The Minoan Goddess Rhea
The Earth Mother 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 on the Minoan Path blog. I’m moving the content over here in an effort to consolidate my writing on a single platform. All the posts about modern Minoan spirituality and ancient Minoan culture can be found in the Minoan section of my Substack.
The Minoan pantheon, as we’ve reconstructed it in Ariadne’s Tribe, is headed by a trio of mother goddesses. This makes sense, given that the Minoans were probably a matrilineal culture, and a culture’s pantheon will tend to reflect the human social structure.
So I’m beginning my exploration of the pantheon here with the Three Mothers, a triplicity of goddesses who reflect the sacred realms of Land, Sky, and Sea. First up is Rhea, the Minoan Earth Mother, whose sacred realm is Land.
You may be familiar with her from the Hellenic pantheon. The Mycenaeans were in contact with the Minoans for several centuries during the Bronze Age and borrowed many Minoan deities into their own pantheon. But how the Mycenaeans and later Hellenic Greeks viewed those deities was colored by their own culture’s values, which were different in many ways from the Minoans’ values.
So let’s look at Rhea through a Minoan lens, as the people of Bronze Age Crete may have known her, and as we know her today in Ariadne’s Tribe.
We don’t know for certain what the Minoans actually called Rhea, though Ida is a strong contender. Rhea’s sacred place on Crete is Mt. Ida, the island’s highest peak. Its name is thought to derive from one of her epithets, a word that some scholars think may be the Minoan word for "mother."
The Greeks called Rhea the Great Mother, Mother of the Gods, and Mother of All, and so she was — and still is.
In her sacred cave on Mt. Ida, Rhea bore the Divine Child, the infant Dionysus, at Winter Solstice. The Greeks confusingly called him Cretan Zeus, hence all the stories about "Zeus" being born in caves on Crete. But the actual god Zeus is from Olympus, while Dionysus (who will have his own post later on) was born on Crete.
Across the ancient world, caves symbolized the womb of the Earth Mother; the Idaean Cave was a site of religious pilgrimage in the Bronze Age and is still accessible today. This same myth is also associated with a cave on Mt. Dikte as well as one on Mt. Aegaeon, two more peaks in the mountain range that rises to great heights in the center of the island of Crete.
Yes, there were competing sacred caves of Rhea in Minoan Crete! The Minoans built cave shrines and peak sanctuaries on these sacred mountains. That gives us one of her epithets, the Mountain Mother.
If the mountain cave is her womb, then Rhea can be considered to embody not just the earth in general, but specifically the island of Crete. Like other Earth Mother goddesses, Rhea is connected with a specific portion of the Earth’s land, the place where she and her people are from. The Greeks even said that Rhea never moved to Mount Olympus with the rest of the deities, but stayed on Crete to be near her sacred cave.
Although she’s an Earth goddess, Rhea is the mythical creator of the Milky Way, that beautiful white band of stars that looks as if it might have been made by a spray of milk from the goddess’s breasts. While modern pagans often think of cups and other vessels as womb-symbolic, the Minoans frequently conceptualized containers of liquid as breast-symbolic. Breast and udder imagery abounds in Minoan art, underscoring the idea of the mother as the source of nurture and nourishment, both literal and symbolic.
Although later writers often referred to Rhea as a fertility goddess, to us in Ariadne’s Tribe, her focus is more on the land itself, the Earth as a sacred, living thing, a source of life, both physical and metaphysical, and not a dispenser of resources to be used or sold. Our relationship with her is not transactional, but heartfelt.
If you want to compare her to another goddess, Demeter is a good choice. Demeter is probably pre-Hellenic, a remnant of the pantheon that belonged to the people who lived in mainland Greece before the coming of the Indo-Europeans. Those pre-Greek people were the Minoans’ “cousins,” in a way — both populations came from the Neolithic-era migrations out of Anatolia and into Europe and the Mediterranean. Demeter is a Grain Mother goddess, just like Rhea. In fact, dance ethnology research shows that the unnaturally white skin on female figures in Minoan art is a reference to the Grain Mother and her gift to humanity. Rhea’s story as the Grain Mother is enshrined in the Mysteries, the Minoan precursor to the Eleusinian Mysteries that we celebrate in the Tribe’s sacred calendar.
In Minoan art, Rhea is often depicted accompanied by lions, even though there were never any lions on Crete. It’s likely, given the art that has been found at Neolithic sites in Anatolia, that lions were connected with the Earth Mother back then and were brought to Crete during those migrations. There were lions in Anatolia back then.
This seal impression found at Knossos shows a goddess on a mountaintop, flanked by a pair of lions and worshiped by a male adorant who stands at the foot of the mountain:
We also find lions on Minoan seals flanking female figures. A pair of animals flanking a female figure or a pillar, column, or stylized tree (any of which could symbolically stand in for a goddess) is common in Minoan art.
The specific animals in the image tell us which goddess is being represented. It's a kind of pictorial shorthand, an iconographic language, if you will. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the goddess pictured is the Mistress of the Animals, and I do wish people would stop slapping that label on every single instance that includes animals. So if you see a goddess flanked by lions in Minoan art, you’re looking at Rhea.
Lions show up in other forms in Minoan art as well. How about this gorgeous alabaster lioness rhyton from Knossos — the eyes and nose would originally have been inlaid with colored stones. A rhyton is a type of ritual pitcher used to pour libations (liquid offerings). In this case, the rhyton was filled via the neck, and the liquid poured out the mouth. This may have been used to pour libations to Rhea.
Here’s another lioness rhyton, this one ceramic, from Akrotiri. I love the expression!
The Greeks (centuries after the fall of Minoan civilization) said that, while Rhea chose to live on Crete, she occasionally journeyed to Mount Olympus for special occasions. On those occasions, she traveled in a chariot pulled by a pair of lions. So her lions stuck around as part of her long-term symbology, even after the LBA collapse.
Lions are fierce animals, and Rhea is no sparkly New Age goddess. Her womb-cave is not just a place of birth, but also a gateway to the Underworld, the place through which the souls of the dead pass at the end of life. The darkness of the womb is also the darkness of the tomb.
We may think of the Minoans as being obsessed with death, considering their extensive tombs and cemeteries as well as a great many Underworld and psychopomp deities. But what Rhea teaches us is that it’s not so much an obsession as an acceptance.
Like it or not, death comes to everyone. The Great Mother assures us that, whenever it comes, she will welcome each of us back into her arms just as joyfully as she led us into this world.
In addition to the names Rhea and Ida, one of the epithets that we use for this goddess in the Tribe is Pandora, the All-Giver.
You’re probably familiar with the later (misogynistic) Greek version of her story, in which her box contains all the bad things of the world, with only hope for redemption. There’s a lesson here: Rhea Pandora’s vase (it’s a pithos, a large storage jar of the type the Minoans used) did originally contain all the bad things, but it also contained all the good things as well. Pandora is the giver of all — birth, death, and everything in between and beyond.
You might think of Pandora's pithos as the original magical bottomless cauldron, shared with humans millennia before anyone thought of the idea of a Bag of Holding. What's in that pithos is not all pretty, but it’s all a natural part of the system. The Minoans knew this. Not only did they use those pithoi to store the grain that was the Great Mother’s gift to them; they also used those jars to bury their dead.
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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. While that process percolates along, I’m working on an illustrated book of modern Minoan myths. I’m also an avid herb and vegetable gardener and living history demonstrator.