Some time ago I wrote about the possibility that Minos, who is a god and not a mythical king, is a Moon god. It turns out, that's only one of his many fascinating aspects.
There's precious little about him in the garbled fragments of Minoan myth that survived into classical times. The stories mostly talk about him being a king, and a horrid one at that. But the tidbits of information that led us to view him as a Moon god also point to his connection with the Minoan sacred calendar. More on both of those aspects shortly.
A lot of people show up in Ariadne's Tribe expecting to find a Minoan Moon goddess. Heck, I expected one when I first began incorporating the Minoan pantheon into my spiritual practice decades ago. Imagine my surprise when our research turned up a Minoan Sun goddess instead. (And a bunch of other goddesses, for that matter. There is no single "Minoan goddess" the way Sir Arthur Evans conceived of Minoan religion; like everyone else in the Bronze Age, the Minoans were polytheists.)
The trick to understanding why there's a Minoan Sun goddess and Moon god and not the other way around has to do with who the Minoans were and where they came from.
I figured this would happen sooner or later. I guess I'm lucky I made it through so much of the Modern Minoan Paganism pantheon before it happened.
For nearly a year now I've been writing posts in the MMP Pantheon series, talking about where we can find our deities in Minoan art. Some of the connections are pretty obvious - the Serpent-Mother and the Snake Goddess figurines, for instance. But some aren't as easy to see.
If the ancient Minoans were such successful traders with so many other cultures, why don't we hear about them in the writings of those other cultures? Because in the ancient world, they weren't called Minoans.
The term "Minoans" is a 20th-century invention. Sir Arthur Evans, the British archaeologist who unearthed the temple complex at Knossos, had been chasing a set of myths for years: King Minos, the Labyrinth, Ariadne and the Minotaur. Like Heinrich Schliemann, who wanted to prove the truth of the tales in Homer's epic works by digging up the real city of Troy, Evans wanted to prove the historicity of the myths about ancient Crete.
We call the people of ancient Crete Minoans thanks to the whim of the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, the main archaeologist who excavated Knossos over a century ago. He knew the Hellenic Greek myth of King Minos of Crete, took it for historical fact, and named the civilization after the king: Minoan.
The thing is, Minos was originally a god, not a king.
Chas S. Clifton
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Steven Posch
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Anthony Gresham
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