I’m delighted to be writing this blog for you about walking the Minoan path. I thought I’d start by letting you know how I got to this place, this most unusual practice within the varied world of modern Paganism. If you know Ariadne and her tribe, or would like to, I would love to hear from you. For me, it started with a few pretty pictures…
I was captivated by the art. I sat there in my ninth grade art history class, staring at the beautiful frescoes from the temple complex at Knossos, their colors still vibrant after so many thousands of years. Those images touched a place deep within me and awakened a yearning for connection, not just with the culture of ancient Crete but with its deities as well. That was the moment I first set foot on the Minoan path.
Taking the next step wasn’t so easy. I made a beeline for the school library in search of information about the Minoans and their wonderful world but came up empty. There was no Internet back in those days, and the bookshelves offered nothing but a footnote or two in plodding histories of ancient Greece. Even the multi-volume encyclopedia only included a few paragraphs.
It wasn’t until college that I finally found enough information to sink my teeth into, and even that was pretty sparse: a couple of books about Sir Arthur Evans’ excavations at Knossos, complete with blurry black-and-white photos of some of the finds, and a slim volume about Michael Ventris’ decipherment of Linear B, one of the writing systems used in ancient Crete.
I practically memorized those books, but all they did was leave me wanting more. The Minoans were real people; they ate and drank, loved and hated. Most of all, they worshiped.
I desperately wanted to know about their religion, their beliefs and practices. What had gone on in those huge buildings? Every time I looked at a photo of the throne room at Knossos, I got goosebumps. Who had sat on that throne? I knew in my heart of hearts that it wasn’t the king Sir Arthur Evans imagined. Something was calling me, but I couldn’t identify it. I moved forward in life with a huge empty space inside me, wondering if it would ever be filled.
Then, in the early 1990s, I was wandering through a bookstore one day and happened upon two volumes that changed my life: Minoan Religion by Nanno Marinatos and The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler. Jackpot! I bought those books on the spot and pored over them until their pages became worn and dog-eared. Slowly I worked my way through their bibliographies, reading the books Marinatos and Eisler had used in their research. My friends thought I was crazy.
By that time I had become active in the local Pagan community and had begun working my way through the Wiccan degrees with a small coven. During our regular rituals I happily invoked deities from the Celtic and Norse pantheons, deities whose names I had heard for years, whose cultures felt familiar. Then one day I was given an assignment, a requirement I had to fulfill in order to complete my work toward the second degree. I had to write a year’s worth of seasonal rituals and a lifetime’s worth of rites of passage. I could choose the pantheon; that part was entirely up to me.
For days I dithered, vacillating between the Celtic and Norse pantheons, occasionally considering the Egyptian or even the little-known Slavic deities. All that time, something…someone…was waiting patiently in the background, waiting for the obvious to dawn on me.
Five days in a row, five different people mentioned Crete and the Minoans to me, totally out of the blue.
I took the hint.
Yes, I relented. The Minoan pantheon it was! Then came the really uncomfortable part. I had lots of archaeological information about ancient Crete, but even Dr. Marinatos’ book with its title ‘Minoan Religion’ really said very little about what the Minoans believed and how they worshiped. I was going to have to rely on my intuition. Yikes.
I’ve known a lot of reconstructionist Pagans over the years – Norse, Celtic, Hellenic. I really admire the amount of work it takes to do all that research and create a living tradition out of the surviving literature, art, and architecture. But it’s really the literature that provides the foundation for those reconstructionist traditions, and it’s literature that we have exactly none of from Crete. We can’t read what they wrote in their native language; Linear A has yet to be deciphered.
So I asked Ariadne to help me. And of course, she did, though I will admit to being a bit thick. Sometimes it takes several tries for the deities to get through to me. Back then, I really didn’t trust my inner voice much at all. But eventually I managed to complete the assignment.
What I ended up with was something of a hybrid between modern Wiccan-style practice and ancient Minoan religion. It was a start.
There are just some things we don’t know, lots of gaps in our knowledge and understanding of the Minoans. All the myth have, for instance, has filtered down to us through the Greeks. But we do have a lot of archaeological evidence, and that's a big help.
We know the Minoans made offerings at shrines…in their homes, in the temples, on mountaintops and in caves. They brought food, wine, flowers, even little clay and bronze figurines. They held big festivals at various times of the year and performed mystery plays at the temples, with clergy members enacting the Minoan mythos. They worshiped a broad collection of deities in many forms, from human to animal.
I took that information and crafted it into a set of rituals that satisfied my teachers. Then slowly, over the course of several years, I enacted most of those rituals with the coven I belonged to at the time.
It was then I learned that the deities weren’t always as pleased as my teachers had been. Thankfully, the Minoan deities were gentle with me…a table collapsing here, a goblet cracking there, an invisible force knocking a knife out of my hand. Fortunately, no one was ever injured, and I learned to take the hints to heart and adjust my rituals accordingly.
UPDATE: That assignment - all those rituals and the research I did to write them - eventually became Ariadne's Thread, which is now (as of 2023) in its second edition. The new edition has changed substantially from its Wiccan-esque beginnings to a style of ritual and connection with the deities that's more in keeping with Bronze Age religious practices like the Minoans themselves would have been familiar with. And this little blog was just the beginning of a journey that has led to an inclusive Minoan spiritual tradition, a beautiful community that I'm proud to be a part of.
So I’ve been walking with Ariadne for a while. Sometimes I need a big, formal ritual. Sometimes I just sit and listen to what she has to say to me. She and her family of deities understand that we no longer live in the same world the Minoans knew. But they remind me that we humans have always faced the same issues: life, death, meaning, and change. And the deities have always walked alongside us, offering their help. All we have to do is listen.