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In Ariadne's Tribe, we developed our sacred calendar one bit at a time over the course of several years, relying on a combination of archaeology, comparative mythology, dance ethnology, and shared gnosis to collect up and organize the festivals. But now that it's a living, functioning thing that we've worked in sync with for a while, something interesting has happened.
We've come to know the seasons of ancient Crete.
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Last week I looked at the top five blog posts of 2021, a couple of which surprised me. Then I decided I wanted to look back over the seven years (time flies!) that I've been writing this blog and see which posts have been most popular over the long term. In this case, four out of the top five surprised me - and one didn't. At all.
Herewith, the top five Minoan Path posts since I began this blog in 2014, from least popular to most popular. Have you read them all?
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Every January, I like to look back over my blog posts of the past year and see which ones were the most popular. I usually find the results a little surprising, and this year is no different.
For 2021, my top five blog posts, beginning with the most popular:
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Some time ago I wrote about the possibility that Minos, who is a god and not a mythical king, is a moon god. It turns out, that's only one of his many fascinating aspects.
There's precious little about him in the garbled fragments of Minoan myth that survived into classical times. The stories mostly talk about him being a king, and a horrid one at that. But the tidbits of information that led us to view him as a Moon god also point to his connection with the Minoan sacred calendar. More on both of those aspects shortly.
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I was recently asked a question during an interview, and I've been thinking about it ever since. The question: What kinds of people seek out Modern Minoan Paganism, and why?
The first part of that question spans the gamut of not just the modern Pagan world but the modern population in general: Wiccans, Hellenic Pagans, Druids, former Christians seeking polytheistic spirituality, former atheists and agnostics who have felt the call of the deities...
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The photo above (image CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons) shows two full faience figurines and one partial one from Knossos as displayed at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum. You're probably already familiar with at least the two full ones in the middle and on the left.
What you might not know is that they weren't found in such a complete state, and at least one of them may have been reconstructed incorrectly.
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Snake tube. What an odd name for a Bronze Age artifact from Minoan sites. That's what Sir Arthur Evans called these cylindrical ceramic objects that were decorated with wavy serpentine shapes running up and down them. You can see a few on the bottom row of the image at the top of this post.
Evans called them "snake tubes" because he thought the Minoans kept pet snakes in their temples and homes, and these tubes were their little houses. I mean, they're decorated with snakes, so why not?
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