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Just like a lot of people, toward the end of December I like to look back over the previous year and review all that has happened. Part of that process involves looking at my blog posts here to see what turned out to be popular and what didn't. That helps me know what people are interested in and where I should put my energy when I'm writing future blog posts. So here's my 2020 Top Ten List.

It's no surprise that my most popular blog post this year is the one that lists the full MMP pantheon. Popular culture leads a lot of people to think that Minoan spirituality is just about the Snake Goddess (those fabulous figurines!) or Ariadne and the Minotaur. But really, there's so much more, and I'm thrilled that folx are checking out all the deities in our pantheon.

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 of posts about the MMP pantheon. Find the full list of the whole series here.

Up this week: the goddess Antheia, one of the triplicity of goddesses who are daughters of the Three Mothers in the MMP pantheon. You can read about the other two daughter goddesses: Ariadne and Arachne. And of course, the Mothers have sons as well. We'll get to them as we move along in this series.

This is one in a series of blog posts about the MMP pantheon. Find the list of the whole series here.

You may have heard the Greek tale of Arachne, the mortal woman who angered Athena with her perfect weaving and ended up as a spider. What if I told you that Arachne was originally a goddess, and specifically a fate goddess? Like Ariadne, who was also "demoted" to mortal status in Greek myth, Arachne turns out to be a Minoan goddess.

This is the second in a series about the MMP pantheon. Find the list of the full series of posts here.

We're on a journey, working our way through the Modern Minoan Paganism pantheon one deity at a time. This time, we're discussing another of our three mother goddesses: the Sun goddess Therasia. (Yes, I capitalize Sun just like I capitalize the names of other stars like Sirius and Aldebaran. I also capitalize Earth, just like I capitalize the names of other planets like Venus and Jupiter. Respect.)

I'm eyeball-deep in the revisions and updates to Labrys & Horns. As I sift through the conversations we've had in Ariadne's Tribe and the notes I've taken over the past couple of years, the gods and goddesses are sorting themselves into pairs and trios - something I hadn't really expected.

When we began putting together a Minoan pantheon for modern Pagan spiritual practice, we were working with the garbled fragments that have come down via Greek mythology plus some useful information in the fields of archaeoastronomy, dance ethnography, and comparative mythology. We found lots of deities, but they didn't shake out into a human-style family tree the way so many other European pantheons did.