Roberta Rio

The Mysterious Ritual Enclosed in the Phaistos Disc and the Kernos Stone Roberta Rio

Sometimes there are places that we find particularly attractive; places where we want to stay because something that is beyond our understanding calls to us. What I am about to describe to you belongs to this type of situation. The Phaistos Disc is a mystery. It belongs to that group of objects which are not interpretable through the classic historical-archaeological method. The Kernos Stone, however, is not considered to be a mystery: it is simply thought to be a surface for offerings. For traditional scholars, it is obvious what unites the Phaistos Disc to the Kernos Stone: they are both artifacts that belong to the archaeological heritage of Crete. Nothing more. But if we link these two objects in our imagination and, indeed, put one on top of the other, perhaps in the same place and at a specific day of the year, we would not only get the solution to an enigma, but also the magic combination to open the mystery that unites them and encloses them: an ancient ritual in which they were used together.