Ariadne's Tribe: Minoan Spirituality for the Modern World
Walk the sacred labyrinth with Ariadne, the Minotaur, the Great Mothers, Dionysus, and the rest of the Minoan family of deities. Ariadne's Tribe is an independent spiritual tradition that brings the deities of the ancient Minoans alive in the modern world. We're a revivalist tradition, not a reconstructionist one. We rely heavily on shared gnosis and the practical realities of Paganism in the modern world. Ariadne's thread reaches across the millennia to connect us with the divine. Will you follow where it leads?
Find out all about Ariadne's Tribe at ariadnestribe.com. We're an inclusive, welcoming tradition, open to all who share our love for the Minoan deities and respect for our fellow human beings.
Ariadne's Tribe Pantheon: The Goddess Antheia
This is one in a series of posts about our pantheon. Find the full list of the whole series here.
Up this week: the goddess Antheia, one of the triplicity of goddesses who are daughters of the Three Mothers in our pantheon. You can read about the other two daughter goddesses: Ariadne and Arachne. And of course, the Mothers have sons as well. We'll get to them as we move along in this series.
Antheia was a bit difficult for us to find at first. She's the Minoan face of Aphrodite, and it took some searching to get a clear picture of her. But once we began to call to her in meditation and ritual, and she answered, we knew we had made the connection.
If she's the Minoan face of Aphrodite, how did we come to call her Antheia? It’s a name the Greeks used for one of the Kharites (the Graces, who were Aphrodite’s attendants). But the Greek writer Hesychius tells us that Antheia was the name used for Aphrodite at Knossos. Presumably this was a bit of mythos that survived the centuries, since Knossos was destroyed about 1350 BCE, two millennia before Hesychius wrote his works.
We connect Antheia with water birds like ducks and geese and beautiful things like flowers. Why water birds? Because Posidaeja is her mother, so the seashore is Antheia's territory, and by association, any kind of water bird. Antheia is the goddess of love and beauty... flowers spring up beneath her feet as she walks. If she's on the seashore, those flowers might be sea daffodils (Pancratium maritimum), a lovely flower that still blooms on some of Crete's beaches.
So where can we find Antheia in Minoan art? You can see one lovely example at the top of this blog post. It's the Garland fresco from a private home in Knossos. The flowers in this fresco have been identified as lilies, myrtle, and anemones. We especially associate myrtle - the flowers and the whole plant - with Antheia. Other specific flowers are linked to other goddesses (lilies to Rhea and Ariadne, for instance, and the saffron crocus to Therasia). But flowers in general belong to Antheia, especially white and yellow ones. So we might think of Antheia when we see this Kamares ware krater with lovely 3-D flower ornaments:
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons
Or this beautiful serpentine bowl carved in the shape of an opening blossom:
Image CC BY 1.0 via Wikimedia Commons
We also consider water birds, like ducks and geese, to be Antheia's territory. So we think of her when we see them on the Minoan stone seals or in fresco scenes like this one from Akrotiri:
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons
Though Greek mythology portrays Aphrodite as petty, vain, and vindictive, we don’t find Antheia to be any of those things. She is beautiful, yes, but it’s a loveliness that she shares freely with the world, not one born of competition or jealousy. She helps us find beauty in the world: in ourselves, in each other, in nature, even in the tasks of our daily lives. And she helps us realize the power of beauty to connect us with the divine. A pretty flower, a twinkling star, a warm smile—these are things that remind us that the whole world is sacred, that the divine isn’t “out there somewhere” but right here, within each and every one of us.
In the name of the bee,
And of the butterfly,
And of the breeze, amen.
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