The Phaistos Disk provided me an opportunity to study material outside the realm of English literature but within the realm of my first love, mythology. This new material included geometry, mathematics, archaeology, astronomy, ancient pictographs, and the antique science of containment of geometrical arrangements. The Phaistos Disk taught me plane geometry as it existed before Euclid complicated it, when he got hold of it 1,300 years after the disk was created, and before the Georgia school systems tried to teach it to me with no success 3,600 years later. Geometry is a universal language providing a portal into this Minoan world so old that the Greek poet Homer in 700 BCE called it ancient and forgotten.

After 15 years as a student in this phenomenal university, I have completed my studies and am now publishing these conclusions. On my computer are 2GB's of space dedicated to the disk and to images of it involving geometry, astronomy and mythology, but this website contains only what seems to me to be the most important information. I have learned something about what is involved in understanding this artifact and I have offered many different decipherments.

The number of decipherments I explored was an attempt on my part to be as thorough as possible and also it was the result of having to work backwards through time to arrive at understanding. First I explored, by necessity, popular cultural beliefs that were built up over time, culture after culture, to our modern times' perspective. And each age I researched had its own popular cultural superstitions and beliefs, many of which were also explored. This is like running a maze, not knowing which way to turn, which theory to embrace, but always learning something about myself, my ideas, the way I think, my own belief systems.

The picture of the labyrinth is thus offered to us as emblematic of the whole labour of the Great Work, with its two major difficulties, one the path which must be taken in order to reach the center-where the bitter combat of the two natures takes place-the other the way the artist must follow in order to emerge. It is there that the thread of Ariadne becomes necessary for him, if he is not to wander among the winding paths of the task, unable to extricate himself. (Fulcanelli)

I give up on extricating myself from this work that I love. The way I see it, after all this time and meandering through this maze only two decipherments are possible: absolute and relative. Absolute decipherment refers to what is explicit on the Phaistos Disk for anyone to see and recognize. I am the only one to see something explicit on the disk that everyone else missed, which encourages some reviewers to suggest it is not really there. My decipherment is absolute in the sense that anyone could have found the hidden images on the disk if they had thought to do what I did, simply connect with lines the matching pictographs that produce the images. The images though hidden are explicitly there once someone realizes to connect the matching, seemingly matching pictographs with lines just in case something emerges that makes sense. At least one thing is certain from this method; connect-the-dots puzzles have been around since the Phaistos Disk was created.

My definition of absolute decipherment makes me wonder sometimes if the Phaistos Disk is the legendary Philosophers' Stone.

We would point out that this term (Absolum) is close to the Absolute, which is the name by which the ancient alchemists designated the philosophers' stone. (Walter Lang)

What these hidden images mean, produced from absolute decipherment, is part of relative decipherment, which refers to the interpretation of what is explicit on the disk. For example, a studied relative decipherment of these four images, derived from this method of absolute decipherment involving connecting identical pictorgraphs with lines, is that the cave is the Cave of Zeus, the boat is constellation Argos, the star is Sirius within the seven planets, and the pyramid is the Great Pyramid.

As for the pictographs, all decipherments of the pictographs are relative decipherments because they must always arise from the decipherer's personal perspective, cumulative knowledge, and area of research. For example, a linguist deciphers the pictographs as an ancient language, an historian might say the disk hails from somewhere other than Crete, a board game collector deciphers the disk as an ancient game, an Ancient Egypt enthusiast deciphers the disk as an Egyptian myth (that one is mine), an admirer of Linear B deciphers the disk as more Linear A, a calendar researcher deciphers the disk as an ancient calendar (me also), a computer programmer deciphers the disk as an ancient computer disk, and a UFO researcher finds a UFO on the disk and deciphers the disk as an alien artifact (me again). The number of decipherments possible has a correlation to the number of people who try to decipher it. How can the Phaistos Disk accommodate so well all the different versions of it? I think I know.

The Phaistos Disk may fit everyone's idea of it simply because it may be a very good small model of the universe - a disk of the world - and nothing accommodates everyone's point of view so well as the universe. Perhaps this is the whole idea behind the creation of the disk. If so, it proves itself like a mathematical theorem. If it was intended this way, it certainly is successful. The disk has more than proved to me that it accommodates whatever decipherment I come up with, and I have come up with quite a few. As long as you stay within the context of the ancient Aegean world, you can come up with a very good relative decipherment. But back to the absolute decipherment.

By connecting exactly matching, seemingly matching pictographs with lines, many images are revealed that would be hard to imagine are just randomly there on the disk, even when the disk is a small model of the universe. In most cases I connected the dots in all the ways possible to arrive at the image displayed, by which I mean I didn't just arbitrarily connect this one to that one, without connecting it to the other one if I could. This method of decipherment produces images recognizable by everyone everywhere. Therefore, I suggest these images are archetypes or original models or patterns from which copies were made, or out of which later forms developed. The disk may have been a model or archetype for other disks, none of which survived or which are still undiscovered.

For nearly 100 years now, individuals have attempted to decipher the disk by reading the pictographs as though they were hieroglyphs, a method that always produces a relative decipherment, and one which the decipherer is absolutely convinced is the one and only decipherment. But by reading the signs differently - connecting them together with lines - the decipherer produces an absolute decipherment that speaks for itself, and which is open to interpretation by anyone who sees it, just as the disk is.

In conclusion, the absolute decipherment of the Phaistos Disk is achieved by connecting matching pictographs with lines to produce easily identifiable images. This also includes joining the two sides together at the matching line segments to produce the images associated with the Minoan civilization -- the Minoan wave spiral and the Minoan figure 8 shield. For my relative decipherment of the images and the pictographs, I stay within the context of the Minoan civilization, where the disk was found.

(1) The Phaistos Disk may be the Great Flood artifact of the antediluvian world, created shortly after the flood/tsunami to record both the event and the explanation for the great catastrophy.

(2) The Minoan inventor Daedalus probably created the Phaistos Disk Maze of Daedalus, giving us a Wings of Icarus view of his world-view that includes the cosmic calendar he likely invented. If Daedalus never lived, the name may mean "Inspiration."

(3) Two Minoan astronomer-priests are portrayed on the Phaistos Disk, perhaps Daedalus and his son Icarus, and they probably represent all the Minoan astronomer-priests during that time.

(4) Daedalus probably invented the telescopes and binoculars used by Minoan astronomer-priests, along with the printing press technology used to create the disk and even the kiln to fire it, now lost. Alternately, the Phaistos Disk may have been fired in a pottery factory in Egypt or it may have been "fired" by the fire that burned Phaistos Palace.

Everywhere in the ruins Evans found signs of uncontrollable fire – charred beams and pillars, blackened walls, and clay tablets hardened against time's tooth by the conflagration's heat. (Will Durant)

(5) The Phaistos Disk may be an explanatory historical record of the Minoan eruption and tsunami that devastated the northern coast of Crete and undermined the fabulous Minoan civilization, giving rise to the legend of Atlantis and its destruction.

(6) Daedalus probably lived, whoever he really was, and he was probably the world's greatest inventor. He is not unlike Shakespeare, the world's greatest writer, in that we do not know Shakespeare's real identity, either. We know he lived because we have his plays as proof of it. We can accept the Phaistos Disk as proof of the life of Daedalus and his successor, Icarus, and others who followed in that line. They probably not only invented or discovered everything evidenced by the Phaistos Disk but also taught it to the Minoans.

(7) Two such disks may have once existed, one found at Phaistos, Crete and one or more placed either in the subterranean chamber of the Great Pyramid for safekeeping or in Kephren or Mykerinos. Only the one at Phaistos survived, while the pyramid disk may still be there, undiscovered.

(8) The 240 raised pictographs make the disk itself into a two-sided stamp. Perhaps Daedalus and other astronomers pressed each side into the sand so they could use it as a teaching tool. It displayed such a remarkable maze it came to be known as the Maze of Daedalus. Disks like this would be easy to carry and use this way by these "world teachers," who perhaps taught this world soul creation theology.

(9) The Phaistos Disk Maze of Daedalus contains concepts that become, over a period of three millennium, the basis of Greek Mythology, Hermeticism, Alchemy, historical religions and modern mysticism. These concepts engendered Pythagoras' idea of the cosmos (kosmos) and Plato's idea of the World Soul. Although the disk itself remained lost for that period of time, the Inspiration (Daedalus) behind it continued to guide artists and writers throughout the ages. Following are the six main concepts of the theology that seems to be be recorded on the Phaistos Disk Maze of Daedalus:

A. The disk of the world (universe) has a rational order based upon a comprehensible structure that can be described using the universal languages of geometry and mathematics.
B. The disk of the world has two harmonious opposites, one part is a reflection of the other one and existing as a mirror image or a spirit twin.
C. The disk of the world is comprised of pre-existant and eternal archetypes that are mirrored in the stars as constellations.
D. The disk of the world and thus the stars that circumnavigate the Pole Star are spinning in an infinite spiral.
E. The spin creates projections of the pre-existantant geometrical forms and these become the impermanent physical world. (Click the image above to see an example.)
F. The disk of the world is spinning through the Void inside an octahedron (right).

Inside the octahedron, the top disk rests inside the top pyramid, home of the gods (later on in history the Olympians) and represents Heaven and Earth while the bottom disk rests inside the pyramid below, the mirror image of above, later on in history described as home of the Titans - Hades and Tartarus. The Heaven and Earth world is the solar world of light and the daytime; the Hades and Tarturus world is the lunar world of night and darkness. The disk of the world is surrounded by Oceanus, the cosmic ocean that circumnavigates the universe and holds everything within it (see above, the wave spiral).

(10) The pictographs on the Phaistos Disk have been found nowhere else in the Minoan civilization. It is possible they were part of a tattoo language worn by Minoan sailors, who took the language with them to their graves.

"...in those days [of ancient Egypt] of initiate kings and rulers and sages who occupied themselves with the Sacred Science, when the clear Aether spake face to face with them without disguise, or holding back aught, in answer to their deep scrutiny of holy things...In those days so great was their love of the holy mysteries, so high their virtue, that they left the earth below them, and in their deathless souls became 'heaven-walkers' and knowers of things divine." (Thrice-Greatest Hermes, G.R.S. Mead)

I recently found this on the internet when searching the web for more references to Minoan astronomy than those pointing to my website.

We present the results of orientation studies of important Minoan monuments and our interpretations of their significance for later Greek astronomy. The studies have been made on the hypothesis that the Minoans, via the Mycenaeans, were the source of the Greek lunisolar calendar and the use of bright stars to signal when to begin activities of economic importance, e.g., ploughing and sailing. The palace at Knossos is oriented so that the first rays of the sun at the equinoxes, as they clear the ridge in the east, will strike an usual concave stone in the floor of the corridor immediately adjacent to the pillar crypt area in the west wing. This area is generally considered to be the most sacred part of the first palace. The palace at Zakros is oriented so that from the northern-most corridor of the west wing the moon, as it rose at the southern major standstill, would have been observed to follow the profile of the ridge opposite at the time when the first palace was built (ca 2000 BC). At two peak sanctuaries near Zakros, there are walls oriented such that they could have been used to facilitate observations of the heliacal rising and setting and also the acronychal rising and cosmical setting of the bright star Arcturus ca 1700 BC. In the Minoan ruins of the palaces at Ayia Triada and Mallia, there was constructed a small building of Mycenaean megaron type. Both are oriented to sunset at the summer solstice. We argue from these results that the Minoans had begun systematic observations of the sun, the moon and the bright star Arcturus by the end of the Early Minoan Period (ca 2000 BC). The proximity of Crete to Egypt and the Near East and the documented contact among these regions invite comparison of the calendrical uses of astronomical knowledge in the three areas in the Bronze Age.

Title: Possible Minoan Contributions to Greek Astronomy
Authors: Henriksson, G.; Blomberg, M.
Affiliation: AA(Astronomical Observatory, Box 515, S-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden), AB(Department of Classical Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, S:t Erikstorg 5, Uppsala, S-75310 Sweden)
Publication: Joint European and National Astronomical Meeting, JENAM-97. 6th European and 3rd Hellenic Astronomical Conference, held in Thessaloniki, Greece, 2-5 July, 1997, Meeting Abstract, p. 332.
Publication Date: 00/1997
Origin: AUTHOR
Bibliographic Code: 1997jena.confE.332H

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THE MINOAN ERUPTION

TSUNAMI

According to recent conclusions by analyists in this field, the Minoan eruption is the second most catastrophic volcano of the last 5,000 years. This volcano erupted on the island of Thera, now Santorini, in the Aegean Sea only 70 miles from Crete. According to researchers, the volcano caused a very violent tsunami to hit the northern coast of Crete, destroying the ships and the ports. Whether or not the eruption destroyed the Minoan civilization is still in debate, but obviously it undermined it. What took a thousand years to build cannot be rebuilt in only a few years. In an ongoing debate, researchers date the volcanic eruption sometime between 1650 and 1500 BCE, although recently the date has narrowed to between 1627 and 1600 BCE. The Phaistos Disk is dated about 1700 to 1650 BCE because of the date it acquired from the Linear A tablet found with it in the charred rubble of Phaistos palace.

We may never know the actual date of the creation of the Phaistos Disk, but because it may be a record of the volcano and the tsunami we perhaps can use the disk to help date the volcano, and vice versa. The Great Pyramid on the disk might also represent the volcano. Because of the size of this historic record, only a little over 6" diameter, and because of the times in which it was created, when syncretisms were in use more than now, this image and the others on the disk can represent two or more things/ideas. In the following two paragraphs, Manfred Lurker writes about syncretism in reference to ancient Egypt but which can certainly apply to Minoan Crete.

The spiritual world of the ancient Egyptians is not immediately understandable by the western civilizations of the twentieth century...We may find it ridiculous for artists to represent the sky as a cow, or for a beetle to be venerated as a symbol of the sun god, but in past ages, among peoples having a mythical view of the world, the formative principle was not of logic but of an outlook governed by images...The whole symbolic evocation rests upon the supposed, and in the end actual, corres­pondence of things, on the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm as intuitively understood by the mind and visually by the eye...The ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, and to some extent the Greeks, used images; their view of the world was a comprehensive one.

...A symbol has manifold significance and therefore its origin and purpose cannot often be explained satisfactorily. Sometimes the symbol seems to contradict itself. There are, in fact, symbols which refer to both poles of existence: life and death, good and evil. (Introduction, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Egypt, Manfred Lurker, Thames and Hudson, publishers, 1974.)

As example of contradictory symbols, suppose this equilateral triangle is a pictograph of the volcano (right) filled with 20 pieces of molten rock and ash. It may also represent the icosahedron, later to become one of the five Platonic solids, an equilateral triangle composed of 20 equilateral triangles. What would be the relationship between the three? What may have been an obvious relationship to the Minoans would be, for us, as strange as thinking a cow also represents the sky. But would our world be any less mystifying to the Minoans if they could study us as we study them? Would they not go nuts trying to comprehend what we intend by all our corporate symbols? Maybe some civilization in the distant future will forget the purpose of corporations but still raise up a bunch of scholars who claim to decipher the strange symbols and hold endless debates as to their meanings.

If this image (far left and up above) represents an exterior view of both the Great Pyramid and the great volcano, then by using intuition we can understand it. They look similar, they are both monumental in the Bronze Age, one as a creation and the other as a goddess-made destruction. It may even be that the Minoans believed that viewing the goddess (2nd left) with their telescopes (3rd left) from within the pyramid, and climbing to the top of the pyramid to get nearer to her, unveiled her so extensively that she was offended and she assaulted their world with her tsunami (the wave pictograph, 4th left, and the spirals on the disk), that emanated from the center of the volcano which is also the center of the disk (see up above). Perhaps they hypothesized that the Great Pyramid itself was offensive to her. (Click the pyramid to see a larger image.)

In another pyramid image, an interior view, also found on the same side of the disk as the other pyramid (above right and right) by connecting all 10 identical golden fleece signs (5th left), the golden fleece representing perhaps the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, the goddess is highlighted by a door leading to a lower level. This seems to confirm the idea that their purpose for being at the pyramid was to get a closer look at her and that she was at the "bottom" of the Minoan eruption, i.e. causing it. The Phaistos Disk was found in a room with a trap door entrance. This trap door in the pyramid may indicate the astronomer-priests placed another disk in the subterranean chamber of the Great Pyramid, perhaps for safe keeping, as a record of the Minoan eruption and tsunami and their explanation of why it happened. Alternately, this second pyramid may be Kephren.

This could be the precursor, even the foundation, of the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. In the Bronze Age, the astronomers got too close to the goddess, like Icarus who flew so high that Ra melted his wings. Because she was displeased with them she made a volcano erupt in a time when no one had ever seen or heard of such a thing. It must have seemed like the end of the world, brought about by an angry goddess. Later on, perhaps in a Bible transformation, the goddess became god and the Great Pyramid became the Tower of Babel.

How would such a catastrophy as the Minoan eruption be interpreted by people in the Bronze Age? We have scientists to tell us about these things and so did the Minoans, but their science was interwoven with their theology, so that an event of this magnitude would be interpreted as an act of goddess. The ten plagues of Egypt, as example, were interpreted within a theological context but in actuality they may have been the result of the Minoan eruption. That theory is not widely accepted due to the differences in the dates of the Exodus (1450 BCE) and the eruption (1628 BCE), but it is normal human behavior to interpret cataclysmic events as apocalyptic. Today our general education and knowledge about things and the past allows us to reverse some apocalypses. Lately, we have begun to interpret the destruction of Atlantis within the context of our knowledge of the Minoan eruption. We are assisted in this interpretation by the phenomenal Minoan culture that seems to us to be too advanced for the times so that it must have been Atlantis.

Now that we have the final piece, the technology of the Minoans, in place it seems quite possible to conclude that the fabled civilization of Atlantis perhaps was Minoan Crete. In the great legend, Atlantis was destroyed because they offended the gods with their technology, and here we have on the Phaistos Disk the idea of it, that the Minoan-astronomer priests took their theology to such heights, literally and figuratively, that they understood completely the creation of the universe and their place within it.

But they understood it via their man-made technology, their telescopes, their binoculars, their astronomical measuring devices (left), things the goddess did not grant them at birth but that they acquired on their own, like little gods. The knowledge they gained from these devices was self-derived as they peered into her and measured her and performed vivisection via astronomy. Is this how they offended her so that she set out to punish them? Like God granting humanity the favor of punishment, rather than total destruction, in his gift of Noah's Ark, the Goddess granted Minoans salvation through her gift of ships, symbolized by the Constellation Argo on the disk (right). There we see Jason's ark, loaded with Argonauts (Arkonauts), Minyae and other life indigenous to Minoan Crete, riding the spiral wave of the tsunami and all around them the people and things swept away by the tsunami to float in the waters of the Aegean Sea.

If only we could look back in time, back through the stars, we might see the civilization of Minoan Crete and the people arriving at Knossos Palace before the flood. From the perspective of the ancient Greeks, who spread the Atlantis story so effectively that all the world knows it, a fabulous civilization did really exist out in the ocean, or under it as the story goes. But that could be because of the Minoan buildings and upside-down Doric columns swept to the bottom of the sea by the tsunami, to be explored in the aftermath by divers looking for loot and stories to tell of fishes swimming amongst the ruins of a lost city under the sea. Atlantis, and its human-devised technology, was destroyed because it overstepped its boundaries into those of the divine, and this could have been the interpretation given to the tsunami by the Minoans who, lacking the science of Tectonics, had no other methods of understanding it. (Above, viaduct entrance to the Palace of Knossos.)

For many researchers who study the Minoan civilization, the story of Atlantis must surely be a story about Minoan Crete, and the Phaistos Disk may well be a story of the Minoan eruption. Fortunately for us, Daedalus may have included on the disk not only the story of how the goddess attacked them with volcano and tsunami, but also he recorded the knowledge the astronomer-priests acquired via their offensive technology that so angered her. Part of their interpretation of the volcano and tsunami could be that the goddess was jealous of them because their civilization was so beautiful that it competed with her own beauty. Later on in Greek mythology we see this theme quite a bit.

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NEXT - MINOAN WORLD ON A DISK 2

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Page 1 - Astronomer Priests | Conclusions | The Minoan Eruption
Page 2 - Up is the Way Out | Myths and Legends of Crete
     Isle of Crete | Minoan Designs | Dance of the Labyrinth
Page 3 - Magic Horus | Minoan Creation Myth

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Copyright Notice - Disk of the World - Text and images copyrighted March 21, 1993-2023, Claire Grace Watson, B.A., M.S.T., U.S. Copyright and under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, All rights reserved.