Today I’m going to explore the deity Zagreus. In Ariadne's Tribe, we consider him to be a face of our bull-god Tauros Asterion. 

He’s the bull who comes wreathed in flowers in the spring, specifically during the Blooming Time, the shortest of the Minoan seasons. A shamanic deity, his name means “the dismembered one,” a reminder that he’s also the sacrifice who goes willing. He is a dying-and-reborn god.

Just to be clear: Zagreus is not the same as the Hellenic god Zeus, even though their names look somewhat alike. In their effort to create an ancient ancestry for their deities, the Greeks made Zeus the son of the Minoan goddess Rhea and said he was born on Crete, but he is a Hellenic deity and not the same as Zagreus.

Zagreus appears prominently in the Orphic traditions of Hellenic Greece. But despite the presence of snakes in Orphism, there's no connection between those later Greek traditions and the earlier Minoan ones. Zagreus as we know him in Ariadne's Tribe is specifically a Minoan deity.

As the dismembered sacrifice, Zagreus is a regenerative deity; he dies and is reborn on a predetermined schedule. This is especially moving to me because the Blooming Time is a season of life-in-death and death-in-life, a liminal juxtaposition of the two.

It's springtime, when Crete is overwhelmingly covered in blooming wildflowers. But it's also the grain harvest time in the Mediterranean, the death of the crop and the end of the growing season, a time to commune with the ancestors and the spirits of the dead.

As a dying-and-reborn god, Zagreus is a psychopomp, guiding the souls of the dead to the safety of the Underworld. It's likely that bulls were sacrificed to him during Minoan times, just as he sacrifices himself to show us the way to the World Below.

So Zagreus reminds us that life and death are two sides of the same coin, both necessary, each beautiful in its own way.