Carme (mythology)

Carme, the Latinized form of Greek Karmê ("shearer"), was a female Cretan spirit who assisted the grain harvest of Demeter's Cretan predecessor. According to the Olympian mythology, she was the mother, by Zeus, of the virginal huntress Britomartis, also called Diktynna, whom she bore at Kaino. Carme was the daughter of either Phoenix and Cassiopeia, or of the divine ploughman Euboulos, son of Karmanor. The name Karmanor is simply "the man of Karme", an epithet with the masculine -or suffix describing his role; Karmanor was a double of Iacchus, the consort of Demeter, and was the purifier of Apollo after he had slain the earth-dragon Pytho, that possessed Delphi. "The name does not appear to be Greek", observed Walter Burkert of Karmanor.

The duplicates and parallel genealogies are symptoms of the uneasy fit between Minoan cult, to which Carme belonged, and the Mycenaean cult that superseded it.