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This is one in a series of posts about the MMP pantheon. Find the full list of the whole series here.
Up this week: the goddess Antheia, one of the triplicity of goddesses who are daughters of the Three Mothers in the MMP pantheon. You can read about the other two daughter goddesses: Ariadne and Arachne. And of course, the Mothers have sons as well. We'll get to them as we move along in this series.
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This is one in a series of blog posts about the MMP pantheon. Find the list of the whole series here.
You may have heard the Greek tale of Arachne, the mortal woman who angered Athena with her perfect weaving and ended up as a spider. What if I told you that Arachne was originally a goddess, and specifically a fate goddess? Like Ariadne, who was also "demoted" to mortal status in Greek myth, Arachne turns out to be a Minoan goddess.
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Modern Minoan Paganism is a revivalist tradition of modern Pagans in relationship with the Minoan deities from ancient Crete. Our pantheon is a crowded one, and it can take some time to explore the different deities. With that in mind, I'm writing a series that explores each god and goddess and where we can find their symbology in Minoan art.
You can find our full pantheon here. Here are the posts in this pantheon series:
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This is the second in a series about the MMP pantheon. Find the list of the full series of posts here.
We're on a journey, working our way through the Modern Minoan Paganism pantheon one deity at a time. This time, we're discussing another of our three mother goddesses: the Sun goddess Therasia. (Yes, I capitalize Sun just like I capitalize the names of other stars like Sirius and Aldebaran. I also capitalize Earth, just like I capitalize the names of other planets like Venus and Jupiter. Respect.)
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Over the past six years, what began as a tiny collection of people in a FB group has evolved into a full-fledged pagan tradition: Modern Minoan Paganism (MMP). Yes, I'm as astounded as you are. One aspect of that evolution is that we've spent quite a lot of time researching and developing relationships with different deities, some of whom we didn't even realize existed until very recently. Today, I'm sharing with you the full pantheon. Beginning next week, I'll focus on one deity per week, sharing their iconography that we find in Minoan art.
MMP is a revivalist tradition. We're not attempting to reconstruct either the pantheon or the religious practices of the ancient Minoans - that's probably not possible anyway, since we can't read their writing in Linear A. But just be aware that this is the pantheon we use as modern Pagans. We honestly can't say whether or not this is how the Minoans interacted with the deities, but it's pretty clearly the way the gods and goddesses want us to interact with them now.
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I'm eyeball-deep in the revisions and updates to Labrys & Horns. As I sift through the conversations we've had in Ariadne's Tribe and the notes I've taken over the past couple of years, the gods and goddesses are sorting themselves into pairs and trios - something I hadn't really expected.
When we began putting together a Minoan pantheon for modern Pagan spiritual practice, we were working with the garbled fragments that have come down via Greek mythology plus some useful information in the fields of archaeoastronomy, dance ethnography, and comparative mythology. We found lots of deities, but they didn't shake out into a human-style family tree the way so many other European pantheons did.
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Modern Pagans are used to pantheons that have a Sun god and a Moon goddess. But it hasn't always been that way. Some of the oldest and earliest religions in the world have a Sun goddess. When we went looking for the Minoan deity who was associated with the Sun, we found not a god but a goddess. We call her Therasia.
How did we find her? Two books were very helpful, as was the author of one of them. Until I read The Ancient and Martial Dances by Arlechina Verdigris, I had no idea that dance ethnography could be such a powerful tool for teasing out bits of mythos. Ms. Verdigris's study of Mediterranean folk dance shows clearly that it still holds layers that go back at least to late Minoan times, and probably much earlier, giving glimpses of not only a Sun goddess but also a grain goddess and the Mountain Mother who rules over the crafts that use her substance to create beautiful objects: pottery and metal-smithing.
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