Ariadne's Tribe: Minoan Spirituality for the Modern World
Walk the sacred labyrinth with Ariadne, the Minotaur, the Great Mothers, Dionysus, and the rest of the Minoan family of deities. Ariadne's Tribe is an independent spiritual tradition that brings the deities of the ancient Minoans alive in the modern world. We're a revivalist tradition, not a reconstructionist one. We rely heavily on shared gnosis and the practical realities of Paganism in the modern world. Ariadne's thread reaches across the millennia to connect us with the divine. Will you follow where it leads?
Find out all about Ariadne's Tribe at ariadnestribe.com. We're an inclusive, welcoming tradition, open to all who share our love for the Minoan deities and respect for our fellow human beings.
Hands of Great Skill: A few "handy" Minoan deities
The Ariadne's Tribe pantheon includes a wide variety of deities. One group I haven't talked much about is the set of deities we call Hands of Great Skill: those whose purview is highly skilled handcrafts of various sorts.
Taking the raw materials of the Earth and transforming them, turning them into something new and different: that's a kind of magic. Rhea's gifts to us - clay and metal ore - are the body of the Earth Mother, offered up to those whose can make blades from rocks and vessels from mud using their hands and the equally magical power of fire, a gift from the Sun Goddess Therasia.
The foremost member of this group is Daedalus, the mythic figure who is famous for building the Labyrinth and, according to Homer, Ariadne's dancing floor. Centuries after the fall of the Minoan cities, the Greeks twisted his story into something sad and terrible. But in the Tribe, we know him as a smith-inventor god.
The Minoans were a Bronze Age culture, so you won't find any anvils or pieces of red-hot iron in Daedalus' workshop. Instead, you'll find the tools for pouring bronze blades and figurines, along with the accoutrements of the goldsmith and silversmith's trade. You might even find the plans for some of the fancy temple complexes at the heart of the big Minoan cities.
We consider Daedalus to be a face of our god Korydallos. We also consider the legendary bronze automaton Talos to be, not a mythical robot, but another face of Korydallos, closely related to Daedalus. They all point back to the magical creation of bronze from the gifts the Great Mothers have given us: metal ore and fire. All three of these deities - Korydallos, Daedalus, and Talos - have the same talos/dalos root in their names; that's probably not a coincidence.
Along with Daedalus, you'll find some interesting demi-gods and goddesses in the Tribe pantheon: the Daktyls and Hekaterides. Where did they come from?
At Midwinter, the goddess Rhea went to her sacred cave on the island of Crete to give birth to her son, the god Dionysus. During her labor, as she cried out in the throes of a contraction, she dug her fingers into the Earth. As her son was born, so too rose up a set of beings from the marks her fingers made in the soil: the five male Daktyls from her right hand and the five female Hekaterides from her left hand.
These beings represent the magical skills that transform the Earth from raw material to fine finished goods. Pottery, the Hekaterides' territory, goes back at least as far as the early Neolithic era. And metalsmithing, which we associate the Daktyls with, began in the Copper Age during the late Neolithic, progressing to the fine works of the Bronze Age.
In a world before the advent of the factory assembly line, every item anyone owned was made entirely by hand. The hands of a skilled craftsperson were their most precious tool, the focus of their expertise. It’s no wonder that hands and fingers became the focus of reverence and even the names of some special deities.
The next time you begin a craft project or buy a handmade item, consider the possibility that Hands of Great Skill, whether yours or someone else's, are a sacred gift.
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