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Today I'm sharing a guest post from my dear friend Dana Corby (author of The Witches' Runes, which I heartily recommend). She has many years of experience in the Pagan community and has seen all sorts of theories and points of view come and go. Today, she has generously offered to share her knowledge about the way Minoan spirituality has intertwined with Wicca over the years and how that has sometimes led to misunderstandings about the Minoans, their culture, and their religion.

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When I first discovered the Pagan community, I never dreamed I'd end up as the facilitator for a new spiritual path, but here we are. Modern Minoan Paganism is a thing and a lot of us are doing it. So what, exactly, are we doing?

Like many Pagan traditions, there are no rules about what you must believe. Some of us are hard polytheists; some of us approach the Minoan deities from a psychological or symbolic perspective. All that really matters is that the connection works, however you make it. The central focus is the Minoan pantheon, the gods and goddesses of ancient Crete who are still very much alive today.

When we learn history in school, we're given pictures of maps with clear lines drawn to separate the different empires, cultures, and nations. We're taught that one set of people lived within this little box on the map and another set of people lived within the next box over. But history isn't that neat and tidy.

Take the Minoans, for instance. Their culture centered on the island of Crete, just south of Greece, during the Bronze Age. They were a pre-Indo-European people (they weren't Greek) who became quite wealthy by importing raw materials and exporting fancy finished goods like bronze blades and dyed woolen cloth. But in order to do all that trading, they had to move around.

It was while I lived in Jerusalem, Israel, in the winter of 1992, and previous to becoming a metaphysician and fire priestess, that I began a surprising although insightful journey. Having spent days curled up on my couch glued to a Mary Summer Rain book titled, Dreamwalker, a book I found in Tel Aviv, I was hooked. I could not put that book down, it held me spellbound. Having noted the name Silver Eagle, Dreamwalker, a bell went off in my psyche. When I read that one could support this Tennessee US Native Dreamwalker by purchasing his hand made earrings consisting of beads, wood and or feathers, I determined to write to him. Dreamwalkers are individuals who can use dreams to visit people, or teleport themselves and read ones energy vibration, offering help and assistance.

Different people approach spiritual practice in different ways. Some people like detailed rules for how to set up their altar, prepare for ritual, perform ritual, and clean up afterward. Others prefer a more open approach, following general guidelines but allowing their intuition to guide them for much of what they do.

Some spiritual traditions fall squarely in that first category as well, practices such as Hellenic and Roman Paganism, simply because we have extensive texts from those cultures telling us exactly how those people practiced their religion: What was allowed, what was required, what was forbidden. But for many ancient religions, we have few to no written sources to tell us how it was done. The religion practiced by the Minoans of Bronze Age Crete is one of those.

If you look at one of the amazingly detailed Minoan gold seal rings, you might see a tiny human figure hovering as if it's descending from the heavens. These are usually interpreted as a god or goddess coming down to their worshipers: an epiphany scene. But what about all the other strange shapes that float in the air on the seal rings?

Given the Minoans' focus (obsession, maybe) with astronomy, there's a strong possibility that those floating objects represent constellations. One clue is that they always show up in the same position relative to each other, no matter how many or few of them are on the ring.

In my early 20s, I experienced a spontaneous awakening that fully opened up my world to the life of a mystic. Years later nothing quite cements the phrase “spiritual emergence” than the exact moment when the energetic point at my heart broke open.

There were a few problems with the journey I was about to begin. One, I didn't have a community, and the network of support I did have hadn't experienced anything like I was describing. I didn't have any local teachers. The greatest hurdle, though, was the fact that I'm bipolar with the diagnosis now of Bipolar Type II.