Very interesting. Thanks for sharing, Laura. Eileithyia made me think of both Hekate and Nebt-Het (Nephthys). I look forward to getting to know these deities better!
Fascinating, thank you, yet also a bit confusing. Have you ever found any connection to Hekate? I wonder as she is One who has traveled cultures and times with various names.
Yes, it is confusing! lol I've often likened the Minoan pantheon to a carnival funhouse full of mirrors. It's hard to tell which deities are distinct and which are faces of each other. That's one of the reasons we say "individuation is problematic."
Hekate belongs to the family of deities from mainland Greece, from the time before the Indo-Europeans arrived, a culture that is sometimes referred to as Pelasgian. Demeter and Persephone also come from that pre-Indo-European culture. Both the Minoans and the Pelasgians descended from waves of migration that came out of Anatolia during the Neolithic era, so the two cultures are "cousins," in a manner of speaking. Their pantheons would have evolved or descended from a single original family of deities in Neolithic Anatolia. We've found a number of correlations between Pelasgian deities and Minoan ones. The correlation between the Demeter-Persephone pair and the Rhea-Ariadne pair is one of the obvious ones. Hekate appears to correlate to the Minoan goddess Eileithyia, who is a torch-bearing midwife goddess of the Underworld. The Minoan Eileithyia is a far more complex deity than the simple midwife goddess who survived into the Hellenic pantheon. I'll be sharing more in-depth writeups about each of the deities in future posts.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing, Laura. Eileithyia made me think of both Hekate and Nebt-Het (Nephthys). I look forward to getting to know these deities better!
Fascinating, thank you, yet also a bit confusing. Have you ever found any connection to Hekate? I wonder as she is One who has traveled cultures and times with various names.
Yes, it is confusing! lol I've often likened the Minoan pantheon to a carnival funhouse full of mirrors. It's hard to tell which deities are distinct and which are faces of each other. That's one of the reasons we say "individuation is problematic."
Hekate belongs to the family of deities from mainland Greece, from the time before the Indo-Europeans arrived, a culture that is sometimes referred to as Pelasgian. Demeter and Persephone also come from that pre-Indo-European culture. Both the Minoans and the Pelasgians descended from waves of migration that came out of Anatolia during the Neolithic era, so the two cultures are "cousins," in a manner of speaking. Their pantheons would have evolved or descended from a single original family of deities in Neolithic Anatolia. We've found a number of correlations between Pelasgian deities and Minoan ones. The correlation between the Demeter-Persephone pair and the Rhea-Ariadne pair is one of the obvious ones. Hekate appears to correlate to the Minoan goddess Eileithyia, who is a torch-bearing midwife goddess of the Underworld. The Minoan Eileithyia is a far more complex deity than the simple midwife goddess who survived into the Hellenic pantheon. I'll be sharing more in-depth writeups about each of the deities in future posts.
Thank you 🙏🏼