One of the issues we face when reviving ancient spiritual practices is that we often don’t know exactly what the original people called their deities. In the case of the Minoans, we don’t even know what language they spoke, and their deity names have come down to us only through the Greeks.
Today I’m going to toss out some thoughts about some of the deity names from ancient Crete. Maybe, if we put enough ideas into the pot, we can brew up some useful bits for our spiritual practice. Let’s start with Rhea, the Minoan Earth Mother Goddess.
We hear a lot about libations in Pagan spiritual traditions.
A libation is simply an offering of a liquid, poured out in either a casual or formal ritual setting. A casual example would be the nights my friends and family gather around the fire out in our orchard to celebrate the seasons. Once the fire is lit, I pour out the first bit of my drink in thanks to the spirits of the land, my ancestors, and the divine in general. A more formal example might be the pouring out of wine onto the ground or into a bowl during a seasonal ritual.
Travel with me, across the world and back in time, to a Winter Solstice morning in ancient Crete, the era of the Minoans, and one of their most sacred holy days.
We're among the special guests, the important members of the community who have been invited to join the clergy of Knossos to witness a most sacred event. The gathering begins in the darkness before dawn.
The Labyrinth may be the most well-known and widespread symbol to come out of ancient Minoan spirituality, but it's a static image. What if it were to come alive, to move, to dance? We think it did so on ancient Crete, and it still does today in Greek folk dances. And the motions of this sinuous dance have many layers of meaning. Let’s explore some of them. Maybe we’ll be inspired to set our own feet moving.
The Labyrinth-in-motion I’m talking about is known as the Crane Dance or Geranos Dance (the word geranos is Greek for ‘crane’ – the bird, not the construction equipment). The Greeks immortalized it in their version of the story about the Labyrinth and the "monster" Minotaur, a story that's Greek, not Minoan, but hey, we work with what we've got. Please keep in mind as you read the following that much of the Labyrinth-and-Minotaur story is a purposely altered version of Minoan myth and that Ariadne, Minos, and the Minotaur were originally deities, not humans or monsters.
Today I’m going to explore the deity Zagreus. In Ariadne's Tribe, we consider him to be a face of our bull-god Tauros Asterion.
He’s the bull who comes wreathed in flowers in the spring, specifically during the Blooming Time, the shortest of the Minoan seasons. A shamanic deity, his name means “the dismembered one,” a reminder that he’s also the sacrifice who goes willing. He is a dying-and-reborn god.
I decided I wanted to begin a series of posts about the gods and goddesses of ancient Crete, and I figured I’d start with Ariadne, since she is the deity most strongly associated with the Minoans in popular culture. But I just couldn’t manage to get going with the writing; then Rhea asserted herself, popping up online and in conversations, and I realized she should be first. She is the Earth Mother Goddess, one of three mother goddesses who presided over the Minoan pantheon in much the same way that my grandmothers were the matriarchs of my extended family. So it’s appropriate to begin with Rhea.
Please bear in mind that our knowledge of the Minoan deities comes down to us from the later Greeks and is filtered through their religious and cultural perceptions, which were different from the Minoan worldview. In order to understand any Minoan god or goddess, we have to dig underneath the writings of Greeks such as Homer and Diodorus Siculus to find our way back to the earlier levels.
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