When someone says "papyrus," most people think of Egypt - specifically, ancient Egypt with papyrus plants growing along the banks of the Nile and being made into sheets of material to write on.
People don't often think of the Minoans in connection with papyrus. But papyrus appears in Minoan art more than you might think. And we're still not quite sure what it means.
The very first book I ever published about Minoan spirituality is Ariadne's Thread: Awakening the Wonders of the Ancient Minoans in Our Modern Lives. That was back in 2013, before I started the Ariadne's Tribe Facebook group and before Modern Minoan Paganism (MMP) had even begun to form in anyone's thoughts.
Ariadne's Thread is based on the set of Minoan-themed rituals I wrote for my second degree in a Wiccan coven back in the 1990s - a year's worth of seasonal rituals and a lifetime's worth of rites of passage. The coven I belonged to at the time helped me "road test" a lot of the rituals, which was very helpful. Then I added a large section about Minoan culture and religion and a mini-encyclopedia of deities and symbols to complete the book.
In Ariadne's Tribe, we developed our sacred calendar one bit at a time over the course of several years, relying on a combination of archaeology, comparative mythology, dance ethnology, and shared gnosis to collect up and organize the festivals. But now that it's a living, functioning thing that we've worked in sync with for a while, something interesting has happened.
Last week I looked at the top five blog posts of 2021, a couple of which surprised me. Then I decided I wanted to look back over the seven years (time flies!) that I've been writing this blog and see which posts have been most popular over the long term. In this case, four out of the top five surprised me - and one didn't. At all.
Herewith, the top five Minoan Path posts since I began this blog in 2014, from least popular to most popular. Have you read them all?
Every January, I like to look back over my blog posts of the past year and see which ones were the most popular. I usually find the results a little surprising, and this year is no different.
For 2021, my top five blog posts, beginning with the most popular:
Some time ago I wrote about the possibility that Minos, who is a god and not a mythical king, is a moon god. It turns out, that's only one of his many fascinating aspects.
There's precious little about him in the garbled fragments of Minoan myth that survived into classical times. The stories mostly talk about him being a king, and a horrid one at that. But the tidbits of information that led us to view him as a Moon god also point to his connection with the Minoan sacred calendar. More on both of those aspects shortly.
I was recently asked a question during an interview, and I've been thinking about it ever since. The question: What kinds of people seek out Modern Minoan Paganism, and why?
The first part of that question spans the gamut of not just the modern Pagan world but the modern population in general: Wiccans, Hellenic Pagans, Druids, former Christians seeking polytheistic spirituality, former atheists and agnostics who have felt the call of the deities...
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...