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Minoan culture centered on the island of Crete, which lies in the Mediterranean Sea just south of Greece. The Minoans were a seagoing people: they fished, they traded, and they traveled in boats and ships. So it makes sense that they would have incorporated these major facets of their lives into their spiritual practice.

We don't know for certain what the Minoans did to bless ships before a voyage. But tidbits that made it through the Bronze Age collapse and ended up in the works of later writers, combined with archaeoastronomy research, suggest that the Minoan sailing season had a definite beginning and ending: the heliacal rising of the Pleiades in May and the heliacal setting of that constellation in late October.* This makes sense, given that the winds during the wintertime would have made sailing in that era quite hazardous (not that it's a whole lot easier today, but at least we have modern gadgetry and gas-powered engines to help).

One aspect of ritual that we don't often think about until we're armpit-deep in actually performing one is music. The ancient Minoans, like other Bronze Age cultures in Europe and the Mediterranean, used music in ritual - we know because we see it in the art. But we don't know what it sounded like. So how can we incorporate music into Minoan ritual? It's not that hard, really.

Like many aspects of Minoan religion, we have to base our choices on two points: what we see in the archaeological record and what evokes the ancient Minoans to us as modern Pagans. In other words, we have to make some educated guesses as to what Minoan music probably sounded like. We know a lot about Minoan music from Minoan art. And we have a pretty good idea about what other types of ancient music from the Mediterranean and the Near East sounded like. So what we tend to go for in Modern Minoan Paganism is music that makes us feel like we're in the ancient world. It's a psychological trigger, in other words.

One of the more frustrating aspects of practicing Modern Minoan Paganism and studying ancient Minoan culture is that we can't read Linear A, the script the Minoans used to write their native language. So we have to rely on the fragments of Minoan myth and history that have trickled down to us via the Greeks (the Minoans weren't Greek - they were their very own independent Bronze Age culture).

This means we don't even know the words the Minoans used for ordinary objects like cups and bowls. The archaeologists who first excavated Minoan sites had backgrounds in Greek history, myth, and culture, so they simply used the Greek terms for the pottery they unearthed. That's why libation pitchers from ancient Crete are called rhytons (or rhyta, if you want to use the Greek plural); rhyton is the Greek word for this kind of container.

A lot of people ask me how I got into Modern Minoan Paganism and why I'm inspired to write the books and create the art that goes along with that spiritual path. If I'm honest, the Minoan gods and goddesses have been stalking me since I was a teenager and it just took me a while to pick up on their intent - sometimes I'm slow that way. But once I finally got started, all enthusiastic and rarin' to go, I hit a roadblock: There were virtually no resources out there.

Bear in mind, I'm old enough that when I first started researching the Minoans, I had to resort to actual ink-and-paper encyclopedias and history books. And none of those ever had more than a paragraph or two about the Minoans, usually as a sort of side note before the text started talking about the Greeks.

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. The sacral scarf has its own place in Ariadne's Tribe spiritual practice and is, as far as we can tell, unique in the ancient world.

We divide our world many different ways based on time and space: day and night; the 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?

The modern Pagan world is awash in womb symbolism, and I can’t say I mind. After all, the feminine side of the divine has been almost entirely ignored by the major religions of the past few centuries. OK, millennia.

But the ancients didn’t always focus on the womb as the central symbol of the feminine, either divine or mundane. Take, for instance, the Minoans and their reverence for the breast.