pictograph or an Egyptian hieroglyph. Your decipherer hopes she will be guilty of using her imagination like Evans and not like Mackenzie. And she hopes that, whenever at a loss to interpret or decipher something, she will turn away from flights of fancy to the solution of more research. She hopes ardently to avoid convenient theories, recalling Mackenzie's recollection of the words of Mr. Hogarth, There is a well-known tendency to find one formula to explain all things, and an equally notorious one to overwork the latest formula.⁴ And she sends up prayers to the Goddess to protect her from Mackenzie's quotation of Mr. Lang's accusation of scholarly stupidity.⁵ All of that being said, let us push on.

1. D. Mackenzie, Myths of Crete and Pre-Hellenic Europe, 1917, Ch. 1., p.5 ("../myths/mc1.htm#pseudo")
2. Ibid, Ch. 6, p. ("../myths/mc6.htm#duncan")
3. A. Evans, Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phoenician Script, 1895, Ch. 1, p. 1
4. Mackenzie, Introduction, p. xviii ("../myths/intro.htm#hogarth")
5. Ibid, Ch. 4, p. 80 ("../myths/mc4.htm#stupid")