Ariadne's Tribe: Minoan Spirituality for the Modern World

Walk the sacred labyrinth with Ariadne, the Minotaur, the Great Mothers, Dionysus, and the rest of the Minoan family of deities. Ariadne's Tribe is an independent spiritual tradition that brings the deities 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?

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Shake your tree! A ritual in Minoan art

Posted by on in Paths Blogs

One of the issues we face when developing a modern spiritual practice based on ancient Minoan religion is a practical one: we can’t read what the Minoans wrote.

Their two writing systems, Cretan hieroglyphs and Linear A, are still undeciphered. That leaves us with lots and lots of images from frescoes, pottery, seal stones and seal rings. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but figuring out exactly which thousand words are the right ones can be a problem.

Lately I’ve been working on some art projects that involve enlarging photos of some of the Minoan seal rings, and I’ve had occasion to examine the artwork closely. Most of the time this has been an enlightening process, but I ran across one bit that bothered me a lot.

There’s a particular ritual scene that appears on a number of seal rings. The archaeologists have interpreted it as a ‘tree shaking ceremony,’ but they can’t manage to explain what it might actually mean.

As I was examining a closeup of the seal ring from Tholos Tomb A at Archanes (the image above) it occurred to me that the branch-type object the male figure is shaking might not actually be a tree. I had a look at a few other seal rings that include similar ‘tree shaking’ rituals, and I think some of these images may show something far more specific than trees.

I think the people on these rings, at least some of them, are shaking branches full of dates. The fruit. Yum.

Date clusters on a date palm tree

 

The date palm and its fruit are sacred to the Minoan Sun Goddess (and other ancient Mediterranean Sun Goddesses as well).

On the Archanes ring above, it looks like loose dates are falling down into the center of the shrine or altar that's topped by the date branches. That’s what clued me in to the possibility that the branches are clusters of dates and not trees. And it looks like there’s a cluster of date blooms on the end of one of the branches, too. I realize an actual date palm tree wouldn't have blooms and fruit on it at the same time, but this is religious iconography, not a botanical text.

Let’s look at a few other seal rings and see what their ‘tree shaking’ rituals look like. Note that on all these seals, the ‘leaves’ on the trees are rounded like dates and not pointed or oblong like, for instance, the olive tree on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus:

Hagia Triada sarcophagus tree scene

 

Here’s the so-called Ring of Minos from Knossos. It includes two people shaking multiple ‘trees’ or branches of dates.

Ring of Minos

 

The Poros ring is pretty worn from lots of use so it’s a bit harder to see the details of the design, but the ‘trees’ on it look like the ones on the other rings we’ve looked at so far, that is, like clusters of dates.

Poros Ring from crete

 

There are other rings that have these ‘trees’ (branches of dates) on them, always on top of a shrine, but no one is shaking them. The Mochlos ring is a typical example:

Mochlos ring

 

To me, it makes much more sense for the 'trees' in these scenes to be clusters of dates, especially if we take into account the fruit falling into the shrine on the Archanes ring.

So maybe this is some kind of date harvest ritual. Dates are one of a number of fruits the Minoans grew and that would probably have had their own harvest festival. If that's the case, it's a time of year that's sacred to the Sun Goddess, and I think that's just lovely.

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Laura Perry is a priestess and creator who works magic with words, paint, ink, music, textiles, and herbs. She's the founder and Temple Mom of Ariadne's Tribe, an inclusive Minoan spiritual tradition. When she's not busy drawing and writing, you can find her in the garden or giving living history demonstrations at local historic sites.

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