Listen now, friends, to a tale of best-laid plans going awry.

As many of you know, my first book on Minoan spirituality, Ariadne's Thread, went out of print early this year. I got my rights back to the book and began revising it for a second edition. I wrote it before Ariadne's Tribe came into being, so it definitely needed some changes. I was planning to release the new second edition on November 1 of this year.

Silly me, I thought I was just going to update it the way I did with Ancient Spellcraft and The Wiccan Wellness Book. But it turns out, it needs more of a change than just some quick revisions.

The first part of the book is about Minoan life and religion: the cave shrines and peak sanctuaries, the temples and sacred houses, and everyday stuff like clothing, art, and music. That part was a lot of fun to update with all the latest archaeological information. It's exciting to realize what great strides Minoan archaeology has made in the past decade.

Of course, I've also completely revised the mini-encyclopedias about the Minoan pantheon and religious symbols. We've learned so much in our relationships with the Minoan deities since 2013 (has it really been that long?) when the book was published. While you're waiting for the new book to come out, you can check out a lot of the deities and their symbolism in my pantheon blog series.

So the process of revising the book for a second edition was going great. Then I got to the part with the rituals. The ritual format that we developed specifically for modern Minoan spirituality is based in Bronze Age religious practices - totally appropriate for what we're doing, but completely different from the Wiccan-style rituals in the first edition of the book. I knew going in that I was going to have to rewrite the rituals in the new format.

What I didn't realize until I got into the process was that I need to write a bunch of new rituals, too.

You see, when I wrote Ariadne's Thread, Ariadne's Tribe didn't exist yet. So obviously, our sacred calendar didn't exist yet, either. The seasonal rituals that I wrote for the first edition were a simple set: a New Moon ritual, a Full Moon ritual, and a ritual for each of the equinoxes and solstices.

The thing is, our calendar now includes a lot more festivals than just those. In fact, I need to write six new rituals, doubling the number of seasonal rites in the original book.

I'm having to make some major changes to the rites of passage as well, a lifetime's worth of rituals from baby blessing to coming of age to wedding to memorial rite. I'm not just changing them over to the Tribe ritual format. I'm also making them more inclusive and adding a non-gendered coming-of-age rite to complement the Rite of Manhood and the Rite of First Blood.

This isn't stuff that I can just hash out in a weekend. I take ritual writing seriously as a sacred act. I need to make sure these rituals are not just meaningful, but respectful of the deities and safe for you lovely folx to perform. That takes time.

So I won't be releasing the new second edition of Ariadne's Thread on November 1. In order to fit this work in around all my other obligations, I'm having to make a dramatic shift in the publication date.

The new second edition of Ariadne's Thread will be released on May 15, 2023. My apologies for the delay, but the end result will be a much better resource, I promise.

In the meantime, Labrys & Horns is still an up-to-date, accurate resource for the practice of Tribe spirituality. And alongside all my other projects, I have another Minoan novel coming out on Summer Solstice 2023, an MM romance featuring the bull leapers and the Cattle Master at Phaistos. So there's that to look forward to as well!

In the meantime, I wish you joy!