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For a couples of hours one day this year, I needed to be beautiful. Of course I did all the usual beauty things like putting on makeup and so forth but that wouldn't get me as far as I needed to go. I needed to be beyond beautiful; I needed to be glamorous. 

Glamor is magic. It's not a coincidence that it's both a word for a certain sophisticated sort of beauty and also a word for the innate shape changing magic of the fae. 

Some aspects of Minoan civilization feel very modern: big cities with paved roads, aqueducts, and enclosed sewer systems. But there were no supermarkets back in the Bronze Age, no international shipping of out-of-season produce.

I've written before about Minoan cooking methods and typical foods. I've even shared a grocery list of sorts, a compilation of all the foods we have evidence for - foods the Minoans cooked and ate.

I began this blog in 2014. A lot of things have happened since then.

When I wrote the first blog post, Modern Minoan Paganism didn't exist yet. I and a handful of others were still groping around in the dark, doing our best to put the pieces together to figure out what the picture of ancient Minoan religion looked like. We hadn't even begun determining how to turn that into a modern spiritual practice.

If you're looking to deepen your Ukrainian based practice or your connections to Ukrainian gods and culture, here is a list of upcoming holidays in the reconstructed pagan religion Ridnoveri. Some of these may be similar to holidays in other Slavic cultures. They also may have overlap with Christian holidays. 

September

Individuation is problematic. That's the unofficial Ariadne's Tribe motto.

It's sort of a joke, a witty response to difficult questions about divinity. But it's also very serious.

In July I picked almonds, early in the morning, up a ladder with a basket in my front yard. The almond tree is a nonpareil which is supposed to be an ornamental or pollinator, not a nut bearing tree. We, my mom and I, had planted the nonpareil tree along with another variety of almond tree that was supposed to be the nut bearing tree, but the other tree had died, and one day mom had come home with a "white pomegranate" for me to plant where the other almond tree had been so we only had the nonpareil. It made beautiful flowers every spring, but mom wanted nuts. One year mom told the tree she wanted nuts and it bore nuts. It has borne nuts every year since.

I rarely do any spells anymore, but there is one I do almost every day in the summer. When I get in the pool I splash the water and say "No f*ing wasps! No thing that stings belongs in my pool!" So far so good, knock on wood.

During one of the many monsoon storms this summer, after my usual coffee toast to Thor, I lit some candles. Mostly I lit them because during the previous evening's storm the lights had gone out momentarily, but of course the candles are also beautiful, and I lit some of the ones on the main house altar too, so it became a bit of a ritual also. Usually during a storm my housemate and I watch the lightshow and the rain, but this time I felt restless. I was also physically in need of some relaxation due to having fallen trying to take a walk the previous day, so I decided to take a lovely bath to try to relieve some hip pain and so on. I was not intending to take a ritual bath or do anything with spiritual significance, but sometimes these things just happen. The last tiny bit of my umbilical cord fell off. It came right out of my belly button. And no, it was definitely not lint. 

There is an old saying, "cutting the cord," meaning becoming an adult, stopping being dependent on one's parents. I felt that having this tiny bit of paper like skin come off meant that I'm completely free now. It's been about two and a half years now since my mother's death. She was not interested in an afterlife with gods, and stated many times she did not believe in gods, and did not want to participate in religion after her death, so she reincarnated rapidly after her death. I only communicated with her afterwards enough times to know she was happy with where she went and that she knew I was doing ok without her, and we have not maintained contact. She has literally passed on. And I have gone on with my life, as much as I could during the pandemic. I've become the house holder, and the decision maker of the household, and I like it. This was a symbolic sloughing off of the last vestiges of childhood and dependence. How odd to have this feeling at 53.