Ourania: Great Cosmic Mother-of-All

The Minoan Cosmic Goddess

This is one of a long-term series of posts about Ariadne’s Tribe style inclusive Minoan spirituality. Some of these posts, including this one, are revised and updated versions of older articles that I wrote over the course of a decade on the Minoan Path blog. I’m moving the content over here in an effort to consolidate my writing on a single platform. All my new Minoan Path blog posts can be found here.

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When we begin get-togethers in Ariadne’s Tribe, we often open with the following words: “The Mothers are with us. The family of our deities is with us.”

The Mothers. The Minoan pantheon is headed, not by a father-figure male god, but by a trio of mother goddesses - Rhea, Therasia, and Posidaeja - who represent the three sacred realms of Land, Sky, and Sea.

But they’re not the only mother goddesses in our pantheon.

The Snake Goddess, a.k.a. the Serpent Mother, also twines her way through our spiritual lives.

But above and beyond all the other deities, through all the realms of the material world and all the spirit-realms, is a unique mother goddess: Ourania.

We pronounce her name oh-RAH-nee-ah, though we often call her Starweaver. She is the Great Cosmic Mother of our family of deities.

Her name, Ourania, gives us a clue to her original function: she’s the cosmos, the starry sky, the very fabric of the universe. If you’re into quantum physics, you can envision her as the quantum foam, the not-quite-material substance out of which everything material is made.

Like other Minoan deities, Ourania was "demoted" in later Greek mythology to make way for the Hellenic deities. While Ariadne, Minos, and other Minoan deities became mortals, Ourania dropped from goddess to simple Muse. But her function among the Muses betrays her original position: She's the Muse of astronomy.

Astronomy - the study of the starry skies - was a central focus of Minoan sacred life in the temples and the mountaintop peak sanctuaries. The clergy kept track of a complicated calendar based on the cycles of the Moon, the Sun, Venus, and a number of stars. They must have spent many long nights on the temple rooftops, watching the stars wheel through the sky, rising and setting over the tops of the sacred mountain peaks. To them, the entire process was holy.

Ourania’s motions drive the cosmos, turning the wheels of time. She’s the musician who plays the music of the spheres, and she is the music itself. Some people like to think of her as a force of nature, a cosmic power, rather than an anthropomorphic goddess.

The idea of a cosmic goddess is probably a little harder to imagine than, say, an Earth goddess. Some of us experience Ourania as a black vulture, her broad wings spread out across the vast depths of space. Perhaps that’s her we see on the pillars at Gobekli Tepe, a temple from the region and era that the Minoans’ ancestors came from.

Though we consider Ourania to be a mother goddess, most of us find it difficult to envision her in human form except as a veiled figure, mysterious and shadowy. Instead, we look up to the starry night sky and feel her presence, knowing that she is around us, always and everywhere.

She is the cosmos, the stuff of stars and atoms. We are made of her being.

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About Laura Perry

I'm the founder and Temple Mom of Ariadne's Tribe, a worldwide inclusive Minoan spiritual tradition. I'm also an author, artist, and creator who works magic with words, paint, ink, music, textiles, and herbs. My spiritual practice includes spirit work and herbalism through the lens of lifelong animism. I write Pagan / polytheist / magical non-fiction and fiction across several different subjects and genres. My Minoan entry in the Moon Books Pantheons series is now available for pre-order and will be released on 26 August 2025. My book of modern Minoan myths is now available in paperback, hardcover, and ebook. I’m also an avid herb and vegetable gardener and living history demonstrator.