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I live in the northern hemisphere, in the southeastern US, and here it's Spring Equinox today. But in the southern hemisphere it's Autumn Equinox. And even more confusingly, in the Mediterranean, even though we still call it the Spring Equinox, it's harvest time, so in Ariadne's Tribe we acknowledge the grain harvest festival on this day.

Allow me to explain...

One way to connect with an ancient culture like the Minoans is to learn about their daily life: what they did for a living, what their houses looked like, and especially what they ate. Food is a powerful way to connect with other cultures, and that includes those of the ancient world.

A while back I wrote about how the Minoans cooked - what their kitchens and cookpots were like, how they used braziers or outdoor cookfires instead of hearths. Today I'm going to talk about what they cooked. Much of this information comes from an appendix in my book Labrys and Horns.

UPDATE: In the time since I originally wrote this post, we've connected with the goddess who could be described as the Minoan counterpart to Aphrodite. We call her Antheia. I've included clarifying notes in square brackets throughout this post to update the information.

I'm regularly asked if there's a counterpart in the Minoan pantheon to some foreign deity or other. It's a game many of us play, trying to make connections and see where beliefs and practices were similar around the ancient world. Even the ancients did it, especially the Greeks and Romans, trying to figure out which of their deities each foreign one was equivalent to.

One of the most common ones I'm asked about is Aphrodite. If you think about it, she is pretty likely to have some kind of Minoan connection: She dates back at least to the Bronze Age, the time the Minoans flourished. Her mythos tells us that she's from Cyprus or Kythera, both islands within the Minoan sphere of influence (Cyprus even had a script that derived from the Minoans' Linear A), places we know they traveled to and traded with. This "early Aphrodite" was probably much more complicated than her later depiction as a shallow sex/love/beauty goddess suggests.

Over in Ariadne's Tribe, we've been chasing the Minoan Sun* Goddess for some time now. It has long been a given that there is a Minoan Sun Goddess; Nanno Marinatos even wrote a book that's largely about her, without being able to properly identify her (and clinging far too heavily to some of Sir Arthur Evans' discredited ideas, but that's a rant for another day).

Several of us have had dreams and visions of the Minoan Sun Goddess, and folk dance from around the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean enshrines a regional Sun Goddess even today.

Sir Arthur Evans is the name most closely associated with the rediscovery of ancient Minoan civilization.

Though local Cretan archaeologist Minos Kalokairinos discovered the site of Knossos and did some preliminary digging there, it's Evans who undertook a large-scale, systematic excavation of the largest of the Minoan cities and who introduced the ancient Minoans to the modern world.

If the Minoans were such successful traders with so many other cultures, why don't we hear about them in the writings of those other cultures?

Because in the ancient world, they weren't called Minoans.

If you look at one of the amazingly detailed Minoan gold seal rings, you might see a tiny human figure hovering as if it's descending from the heavens. These are usually interpreted as a deity coming down to their worshipers: an epiphany scene.

But what about all the other strange shapes that float in the air on the seal rings?