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The Minoan family of deities includes a variety of what you might call job descriptions. Each deity has unique connections with certain facets of human life and the material world. But it's not always as clear-cut as you might think, since many of our deities appear to be reflections of each other.

Individuation is problematic, as we say in Ariadne's Tribe.

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.

A lot of Pagans are hesitant to use the word prayer since it's so strongly connected with Christianity in modern western culture. But really, one of the things many of us do in our spiritual practice is pray. Prayer has been around a lot longer than Christianity has.

What is prayer? At its most basic, it's a conversation with a deity. In Ariadne's Tribe, we pray a lot, although often we simply call it talking with deity.

In Ariadne's Tribe, we associate various animals, plants, and objects with our deities: the griffin with Therasia, the staff with Korydallos, geese and white and yellow flowers with Antheia, for instance. These items help us identify the deities in Minoan art. In that sense, they're kind of like name tags or labels.

But there's another collection of attributes that we associate with our deities as well. Like the ones I just mentioned, these can also help us identify the deity or their domain in the art. But more importantly, they indicate a special type of relationship between the deity and the humans who work in certain occupations or who raise certain food crops.

Some of the deities we have relationships with in Ariadne’s Tribe were easy to find because they were still well known not just in classical times but all the way up to the present – Rhea, for instance, and Dionysus, and Eileithyia. Others were a bit harder to identify, but our research led them to us eventually. Therasia is one of those.

But some deities were even more hidden and took us longer to find. I want to talk about three of those today and introduce them to you.

A member of Ariadne's Tribe recently asked what our main virtues and values might be, and that got me thinking. We don't have a formalized list of virtues and values the way, for instance, modern Norse Pagan groups often do. But the values that matrilineal societies have traditionally supported are a big part of the attraction of Minoan spirituality.

The Minoans appear to have valued egalitarianism, inclusion, interdependence, and an animistic reverence for nature. Those are among the major values we espouse in Ariadne's Tribe. They inform our spiritual practice and our daily lives. They're enshrined in our Official Policies. We do our best to be living examples of these values as we interact with the Big World.

Individuation is problematic. That's the unofficial Ariadne's Tribe motto.

It's sort of a joke, a witty response to difficult questions about divinity. But it's also very serious.