PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com Walk the sacred labyrinth with Ariadne, the Minotaur, the Great Mothers, Dionysus, and the rest of the Minoan pantheon. Modern Minoan Paganism is an independent polytheist spiritual tradition that brings the gods and goddesses of the ancient Minoans alive in the modern world. We're a revivalist tradition, not a reconstructionist one; we rely heavily on shared gnosis and the practical realities of Paganism in the modern world. Ariadne's thread reaches across the millennia to connect us with the divine. Will you follow where it leads?
Find out all about Modern Minoan Paganism on our website: https://ariadnestribe.wordpress.com/. We're a welcoming tradition, open to all who share our love for the Minoan deities and respect for our fellow human beings.
All those topless women in Minoan art played a major role in the popularity of Minoan archaeology during the early 20th century, when the cities of Bronze Age Crete were being uncovered for the first time in over 3,000 years. They were quite racy for the Edwardian era, being considered almost pornographic back then.
But to the Minoans, they were sacred.
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The Minoans are a constant source of fascination to modern people. That means that Minoan artifacts are also fascinating, and images of them circulate online every bit as fast as the latest meme.
Unfortunately, a lot of the photos that regularly make the rounds online labeled as Minoan artifacts aren't Minoan at all.
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Minoan art is marvelously colorful, even 3500 years later. Was ancient Crete that colorful in real life? Probably.
Part of that color would have been due to the plant and animal substances used to dye the fabric that made the Minoans' clothing, household textiles, and temple decorations.
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Listen now, friends, to a tale of best-laid plans going awry.
As many of you know, my first book on Minoan spirituality, Ariadne's Thread, went out of print early this year. I got my rights back to the book and began revising it for a second edition. I wrote it before Modern Minoan Paganism came into being, so it definitely needed some changes. I was planning to release the new second edition on November 1 of this year.
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The Modern Minoan Paganism 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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Last time, we looked at what kinds of vegetables the Minoans grew in their gardens. But they needed to season those veggies so they were especially tasty to eat, right? So what kinds of herbs and other seasonings did they use?
The first and most obvious one is salt. Like other island-dwelling people, the Minoans used sea salt. It's easy to make - just collect up some sea water and evaporate the liquid, using heat from the Sun or from fire. The Minoans were surely doing this all the way back in the Neolithic, though most of the evidence for it comes from later on.
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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.
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