When I talk about Minoan spirituality, people tend to recognize the names Ariadne and Dionysus, and maybe Rhea and Minos as well.

But there's one that often leaves them shaking their heads: Amalthea. I actually had someone ask me one day if Amalthea was one of the characters from Game of Thrones. Um, no. LOL

Amalthea is a Minoan goddess who, like Ariadne and the others, was absorbed into later Greek myth as something less than divine (FYI the Minoans weren't Greek). But I promise you, she was originally a full-fledged goddess and not just a goat-herding foster mother of Zeus.

Zeus is a Greek god, not a Minoan one. Like the Romans, the Greeks enjoyed equating foreign deities with their own, both as a way to understand other pantheons and as a handy method for taking over those cultures and absorbing them. So when the Greeks say that Amalthea was the foster mother of "Cretan Zeus," they're talking about Dionysus, the Minoan god who is born in his mother Rhea's cave at the Winter Solstice. And Amalthea plays a role in that story.

Amalthea is the sister-twin of the Minoan Mother Goddess Rhea. When Dionysus is born, Rhea can't stay with him all the time; she has work to do. So she leaves him with Amalthea, who nurses him and takes care of him.

Amalthea is a goat-goddess, one of the Minoan Horned Ones who may date back to Neolithic times on Crete. So obviously, she feeds Dionysus on goat's milk (as well as honey, which she gets from the Melissae, the Minoan bee-goddesses who protect and guard the spirits of the dead in the Underworld). Like Rhea, Amalthea is associated with the sacred mountains and caves on Crete, particularly Mount Ida.

That cornucopia also comes from Amalthea. The story goes that the infant Dionysus was playing a bit too roughly with Amalthea in her goat form when he accidentally broke off one of her horns, which became the cornucopia.

I have a little trouble believing that this is the original story. To me, the cornucopia - also known to Wiccans as the Amalthean Horn - is another version of the Great Mother's bottomless pithos from which all things flow.

The original version of Pandora is Rhea Pandora, the All-Giver, whose giant vase is the Source of All and not a box full of bad things redeemed only by hope. Since Rhea is Amalthea's sister-twin, it only makes sense that Amalthea should have her own personal version of that vase, whose analogue we see in so many later mythologies: the Cauldron of Cerridwen, the Holy Grail.

The Greeks borrowed Amalthea's story into their mythos, though they demoted her to a nymph in much the same way that they demoted Minos and Ariadne to mortal humans.

In the Greek version, Zeus' aegis - his thunder-shield - is made from Amalthea's hide. This suggests to me that there was a Minoan original version of this, especially since the Kouretes danced outside the cave where the infant Dionysus lay, banging their spears on their shields to keep rhythm for their dance. Since the aegis is associated with thunder, that suggests another thread connecting both Amalthea and Rhea with Posidaeja, the Minoan sea-goddess.

There are a lot of tangled threads here, a lot of connections through time and space. But to me, one thing remains constant: the overwhelming generosity of Amalthea, whose cornucopia provides an endless bounty for those who honor her.