PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

I've been blogging here for three and a half years now, and I've just been looking back through all my blog posts as the year nears its end. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to discover that my five most popular posts aren't necessarily the ones I was hoping people would pick up and run with, and they're certainly not the ones I expected. But it is interesting to see what draws people, so maybe I can take the hint and provide more of what you lovely folks might like to read.

My most popular blog post? Tying a Sacred Knot - The various types of sacred knots are pretty well known, especially the tet of Isis, which appears to have a counterpart in Minoan Crete. But there's another object that Sir Arthur Evans conflated with this type of sacred knot, and this second object is obviously a piece of fabric, not a cord. I've written about this second object, which we've come to call the Sacral Scarf, in this blog post. It has its own place in Modern Minoan Paganism and was, as far as we can tell, unique in the ancient world.

We divide our world into all sorts of segments based on time and space: day and night; the four seasons; the ground, the air, and space. Organizing the world into understandable parts is a natural human inclination, and the Minoans did it, just like everyone else. So how did they divide their world?

I have a few ideas. The most obvious is the seasons. Crete lies in the sea just south of Greece and has a Mediterranean climate. That means that, instead of the spring-summer-autumn-winter cadence we're used to in most of North America and Europe, the year flows from the rainy season to the dry season and back again: only two major seasonal divisions. In Mediterranean climates, the dry season lasts from what we might call late spring, through summer, and into early autumn. On Crete, plant life turns crispy-brown and dry. All but the largest creeks dry up, and even the rivers diminish to a flow much smaller than their wet season. This is the dead time of year, the counterpart to winter in the northern temperate zone.

As I've said repeatedly in interviews and in my books, Modern Minoan Paganism isn't a rules-and-regulations tradition but a broad pathway with room for many people to walk it, each in their own way.  That's great in terms of personal spirituality but not so great in terms of finding other people to practice with.

Pagans of all stripes are scattered far and wide in the modern world. Sure, there are larger clusters of us in metropolitan areas. But unless you follow one of the big traditions with standardized rules, regs, and rites (Wicca, Druidry, and various types of Norse Paganism, for instance) you may have a hard time finding others who want to do the same thing you're doing.

I’ve been asked all sorts of questions about Modern Minoan Paganism, but the most common one is probably also the most fundamental: How do you do it? In other words, how do you actually practice this spiritual path?

To start with, I’d like to point out that this is a very individualistic path. It’s not a monolithic tradition with a set of rules and regulations everyone has to follow. It’s more like an umbrella structure under which each person can tweak the details in the way that they find most satisfying. So you start with the basics: the gods and goddesses of ancient Crete and their stories. Then you approach them in the way that makes the most sense for you.

There are two things we can be pretty sure the Minoans did: libations and divination. We have lots of pictures of libations (poured offerings of liquids) in the frescoes, seals, and other art from ancient Crete. As for divination, besides the fact that pretty much every civilization has done its best to foresee the future, there are some interesting “floating organs” (hearts, livers, bones) on some of the seals that suggest the Minoans took part in the same kind of animal-part auguries that many ancient cultures used.

I’m not here to tell you how to check your horoscope in animal guts. Instead, I’d like to talk about wine.