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One of the most frequent comments I hear about Minoan ceramics is how modern they look, how much they would be at home in any of our kitchens or dining rooms.

Most of us have an idea in our heads about what ancient pottery looks like. We've seen enough pictures of Greek and Roman cups, jars, and pots to know the vibe they have.

The Minoans were great artists, including beautiful plants and animals in their work. I've written before about their depictions of lilies - perhaps the most well-known botanical figure in Minoan art - and papyrus.

Today, I'd like to talk about an unnatural flower, one that doesn't exist in the real world but that appears in Minoan art: the waz lily. You can see two of them on the teacup above (the looped handle is facing away from the camera, so it's not visible). The waz lily is a stylized lily with a pronounced double curl, combined with a stylized papyrus bloom head.

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.

It's autumn in the northern hemisphere. For many of us, this is the end of the growing season and the beginning of the turn toward winter. But in the Mediterranean, it's the end of the hot, dry, rainless (and lately, wildfire-laden) summer. In the Mediterranean climate, the summer, not the winter, is the "dead season" when nothing grows.

But when the rainy season begins in the autumn, it's like the world is born anew.

One of the interesting aspects of imagining or recreating Minoan daily life - including religious practice - is that we don't have any textiles to speak of: no altar cloths, no curtains, no rugs or baskets. The damp Mediterranean Sea air tends to rot organic materials pretty swiftly. So we only have a few tiny fragments of the real thing, plus pictures of them in Minoan art.

But we have an interesting reflection of soft materials in some creative ceramics the Minoan potters made. Minoan pottery was pretty imaginative all round, including loads of 3d decorations and other fun details. But this particular class of ceramic vessels is unique: They all look like they're made of soft materials.

I've written about Daedalus before, describing his connection with the Minoan demi-deities the Daktyls and Hekaterides. But as with so many of the members of the Minoan family of deities, he has more than one set of connections.

These clusters of connected deities are called micropantheons and are a great way to focus on one particular portion of the mythos, since a whole pantheon can be pretty intimidating. Besides, most of us have our favorites that we prefer to spend most of our time with. Micropantheons were so popular that they continued to be how most people approached religion in the eastern Mediterranean all the way into the classical era (and even later, really, with the local cults of certain Christian saints).

One fun-but-also-challenging aspect of revivalist Pagan spirituality is figuring out how to do things in the modern world when it's clear we can't do the same thing the ancient culture did.

The Minoans had huge temples in all the major cities of Bronze Age Crete, staffed with full-time clergy, part-time clergy, administrators, artisans, cooks, housekeepers and other people to keep the huge institution running on a day-to-day basis. This would have been a hierarchical organization with bureaucracy as well as religious activities - a far cry from the solitary and small-group Paganism most of us practice in the modern world.