Sacred Art: The Minos Ring

Part of the Minoan Seal Ring Project

This is one in an occasional series about my sacred art. Find all the posts in this series here.

In the first post in this series, I shared the first piece of art I created for the Minoan Seal Ring Project. I hadn’t actually intended to create a whole project, but once I finished that first piece, I felt called to look at other Minoan seal rings and make artistic interpretations of them as well.

The Minoans were big on seals in the form of cast metal rings and carved stones. Thousands of them have been found so far, mostly in graves and tombs. Like the seals medieval Europeans used to stamp images in wax on documents, Minoan seals were used as a sort of signature that identified individuals, usually by stamping images into nodules of clay.

Many Minoan seals include geometric designs and images of plants, animals, humans, and everyday objects like boats, pots, and weaving looms. But the metal seal rings, most of which were made of solid gold, are unique.

First of all, they’re bigger than the seal stones, so there’s more room for a complex image. And second, the designs on them almost always depict ritual scenes of some sort.

That’s what fascinates me about these seal rings. They’re a glimpse at living Minoan religion.

Consider, for instance, the seal ring that’s the basis for my artwork at the top of this post.

It’s called the Minos Ring or the Ring of Minos, but that’s just a modern title designed to spark interest in it. We don’t know who owned it or what their name or title was. And of course, since the Minoans didn’t have a monarchy, there never was a King Minos — he turns out to have been a god all along.

In fact, this ring has a bit of a checkered past. It was presented to the Knossos excavation team in 1928 by a young boy who said he found it in the field by the Temple Tomb near the main Knossos temple building. The prominent archaeologists of the time argued extensively about it, some insisting it was authentic but others questioning its provenance and the fact that it appeared to be unworn, almost pristine, when most Minoan seals and seal rings were very worn (after a lifetime of use followed by burial with the seal’s owner). In recent years, archaeologists have finally agreed that it’s genuine, dating to about 1500-1400 BCE.

The Ring of Minos still hasn’t made its way into the CMS Database as far as I can tell, though I expect it will be added eventually. If you’re at all interested in ancient sacred art, the database is a fun resource to browse through. Simply click on any Band (in the lefthand column) and peruse the hundreds of seal images. Click on any individual seal to see drawings, photos, and images of the shape of the seal.

The Ring of Minos fascinates me because it shows multiple different religious activities in a single scene. Every one of these activities is attested on other seals; it’s just unusual to see them all together.

In the lower center of the scene, there’s a woman standing in a reed boat on the water, poling it along. A small shrine topped with sacred horns sits in the boat alongside her. We see shrines on board boats repeatedly in Minoan art, but we still don’t understand exactly what the people were doing with them. Was this perhaps a way to build a shrine to the sea goddess Posidaeja, since having a shrine to her on land doesn’t exactly make sense? Here’s a seal ring from Mochlos showing a woman in a reed boat along with a shrine. This one has all sorts of other things going on that I’m not going to get into right now.

On the Minos Ring, on shore, on the left and in the center we see a woman and a man pulling down on tree branches that are affixed to the tops of shrines. This activity has been dubbed the “tree-shaking ceremony” and appears on other seals with both olive branches, as we see here, and clusters of dates (from date palms). It may be some kind of agricultural abundance rite. Here’s a seal ring from Kalyvia showing a woman, on the left, performing the tree-shaking ceremony.

Back to the Minos Ring. On the shore, on the right is a mini-scene that’s familiar from many places in Minoan art: a single female figure is seated on a shrine next to a pair of sacred horns. A lone seated female figure in Minoan art is usually interpreted as either a goddess or a human woman embodying a goddess in ritual. In this case, I think it’s a woman, since there’s a tiny epiphany figure hovering next to her, a goddess descending to the humans during ritual. There’s a similar epiphany figure on the Isopata ring that I featured in my first sacred art post.

When I create these modern renditions of the Minoan seal rings, I have to examine the originals (well, photos of them, anyway) in minute detail. The amount of tiny detail in these works of art continues to astound me. The Ring of Minos is barely 3 cm wide, yet it has this huge, busy, active ritual scene that includes land, water, boulders, trees, four humans and a deity!

The level of skill it took to create this ring, via the lost-wax casting method, simply astounds me. Obviously, this was the artisan’s job, the way they made their living. But I have to believe it was also a calling. I can’t imagine anyone putting this kind of dedication into their work, creating such beautiful sacred images, and not being profoundly moved by it, as I am moved today when I look at these scenes and when I paint them all over again for you to enjoy.

---

My Substack is free, but if you’d like to support my work (please and thank you!), you can find my books here and my art, including the work shown above, here and here.

About Laura Perry

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