He was probably high-priest as well as king, ruling his people chiefly through their religion. They worshiped a female deity, the "Great Mother," the productive force of Nature, and they symbolized this Mother by a sort of double axe which we find stamped upon their ornaments and buildings. Theirs was a cruel worship, involving public sacrifices of human beings made to savage bulls before a crowd of people; or perhaps the sacrifice was to a bull-headed idol such as the Moloch of the Phoenicians. The later Greeks who had been tributary to Crete long remembered these sacrifices; and we come upon traditions of the "Minotaur" or Minos bull in many places.