PaganSquare


PaganSquare is a community blog space where Pagans can discuss topics relevant to the life and spiritual practice of all Pagans.

  • Home
    Home This is where you can find all the blog posts throughout the site.
  • Tags
    Tags Displays a list of tags that have been used in the blog.
  • Bloggers
    Bloggers Search for your favorite blogger from this site.
  • Login
    Login Login form
Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Reconstruction

Posted by on in Paths Blogs
The Mysterious Minoan Snake Goddess Figurines

The photo above (image CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons) shows two full faience figurines and one partial one from Knossos as displayed at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum. You're probably already familiar with at least the two full ones in the middle and on the left.

What you might not know is that they weren't found in such a complete state, and at least one of them may have been reconstructed incorrectly.

...
Last modified on

Posted by on in Paths Blogs
Minoan Clothing: Ready, Set, Sew!

I've been working on a secret project for a while now. It's finally ready to unveil. But first, I need to give you a little background information.

Those of us who practice Modern Minoan Paganism like to collect up reproductions of Minoan art and artifacts for our altars and shrines. But one thing that's a bit harder to come by is Minoan-style clothing, for those of us who would like to add that aspect to our spiritual practice (or even just for fun).

Over the years, I've sewn a few different garments to use in my Minoan spiritual practice. One of the most fun was this outfit, inspired by one of the Minoan Snake Goddess figurines:

...
Last modified on

Posted by on in Paths Blogs
The Linear A Conundrum

One of the reasons we don't call Modern Minoan Paganism (MMP) a reconstructionist tradition is that we don't have any texts from Minoan times that we can read to learn how the people of ancient Crete worshiped. Reference texts are a fundamental part of the reconstruction process in many traditions. Why don't we have that resource for MMP?

The Minoans were a literate people; we just can't read what they wrote.

...
Last modified on
Reviving Ancient Religion: How does shared gnosis work?

It takes a number of different approaches to build a revivalist spiritual tradition like Modern Minoan Paganism. We started with some of the usual reconstruction methods: ancient artifacts and art; archaeological information about cities, buildings, and homesites; astronomical building and tomb alignments; myth fragments recorded by later writers; dance ethnography; and comparative mythology. But even with all those methods stacked together, we still ended up with holes to fill in order to create a functional modern spiritual practice. In the case of Minoan religion, those holes are pretty big.

What do we use to fill those gaps? Shared gnosis.

...
Last modified on
What can we compare Modern Minoan Paganism to?

When people hear about Modern Minoan Paganism, they often ask, "Oh, is that like Wicca but with labryses and that snake goddess?" Um, no.

Granted, a lot of my early Minoan rituals were very Wiccan in flavor, because like many modern Pagans, Wicca is where I started out. So my first book about Minoan spirituality, Ariadne's Thread, has rituals that follow a roughly Wiccan outline. But once we started developing Modern Minoan Paganism as its own thing, we moved away from that framework and to something more in keeping with the way the ancient Minoans probably worshiped. So the rituals in Labrys and Horns are definitely not Wiccan in flavor. (You'll find a discussion of the differences between the two books here.)

...
Last modified on
Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    So, the process is something like: 1. Start with what you know. 2. Garner what you can from scholarship. 3. Adapt scholarship for
  • Laura Perry
    Laura Perry says #
    Essentially, yes. Though in terms of personal gnosis, we do our best to rely only on widely shared gnosis rather than stand-alone
Ariadne's Tribe: Reviving ancient spirituality

I've been in relationship with the Minoan deities since I was a teenager, but it was only a few years ago that inclusive Minoan spirituality began to take shape as a specific spiritual path. I've been walking that path with the lovely folks in Ariadne's Tribe, and together we're creating a tradition that works for us as Pagans in the modern world. The hardest part, believe it or not, is explaining what we do to other people.

We're combining the bits and pieces we know about ancient Minoan religion and culture in a modern Pagan context. We can't really reconstruct ancient Minoan religious practice in detail. There are too many gaps in our knowledge, we don't live in the same kind of culture the Minoans did, and we probably don't want to go back to sacrificing bulls and goats (and possibly people) anyway.

...
Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Imperfect Canes

As we learn—or relearn—our native paganisms, the lessons sure do come from some strange places.

After surgery, a friend needed a cane. He told me what he wanted and I went down to the store to get it for him.

It soon became clear to me that his dream cane didn't exist. Eventually I bought the one that was closest to what he wanted, on the principle that, when you need a cane, it's better to have an imperfect cane than not to have the perfect one.

Planning this year's Samhain, we needed a song to call the ancestors.

In a traditional society, of course, we would call the ancestors with the song that they themselves had handed down to us. We'd all know this song, and it would have the quality and the worthiness that centuries of honing can give.

Alas, that song—along with so much else—is now lost to us.

Instead, we have a new song which, frankly, isn't as good as I would like it to be: the dilemma of much modern paganism.

Last modified on

Additional information