Although we still can't read Linear A, the script the Minoans used to write their native language, we can read Linear B. It's the script that the Mycenaeans, or their Minoan scribes, used to record Mycenaean, an early form of Greek. The Mycenaeans borrowed so much of Minoan religion and culture that the Linear B tablets give us some information about Minoan religion, even if most of the tablets are just inventory lists of donations to temples.
The Linear B tablets include the names of deities, some of whom are manifestly Minoan and some of whom look to be a part of the blended Minoan-Mycenaean culture that developed during the Mycenaean occupation of Crete.
Today we'll look at a couple of deities who are native to Crete, members of the Minoan pantheon. Here's a goddess who's very important to those of us in Ariadne's Tribe:
The Lady of the Labyrinth is, of course, Ariadne, who was maligned by the Greeks as a mere maiden with a ball of string, but who has finally come back to us as the powerful goddess she truly is.
Though the Greeks tried to turn the Labyrinth into an actual building constructed by the architect-god Daedalus, it was never a physical structure; the Labyrinth is a spiritual pathway to the Underworld and your own inner world.
The Crane Dance, sacred to Ariadne, is the ritual embodiment of the Labyrinth, the motion that takes us on the sacred journey. So when we walk the labyrinth, the design that's marked on the ground isn't the real labyrinth: our motion and life energy creates an energetic labyrinth that is generated out of the sacred act.
How about a god from Minoan times? This one is appropriate for this time of year, as we approach Solstice:
The Psychro Cave on Mt. Dikte has been sacred to the Minoan Mother Goddess Rhea since early Minoan times. It's where the divine infant Dionysus, the Minoan sacred year-king, is born at sunrise on Winter Solstice.
Like the later Romans, the Greeks liked to call foreign gods by the names of their Greek equivalents. So the Greeks said it was "Cretan Zeus" who was born in that cave. But really, it was Dionysus, whom they called Cretan Zeus (which some writers later truncated to just "Zeus") because he appeared to be the highest-ranking male deity in the Minoan pantheon.
One of this names was Diktaios, the One Born in Her Sacred Cave. What a beautiful way to enter the world!