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The Minoan family of deities includes a variety of what you might call job descriptions. Each deity has unique connections with certain facets of human life and the material world. But it's not always as clear-cut as you might think, since many of our deities appear to be reflections of each other.

Individuation is problematic, as we say in Ariadne's Tribe.

I've written about Daedalus before, describing his connection with the Minoan demi-deities the Daktyls and Hekaterides. But as with so many of the members of the Minoan family of deities, he has more than one set of connections.

These clusters of connected deities are called micropantheons and are a great way to focus on one particular portion of the mythos, since a whole pantheon can be pretty intimidating. Besides, most of us have our favorites that we prefer to spend most of our time with. Micropantheons were so popular that they continued to be how most people approached religion in the eastern Mediterranean all the way into the classical era (and even later, really, with the local cults of certain Christian saints).

The Serpent Mother is an enigmatic yet ever-present figure in Minoan spirituality. She's a sort of "out of the corner of your eye" kind of character, difficult to define or pin down, yet most people intuitively understand her on some level.

Today I'm going to attempt, not to corral her into a concrete definition, but to describe the way we honor her in our spiritual practice in Ariadne's Tribe. I'll talk around her, and by that means, we can begin to see the outline of who and what she is.

I've been offering workshops and presentations about Minoan spirituality for several years now, and I'm delighted to be giving a workshop about just that topic next month at WitchCon. I hope you'll join me!

As I gear up for another year of public appearances, I'm wondering how deep I should dive into the topics that are my purview as The Minoan Lady.

Learning to Think Pantheonically

Och, I still cringe to think of it.

Back when I still knew everything, I made the mistake of arguing theology with a Hellene elder.

I was talking gods.

He was talking pantheons.

“Oh, pantheons,” I opined, as if I had even the slightest idea of what I was talking about. “I just put together my own.”

(In defense of my callowness, I can only say that this was the prevailing attitude of the day.)

“If you take a head from one statue,” he said, “and a torso from another, and an arm from yet another, and a leg from somewhere else, and you put them all together: the result may be a sculpture, but it isn't a statue.”

For the ancestors, tribal people all, the concept of a “personal pantheon” would have been unthinkable, a contradiction in terms, even a betrayal.

Polytheism ≠ serial monotheism.

Individuation is problematic. That's the unofficial Ariadne's Tribe motto.

It's sort of a joke, a witty response to difficult questions about divinity. But it's also very serious.

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.