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Since the Minoans aren't around anymore and we can't read the things they wrote (Linear A hasn't been deciphered), we have to build our Minoan spiritual practice based on whatever inspiration we can find.

It turns out, there are still remnants of ancient rites that cling to life in the folk practices of Crete and other parts of Europe in this Christian era. You probably already knew this: The Christian church took over Pagan practices and renamed them, like the Irish goddess Brigit becoming a Christian saint.

Today, it's not at all uncommon to see people in New York wearing fashions from Paris, or kids in California watching Japanese anime TV shows (and kids in Japan watching American TV shows). It's called cultural exchange, and it has always happened, as long as people have traveled and traded and interacted with each other.

The way ancient cultures are presented in the history books often makes them sound as if they were completely separate from each other, sealed away in some sort of etheric ziptop bag, as if the borders of the various empires and cultures were non-permeable. But that's far from the case. During the Bronze Age - the time when the Minoans were being all Minoan-y - the whole eastern Mediterranean was one great big cultural exchange area, with people trading objects, ideas, styles, and fashions from one spot to another as fast as the ships could ply the seas.

Most of us who practice Modern Minoan Paganism are solitaries. Our main focus for our spiritual activities is often an altar we've created at home. We might light candles and incense, make offerings, do meditations and devotionals, have conversations with the gods. As with a lot of solitaries, these kinds of activities are often sort of casual. But sometimes, even a solitary wants to do something kind of fancy. And if you have a friend or two to do it with, that's nice, too.

One activity that we don't often think of in terms of modern Pagan ritual is processions. But they were a major part of ancient religious activities, especially in the area of the world where the Minoans lived. We have detailed information about processions from Bronze Age Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. And there are Minoan frescoes and other works of art that show ritual processions as well (the Corridor of the Processions from Knossos, for instance, and the Hagia Triada sarcophagus).

One of the more frustrating aspects of practicing Modern Minoan Paganism and studying ancient Minoan culture is that we can't read Linear A, the script the Minoans used to write their native language. So we have to rely on the fragments of Minoan myth and history that have trickled down to us via the Greeks (the Minoans weren't Greek - they were their very own independent Bronze Age culture).

This means we don't even know the words the Minoans used for ordinary objects like cups and bowls. The archaeologists who first excavated Minoan sites had backgrounds in Greek history, myth, and culture, so they simply used the Greek terms for the pottery they unearthed. That's why libation pitchers from ancient Crete are called rhytons (or rhyta, if you want to use the Greek plural); rhyton is the Greek word for this kind of container.

Like every culture, the Minoans had their music. We can see that in their art and artifacts. The image at the top of this post is of a group of terracotta figurines from Palaikastro. There are three women holding hands and dancing in a semicircle around a fourth woman who is playing the lyre. We don't know what the occasion was here: a celebration? A ritual? One of the famous harvest dances on a circular threshing floor? (There was a circular piece found with these figurines that might have been a model threshing floor.)

It could even have been a funeral; there's a lyre-player on the "death" side of the Hagia Triada sarcophagus.

If I had been asked to write the words that introduce visitors to the Heraklion Archaeological Museum of Crete to its earliest inhabitants, I would have said something like this:

While there is evidence that human beings visited Crete as early as 150,000 years ago, the first permanent settlers arrived from Anatolia in the New Stone Age or Neolithic era, about 9000 years ago, bringing with them the secrets of agriculture and soon afterward learning the techniques of pottery and weaving. As the gatherers of fruits, nuts, and vegetables and as preparers of food in earlier Old Stone Age or Paleolithic cultures, women would have noticed that seeds dropped at a campsite might sprout into plants. Women most likely discovered the secrets of agriculture that enabled people to settle down in the first farming communities of the New Stone Age. As pottery is associated with women’s work of food storage and preparation, and as weaving is women’s work in most traditional cultures, women probably invented these new technologies as well. Each of these inventions was understood to be a mystery of transformation: seed to plant to harvested crop; clay to snake coil to fired pot; wool or flax to thread to spun cloth. The mysteries were passed on from mother to daughter through songs, stories, and rituals.

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 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.