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This is one in a series about the deities in the pantheon of Modern Minoan Paganism (MMP). You can find the full list of posts in this series here.

Today we're focusing on a well-known god, Dionysus, and the places we can find him in Minoan art and artifacts. The ecstatic god that many people know from classical times (a millennium after the destruction of the Minoan cities) is actually a syncretic deity, a combination of the Minoan god (or at least, whatever remained of him after the Bronze Age collapse) with a similar ecstatic god from Phrygia.

This is one in a series about the MMP pantheon. Find the other posts here.

In this post, we'll have a look at Korydallos, one of the gods who are the sons of our three Mother Goddesses. Korydallos (or The Lark, as we sometimes call him) is a new name for an old god. We discovered him via dance ethnography, Mediterranean folklore, and a close look at some of the interesting details of Minoan art and artifacts. In MMP, we consider him to be the son of our Sun goddess Therasia, though there is a sense in which all the son and daughter deities are children of all the Mothers - more about that in a bit.

This is one in a series about the MMP pantheon. Find the other posts here.

Today, we're focusing on Tauros Asterion. He's one of three gods who are sons of our mother goddesses. As you might guess from his name, he has both earthly and cosmic aspects. In MMP, we consider the Minotaur and Zagreus to be two of his faces. But for now we're focusing specifically on Tauros Asterion, whom we consider to be the son of our Earth Mother goddess Rhea as well as having a connection with our cosmic mother goddess Ourania.

Over the past six years, what began as a tiny collection of people in a FB group has evolved into a full-fledged pagan tradition: Modern Minoan Paganism (MMP). Yes, I'm as astounded as you are. One aspect of that evolution is that we've spent quite a lot of time researching and developing relationships with different deities, some of whom we didn't even realize existed until very recently. Today, I'm sharing with you the full pantheon. Beginning next week, I'll focus on one deity per week, sharing their iconography that we find in Minoan art.

MMP is a revivalist tradition. We're not attempting to reconstruct either the pantheon or the religious practices of the ancient Minoans - that's probably not possible anyway, since we can't read their writing in Linear A. But just be aware that this is the pantheon we use as modern Pagans. We honestly can't say whether or not this is how the Minoans interacted with the deities, but it's pretty clearly the way the gods and goddesses want us to interact with them now.

Chaos is often an illusion. 

My Gods’ plans are so complex that my limited human intelligence cannot discern the plans’ intricate orderliness, so it seems like chaos to me. 

May 8, 2018

It’s a surreal feeling sitting at a follow-up doctor appointment with your urologist and she’s talking to a doctor in training about what had happened to you and says “on the ambulance ride here, she went into septic shock. She needed to be resuscitated and that is why she needed to be in ICU.” I sat there in disbelief, still not feeling as if I was that bad off.

It occurs to me that in the nearly four years that I've been writing this blog (!) I've created quite a collection of posts about the individual Minoan deities, the gods and goddesses that make up this fascinating pantheon. So you don't have to go scrambling back through the archives to find them all, I've collected them up here. I did recently post a "whole pantheon" list here that's pretty comprehensive - all the deities we work with in Modern Minoan Paganism. But you might want to know a little more detail about individual gods and goddesses. So here you go:

The Minoan Earth Mother Goddess Rhea whom some of us also call Ida