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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in sacred calendar

Posted by on in Paths Blogs
The Turn of the Year: Autumn Equinox

In the Ariadne's Tribe sacred calendar, we've just made our way through the Mysteries and are awaiting the arrival of the Autumn Equinox this Saturday, 23 September.

What does this date signify in our sacred calendar?

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
The Minoan Autumn Holiday Season

The Ariadne's Tribe sacred calendar doesn't look like the eightfold Wheel of the Year that many modern Pagans are familiar with. Instead, we based our calendar specifically on Mediterranean seasonal cycles (the Minoans came from the island of Crete in the Mediterranean) as well as archaeological and ethnological evidence about the Minoans' religious practices.

So instead of a neatly balanced eight-spoke wheel, our calendar has some festivals that are spread out across the months and others that cluster together. One of those clusters - the biggest one - is my focus today.

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
The Seasons of the Minoan Calendar

In Ariadne's Tribe, we developed our sacred calendar one bit at a time over the course of several years, relying on a combination of archaeology, comparative mythology, dance ethnology, and shared gnosis to collect up and organize the festivals. But now that it's a living, functioning thing that we've worked in sync with for a while, something interesting has happened.

We've come to know the seasons of ancient Crete.

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
Harbor Home: The Safety of Return

The Minoans were a seafaring people. They traveled, explored, and traded all over the Mediterranean Sea and possibly beyond it. But that sea travel wasn't a year-round thing. It had a season.

In the Mediterranean, even now, the winter is not the best time to be out on a boat. The winds can be harsh, the water choppy, the weather unpredictable. It was far more dangerous back in the Bronze Age, before the era of long-distance communication and meteorology. The Minoans had a positive relationship with Grandmother Ocean, but they were skilled enough sailors to know better than to push it. Nature is bigger than we are.

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Minoan Subcultures and the Sacred Calendar

We tend to think of ancient cultures as monolithic: the Minoans, the Sumerians, the Greeks, the Romans. But there were subcultures and differing groups within those larger labels, just like there are now among, say, Americans or modern Greek people.

It can be difficult to tease out the identities of the subcultures, but it's important to do so. Why? Because choosing not to bother has the effect of erasing those people from history. I think they deserve better than that.

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
The Mysteries: The cycle of being

You've probably heard the story of Persephone's abduction to the Underworld by Hades and her mother Demeter's frantic search for her afterward.

But what if the original story was a little different from that?

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Combining Traditions: At the Pagan Buffet

These days, we in the Pagan community have many choices in terms of traditions and paths to explore and practice. Most of the folx I know include more than one tradition in their regular spiritual practice.

How does that work, and what happens when you have traditions whose calendars don't fit with each other?

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