There's a certain kind of mindset that says that we, the current oh-so-modern inhabitants of the world, are the epitome of social and biological evolution, that we're a massive improvement over everything and everyone who has come before us.
This concept was very popular in Victorian times thanks to Social Darwinism, a misapplication of the concept of evolution to social and cultural contexts. It was simply an easy way for well-off white westerners to feel superior to People of Color and pretty much every single culture that had come before them.
It can be hard for us modern folks who have always lived in a patriarchal society to envision any other kind of culture. As Riane Eisler perceptively noted in her book The Chalice and the Blade, we come from a dominance hierarchy type society, so we tend to assume that any other kind of society from history or prehistory must be similar.
In other words, if the men aren’t in charge and disproportionately powerful compared to the women in a culture, then the reverse must be true: the women must hold all the power while the men are largely powerless and oppressed.
The Minoans had a lot of opportunities for what I like to call Big Ritual.
The clergy of the temples at Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, and the other cities put on mystery plays for the public, enacting stories from Minoan mythology at the solstices and equinoxes as well as at other festival dates.
When I tell people I follow a Minoan spiritual path, one comment that regularly comes up involves “those massive double-axe weapons.” Sometimes Wiccans will compare the labrys to the athame or the coven sword – a strong, sharp weapon that’s meant to signify the practitioner’s will, strength, passion and so on.
But that’s not an accurate comparison. Yes, there have been cultures that used double-bladed axes as weapons, and very effective ones at that. And we know the Minoans made all sorts of bronze weapons for export.
We like to think of the deities as having always existed, time out of mind. In one sense they're timeless, of course, but in another sense they're closely linked to the cultures and societies of specific times and places. It’s important to know when each deity ‘showed up’ and in what culture they did so, in order to understand which versions of the myths are the original ones and which are later alterations.
That’s right, later cultures came along and changed the earlier versions of myths - in most cases because they were taking over a society and wanted to downplay or even demonize its deities in favor of their own.
Thursday is the holiday of Thanksgiving where I live in the U.S. As these things go, it’s a relatively modern one, instituted in the nineteenth century to help bring the nation back together after the Civil War (and please, let’s set aside the horrid historical revisionism about the Pilgrims and the native North American nations for the moment – I’m aware that many people choose not to celebrate Thanksgiving because of this issue, and that's fair).
But the concepts on which Thanksgiving is founded are ancient. Essentially, it's the American harvest festival. And some of us find sacredness in that fact.
I was recently asked, over in Ariadne’s Tribe, about the apparent predominance of women and goddesses in ancient Minoan religion. After all, the labrys and the Snake Goddess figurines have been hallmarks of the feminist movement for decades.
But Minoan spirituality wasn't nearly as overwhelmingly female-centric as it might appear. Instead, it's more balanced.
Erin Lale
Fellow faculty at Harvard Divinity School posted an open letter to Wolpe in response to his article. It's available on this page, below the call for p...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. The Wild Hunt has a roundup of numerous responses on its site, but it carried this one as a separate article. It is an accoun...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. This one is by a scholar of paganism. It's unfortunately a Facebook post so this link goes to Facebook. She posted the text o...
Erin Lale
Here's another link to a pagan response to the Atlantic article. I would have included this one in my story too if I had seen it before I published it...
Janet Boyer
I love the idea of green burials! I first heard of Recompose right before it launched. I wish there were more here on the East Coast; that's how I'd l...