PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

The ocean is a rebel. It is a tempestuous woman. No man can tame her nor resist her siren song. She has claimed so many, so many. They have been dragged to that benthic hell. What are the deepest depths of the sea if not the chthonic realm?

Leviathan seeks not to conquer her. He knows his place. He knows she is Tiamat, the greatest monster of them all. What are the serpents, the dragons, the marked beasts if not the children of the sea? Who then is the hero? Or is it the antihero?

Lucifer is the light-bringer, as the brutal sea speaks only the truth from the shining abyss. She bears the knowledge of good and evil. She contains multitudes thereof. She is legion.

The oceans are never told, “Be smaller. You are too much. Behave.” The sea is never told, “You are not enough.”

“Respect the sea,” they say. Respect her. Respect the woman, the womb, the deep, dark matrix. She is the matron, the All-Mother. The ocean is not evil, but chaos. She is a rebel. She tells men, “go to hell”. Or perhaps, “come to hell”.

I invite you to write your own myths, and to write your own versions of the ancient myths. Interpet them how you wish, in the way the resonates with you. Write completely new mythology that speaks to your experience in your real life the way that myths about grain harvest spoke to ancient farmers. But also make new translations of the old myths, and new personal versions of them, and opposite versions like fractured fairytales. 

If you speak other languages, make translations of untranslated works. Instead of translating a work in Old Norse that has been translated a dozen times, how about a work in Old Saxon other than Beowulf? Any other work in Old West Germanic? How about works in modern German which are new academic papers? Works in Latin? Works in obscure dialects? 

I've written about Daedalus before, describing his connection with the Minoan demi-deities the Daktyls and Hekaterides. But as with so many of the members of the Minoan family of deities, he has more than one set of connections.

These clusters of connected deities are called micropantheons and are a great way to focus on one particular portion of the mythos, since a whole pantheon can be pretty intimidating. Besides, most of us have our favorites that we prefer to spend most of our time with. Micropantheons were so popular that they continued to be how most people approached religion in the eastern Mediterranean all the way into the classical era (and even later, really, with the local cults of certain Christian saints).

One fun-but-also-challenging aspect of revivalist Pagan spirituality is figuring out how to do things in the modern world when it's clear we can't do the same thing the ancient culture did.

The Minoans had huge temples in all the major cities of Bronze Age Crete, staffed with full-time clergy, part-time clergy, administrators, artisans, cooks, housekeepers and other people to keep the huge institution running on a day-to-day basis. This would have been a hierarchical organization with bureaucracy as well as religious activities - a far cry from the solitary and small-group Paganism most of us practice in the modern world.

Lilies abound in Minoan art. They're such a common feature of the frescoes and ceramics that I wrote a whole blog post about them.

Lilies have long been a symbol of the Divine Feminine. In Ariadne's Tribe, we connect them with the goddesses Rhea and Ariadne.

The Serpent Mother is an enigmatic yet ever-present figure in Minoan spirituality. She's a sort of "out of the corner of your eye" kind of character, difficult to define or pin down, yet most people intuitively understand her on some level.

Today I'm going to attempt, not to corral her into a concrete definition, but to describe the way we honor her in our spiritual practice in Ariadne's Tribe. I'll talk around her, and by that means, we can begin to see the outline of who and what she is.

Summer Solstice blessings to you all! This year (2024) the moment of Summer Solstice in the northern hemisphere occurs today, June 20, at 4:51 p.m. US Eastern Time (9:51 p.m. GMT).

The first Full Moon after Summer Solstice occurs tomorrow, June 21, at 9:08 p.m. US Eastern Time ( or just over the line into the next day, 2:08 a.m. GMT, June 22, and so on further east). So there's very little time between Solstice and the next Full Moon.