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Imagine climbing halfway up a mountain to a plaza in front of a small building just so you could make an offering - to ask a deity for aid or healing, or perhaps to give thanks for what the deity has already done for you. This is something the Minoans did on a regular basis, making pilgrimages up the mountainsides to the four dozen or so peak sanctuaries that were in operation before the Thera eruption (a number that dropped dramatically by 2/3 to 3/4 after the eruption, for complicated reasons).

The photo (CC BY 4.0) at the top of this post comes from the peak sanctuary at Petsofas on the far eastern end of Crete. This fascinating artifact appears to be a model building in the shape of doubled sacred horns, with more small sacred horns over the central doorway. This piece was probably not a pilgrim's offering, but may have been part of the sacred paraphernalia that had a permanent home in the building at the peak sanctuary. Maybe it was used during rituals of some sort.

The Minoans were big on offerings. They made all manner of offering stands, libation pitchers, and other paraphernalia for their altars and shrines. And they used these ritual vessels to hold items and substances such as bread, fruit, flowers, wine, honey, seeds, and even wool.

But there are some interesting ritual vessels from Palaikastro that come pre-filled with little ceramic offerings. Were these models of offerings meant to replace the real thing? To be a reinforcement of what was put in the offering dish? Or to be some other kind of symbol - a reference to the deity the offering was given to, for instance, or a depiction of what they wanted the deities to protect?

I raised this horn to my companion Tom Newman when I dedicated this shelf on my bookshelf to him. This is his shrine now. I moved some of the things from the temporary altar onto here. I added the photo of us at the San Diego Zoo, and some things I found when I unpacked the Patient Belongings bag I picked up from the hospital the day he died. Those things were candy that I had brought him that he had not opened, and greeting cards, both from me and from his out of state friends which I had picked up from his mailbox at his house and delivered to the front door of the hospital (I was not allowed in because of Covid restrictions.)

The day before I set up this shrine to my late companion, a fellow heathen had told me that she received gnosis that I was supposed to have elecampagne. We chatted online about the idea and finally decided that meant folk art, not the actual flower itself. So when I unpacked the Patient Belongings bag and saw the unopened card from me with the yellow flowers, I knew that meant I was supposed to keep and display this card. I had been thinking about throwing that one out because unlike the first two cards from me that I dropped off for Tom, it was less sentimental and more of a report of what I and our mutual friends were doing at his house and the plans I was working on for him, letting him know we were getting him set up with what he needed to qualify for a military funeral. But then after that conversation about the yellow flowers I knew when I saw the card that I had to keep and display it, even though it was unopened and he never saw it. He can see it now, from his viewpoint in Asgard with Heimdall. The other cards are in the stack on the left side of the photo. The final two cards he received were from out of town friends which I delivered to the hospital in the morning on Friday with a note asking the staff to read them aloud to him. (He could not read them himself because he had already been unconscious for several days at that point.) He passed that afternoon. I hope he got to hear the cards read aloud and that it may have brought him some comfort even if he didn't fully hear or understand.

I have a cow shrine in honor of my mom in her room-- her former room. The suite. It's full of cow things she owned, but not all of them because they don't all fit.

About a month after her death, while I was falling asleep, I suddenly envisioned her in my mind's eye, smiling and shining. Her hair was its natural red color as it had been years ago, not the solid white I had gotten used to seeing before she died. It felt like more than my usual vivid imagination. She did not try to communicate anything, and it only lasted a few seconds, but I felt like I was seeing her, really her, in death. And that upset me, because I had been sure I had set everything up right for her to have a quick and easy passage to her next life (because she had often said religion was stupid, and she didn't believe in an afterlife or any gods, so I figured she'd be upset if she had to hang around in an afterlife being wrong for very long.) So of course I reached inside for Sigyn and Hel, and they reassured me: yes, that was really her, and yes, she has already passed on. She was not at that time still hanging on waiting for her desired oblivion. The dead experience time like the gods do, not like living people do. Even though it only took her a few days after her death to pass completely through Hel and on to what was next, she could still look in on me a month later, to make sure I was going to be OK. And what she saw was me curled up with my sweet kitty Happy. So, that was the most OK I could possibly be. Now I was glad I saw her, and that she saw me. It didn't mean she was stuck trying to pass over, it was just a brief visit out of time.

Later that month, I received her ashes. I placed them on the cow altar, along with pictures of her, one of the silver candles from the Death and Butterfly ritual, and the bottle of Patron with which to toast Hel and Hidden Goddess perfume to bless with in Hel's name. The photo above depicts that ritual. I told each of the three items where they belonged: the ashes in the butterfly urn were in their permanent home and would stay with me, the ashes in the rose urn were in their permanent home and would go to my brother, and the ashes in the box would be scattered. I made sure there were neither any lingering soul pieces in what I'd received, nor any bad energy. I had to mentally take the lavender broom to the pain and sweep it into the black hole in space. I double checked the energy in the ashes and their containers later and they seemed to have a normal amount of presence, that is, mom wasn't in there-- she had gone on already-- but it wasn't the kind of empty that would drawn things to a vacuum. During the ritual, I toasted to Hel, and to Audhumla and the cow spirit, and to my mom, and I said that I knew that mom had already gone to where she was going next but I already knew that time did not work the same way for gods and the dead as it did for me, so if mom wanted to tell  me anything this was the time to do that. She spoke. She told me she had seen her next life before she went to it and she was happy. That reassurance was a relief. It was not only a relief knowing that she already knew she was going to be happy in her next life because while she was in Hel's realm she could see ahead in time, it was also a relief to know she didn't have any other messages for me.

I left her Shrine of the Great Cow Mother up and made occasional toasts. I knew that eventually I would take it down so someone else could move into the suite, so it was not made to be permanent, but it was operating longer than any other altar I had put up in the house before. Usually when I did holiday rituals I took the altar down the same day, or perhaps the next day. I kept the portable working altar that was just big enough for ritual tools and a bottle in my room, but I kept it covered. This one was still powered, and one morning I went in to open the blinds and curtains for the house plants and felt dark energy in that room. I flicked it away at once, and felt carefully to be sure there was no bad energy on any of the ashes or anything else on the altar. There was not. It didn't come from the ashes or the altar, it was attracted to it from outside. I then performed another ritual, this time focused on the gnome (the land wight of my land) and on Audhumla. I asked the gnome to reinforce his protections against vampiric entities looking for power to eat, and I asked Audhumla to bless her altar and keep bad influences away from it. After that, the power of the shrine didn't draw anything in that wanted it as a snack.

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).

Hey, let's build a cairn.

It will be a shrine, a place for the Mother. Everybody honors her. Well, they do if they have any sense.

To seed it, we'll bury her little image beneath where the cairn will rise. It will have to be a beautiful image, precious, enough to hurt. That's what makes it a worthy offering, a foundation.

Then we'll heap on the stones: small stones, each the size of a fist. We'll start with a small cairn, maybe a couple of feet high, but big enough to seed what comes after. And through the years it will grow.

A cairn is the ultimate in democratic architecture. Anyone can bring a stone and leave it. You'll place yours—every stone a prayer—and then there will be something of you there forever, part of this thing that we're doing together down the years.

Every shrine needs a keeper.

Shrines are busy places. Someone needs to sweep away the ash, compost the wilted flowers, remove the food offerings before they go bad.

In a timely manner, mind you, but not too soon. Part of the joy of shrines—part of the encounter that takes place there—is the evidence of the worship of others.

Another part of the keeper's job is to decide. Not all offerings are, shall we say, worthy.

The plastic, the cutesy, the distracting: they've served their purpose. (The worth of the offering is in the making.) Off with them to the favissa. (The Romans had a name for everything.)

After all, they've been given: they belong to a god now. Worthy or not, they still need to be treated with respect.

That's why there's a special pit for sacred garbage.

You can be a shrine-keeper, too.