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.
Below is a group of goddesses you can invoke and honor in your ritual work. I strongly advise placing images of a goddess on your altar when you need her aid, her strength, or her special qualities.
Hang a red jasper crystal attached to a string on your rearview mirror in your car and your parking problems will soon be over. When you need a spot, touch the jasper and say, “See the parking spot; be the parking spot.” Remember to always give thanks to the parking gods and goddesses to remain in their favor.
I'm eyeball-deep in the revisions and updates to Labrys & Horns. As I sift through the conversations we've had in Ariadne's Tribe and the notes I've taken over the past couple of years, the gods and goddesses are sorting themselves into pairs and trios - something I hadn't really expected.
When we began putting together a Minoan pantheon for modern Pagan spiritual practice, we were working with the garbled fragments that have come down via Greek mythology plus some useful information in the fields of archaeoastronomy, dance ethnography, and comparative mythology. We found lots of deities, but they didn't shake out into a human-style family tree the way so many other European pantheons did.
“I don’t believe you have ADHD,” the nurse practitioner said at our first meeting, looking at her computer and not at me. “You scored moderate for depression and anxiety. There are overlapping symptoms between those and ADHD, so we’ll treat them and you’ll see I’m right.”
My two-year-old happily threw all the pillows from the sofa onto the floor, and then tried to pull the blinds down from the window as I attempted to corral him without setting off a crying fit. I scooped him up and plopped on the sofa, relieved to nurse him for a moment, before he went after the blinds again. What did she mean, she didn’t believe my diagnosis? And why did she keep going on and on about how dangerous schedule 2 drugs are and how she wouldn’t just throw them at a problem?
The Maiden/Mother/Crone configuration of goddesses is popular in modern Paganism. It resonates with a lot of us, but there's no evidence the Minoans viewed their goddesses this way. In fact, the Maiden/Mother/Crone triplicity was invented by Robert Graves in the mid-20th century. Yes, it works, and it's meaningful to many people, so it's a legitimate part of their spirituality.
But it's not historically accurate, so we shouldn't apply it to the Minoans. If you're interested in Graves's process and teasing out which of his ideas are historic and which are purely poetic, I recommend Mark Carter's excellent book Stalking the Goddess.
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