Have you ever tried to bake a cake from scratch? Not terribly difficult, right? But what if you didn’t have a recipe? That’s pretty much what we’re doing over at Ariadne’s Tribe these days. Bear with me here and I’ll do my best not to flog the metaphor too badly.

Reconstructionist traditions like Hellenism and Ásatru rely on written texts from earlier times for a lot of their information. The Hellenists have all the works that have come down to us from the classical writers, many of whom were devoted to the Hellenic deities themselves; the Ásatru folks have the eddas, the sagas and more.

Though the ancient Minoans left us their writing in the form of Linear A, we can’t read it; in fact, we don’t even know what language the script records. So, essentially, we don’t have a recipe. But we’re good cooks, or at least, I’d like to think so.

An accomplished cook knows the basic ingredients for a cake and is familiar with the process for creating the batter and baking it. A good cook probably has a collection of cookbooks that contain recipes similar to the one they want, but not exactly the same, and it might be hard to tell exactly how different the desired cake should be from the available recipes. That’s about the situation we’re in as we collaborate to create a Minoan spiritual tradition that’s accessible to modern Pagans but still true to the practices and beliefs of the ancient Cretans.

So we’ve been digging through academic journals and popular books about the archaeological finds from Crete, doing our best to piece together the information. One of the big stumbling blocks is that most academics, including archaeologists, aren’t practicing Pagans. They don’t have the mindset that encompasses modern Paganism, much less ancient Minoan spirituality. So when they look at, for instance, the stones with ‘cup hole’ carvings in them, found at many of the temple sites on Crete, their first thought is ‘board game.’ They don’t know about the ancient cup hole carvings in stones in the British Isles and other locations, where people to this day still leave offerings of milk and booze for the Fairies and the Wights. So we have to work our way around the academic mindset and see what we can find, sometimes glimpsing bits and pieces out of the corner of an eye.

We’ve developed a sacred calendar. The temples on Crete, as well as the ancient beehive-shaped communal tombs, all have distinctive and repeating architectural alignments to astronomical events that point to particular dates in the solar year, which has helped a lot.

We started out with the names of many of the deities, at least what the later Greeks called them (Rhea, Ariadne, Dionysus) or the way their names were written in Mycenaean Greek on the Linear B tablets. That gave us a basic outline to begin with. But then we had to listen, really listen, to the deities themselves. Because the only information we had about them was fragmentary, often purposely altered and distorted by the Greeks. Eventually we heard well enough to see the beautiful, multi-faceted family of Minoan deities. We still discover new ones every now and then, which is always a lovely surprise.

We've created practices that we think the ancient Minoans would recognize, and which we feel the deities approve of: making offerings, celebrating the festivals in the sacred calendar, performing ritual using a Bronze Age style format we developed.

As much as anything, this is an exercise in listening – to our hearts, to the gods, to the whisper of ancient Crete. It's still a work in progress, and always will be. But we've found our footing. Now we get to walk forward hand-in-hand with the divine.