I gave a presentation about Ariadne's Tribe last weekend at WitchCon, and one of the attendees asked me the question:
How is Ariadne's Tribe different from the Minoan Brotherhood?
I feel like I didn't answer it very thoroughly, so I asked the Tribe to help me craft a more comprehensive response. Why would I need to ask them for help? Because not only am I (obviously) not qualified to join the Minoan Brotherhood, but I've never really investigated it.
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.
How do we know what Minoan religion was like? By looking... literally... at the artifacts they left behind.
We can't read what the Minoans wrote in their own language using the Linear A script. And the early form of Greek that the Mycenaeans wrote using the Linear B script amounts to little more than bookkeeping records from the Mycenaean occupation of Crete in the century or two before the Minoan cities were finally destroyed.
One of the more challenging aspects of developing a new spiritual tradition is having to figure out what you need terms for and what those terms should be.
I was in the middle of writing a child blessing ritual for the upcoming second edition of Ariadne's Thread (release date: May 15) and realized I needed a term for Modern Minoan Paganism folx to use, a word for the kind of person Christians call godparents: the close family friend who will have a special place in the life of a child as they grow up.
You've probably heard about the AIs that people are using to make art these days. These are software programs that take a phrase the user inputs and turns it into a digital painting. But the software doesn't make these digital paintings from scratch. It creates them using a collection of art that's already in existence, that they gather and turn into a database. Where does this collection of art come from?
I like science metaphors when talking about heathen concepts that differ from the ideas common in our current modern American culture. In the Fireverse, my fictional universe based on heathen mythology (see previous entries on that topic), the main human character is an author stand-in who gets a guided tour to the worlds and time, like the main human character in Dante's Bible fan fiction. Like me, she likes science and especially physics as spiritual and religious metaphors, so, the Hel-Boat looks like a Viking longship but behaves like a spaceship, landing and taking off from the Nine Worlds as if they were planet type worlds rather than the dimensions the main character knows them to be. Metaphors for the multipartite soul didn't come up in Some Say Fire because the main character is already in her afterlife after the opening scene, but I'm thinking about them now.
Reading Heathen Soul Lore Foundations to review it (review coming soon), I encountered a metaphor for the various parts of the human soul based on alchemy, especially the idea of refining salts to transform substances into other things. This metaphor just doesn't work for me because I'm not into alchemy. During my daily morning coffee ritual I had a conversation in my mind with Odin about metaphors for the soul.
I must apologize, it's been way too long and when I got the mail today and saw the latest issue of SageWoman, and realized that I can't remember the last time I had received the magazine, well, let's just say that I was sad.
Erin Lale
Fellow faculty at Harvard Divinity School posted an open letter to Wolpe in response to his article. It's available on this page, below the call for p...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. The Wild Hunt has a roundup of numerous responses on its site, but it carried this one as a separate article. It is an accoun...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. This one is by a scholar of paganism. It's unfortunately a Facebook post so this link goes to Facebook. She posted the text o...
Erin Lale
Here's another link to a pagan response to the Atlantic article. I would have included this one in my story too if I had seen it before I published it...
Janet Boyer
I love the idea of green burials! I first heard of Recompose right before it launched. I wish there were more here on the East Coast; that's how I'd l...