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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.

Lilies abound in Minoan art. They're such a common feature of the frescoes and ceramics that I wrote a whole blog post about them.

Lilies have long been a symbol of the Divine Feminine. In Ariadne's Tribe, we connect them with the goddesses Rhea and Ariadne.

Since Ariadne's Tribe is a living spiritual tradition, it has taken us a number of years to complete our sacred calendar. This post and the next one will be the last additions for the foreseeable future. This has been a long-term community effort in the Tribe, and I'm grateful to everyone who has participated in this process.

So where are we in the calendar right now? We've just passed the Blessing of the Ships and are now in the season that leads up to Summer Solstice.

In Ariadne's Tribe, our mythos is intricately interwoven with our sacred calendar. This connects the stories of the deities with the movement of celestial objects, from the Sun and Moon to the planets and stars. When we look up in the night sky, we see those stories spread out in sparkling array above us.

The Tribe mythos is organized into micropantheons, with each small group of deities having their own story cycles that are reflected in the stars. Micropantheons have been around in the Mediterranean since at least the Bronze Age, possibly earlier, so it's likely the Minoans had multiple ways of viewing the constellations depending on which deities their personal spiritual practice revolved around.