The Minoan Sun Goddess

Therasia is with us!

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 my new Minoan Path blog posts can be found here.

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The Minoan pantheon is headed by a trio of mother goddesses who represent the sacred realms of Land, Sky, and Sea. I’ve already shared about Rhea, the Minoan Earth Mother Goddess. Now it’s time to move on to the second realm, Sky, and meet the mother goddess connected with it.

Her name is Therasia (teh-RAH-see-ah). At least, that’s what we call her. We don’t honestly know what name the ancient Minoans used for this powerful deity.

We weren’t expecting a Sun Goddess when we began putting the Minoan pantheon together a decade ago. Most modern neopagans equate the Sun with a god and the Moon with a goddess. Yet there are vestiges of an ancient Sun Goddess in many European cultures — the Norse Sunna, the Baltic Saulė, the Irish Áine — as well as elsewhere (the Japanese goddess Amaterasu, the Mesopotamian Sun Goddess of Arinna).

Dance ethnology research combined with the information in two books (O Mother Sun! by Patricia Monaghan and Minoan Kingship and the Solar Goddess by Nanno Marinatos**) led us to the conclusion that the Minoans worshiped a Sun Goddess. In fact, she still appears in folk dances around the eastern Mediterranean today.

Her symbols are the date palm and the fruit of that tree; the griffin, perhaps the fieriest of the mythical creatures in Minoan art; the color red, including the famed blood-red murex dye that later became known as Phoenician purple; saffron, the stigmas and styles of the saffron crocus that are deep red but that dye a sunny yellow; and of course, the Sun rising over the sacred peaks of Crete. Therasia rides through the Underworld at night, from her place of setting in the west to her place of rising in the east, though her Underworld face goes by another name (I’ll get to that deity in an upcoming post).

Around the Mediterranean, the palm tree and the griffin are symbols of this ancient Sun Goddess, who was probably known by different names in different places. Now, where have we seen palm trees and griffins before? Hmmm…

The infamous Throne Room in the Knossos temple complex sports a central seat that is now flanked just by griffins (first image), but that was originally flanked by palm trees as well (second photo) — red ones, one of Therasia’s sacred colors, her other sacred color being yellow. And no, I have no idea why the people who reconstructed that fresco left off the palm trees. I’m just happy that the Ashmolean Museum created that display to show what the fresco originally looked like before the reconstruction team got hold of it.

And that “throne” — archaeologists now agree that it was more likely used as a seat for a priestess during ritual, perhaps a priestess being trance possessed by a goddess. I’ve read that there was some pigment residue on the seat, suggesting that it might originally have been painted red.

And if you look at the front of the seat, there’s a design that could be interpreted as the Sun setting over the double-peaked sacred mountain called Mt. Juktas, which is located southwest of Knossos. The fact that it’s southwest and not due west of Knossos suggests that the sunset depicted on the seat may have happened at Winter Solstice, a time when many Sun Goddesses are said to die and then rebirth themselves. We consider that Therasia does so in one of the sacred caves in the mountainous areas of Crete.

We can also find Therasia in this lovely, though damaged, fresco from Akrotiri:

We can tell this is a goddess because she’s a single seated female figure. And we can tell it’s Therasia in particular because she has a griffin with her. She’s receiving an offering of saffron from a monkey while a girl pours yet more saffron into a basket.

The Sun was an important celestial object for the Minoans. Many of their buildings, from temples and villas to cave shrines and mountain peak sanctuaries, were aligned with astronomical events, including sunrise and sunset on certain days of the year. The Knossos Throne room that I discussed above has alignments to the sunrise on Summer and Winter Solstice, with the light from the rising sun illuminating the entrance to the adyton in the summer and the “throne” in the winter.

The remains of bonfires at many of the mountain peak sanctuaries may be evidence of celebrations in Therasia’s honor, since bonfires have long been a solar-associated activity around the Mediterranean.

In Ariadne’s Tribe, we honor Therasia as one of the Three Mothers, welcoming her to every ritual and celebrating her in song. We make offerings to her — I’ll share about how we perform offerings next week — and we turn our attention to her especially at the solstices and the sacred seasons that precede them.

And where other traditions might hail a deity, we say the following:

The Sun-Mother is with us!

May she be with you as well, bringing a little sunshine and joy to your day.

** Although this book provides useful information about the Sun Goddess in Minoan iconography, it also repeats some of Sir Arthur Evans’ discredited ideas about Minoan religion and culture, so read it with a critical eye.

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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.