The Serpent Mother and other enigmatic deities

Revivalist spirituality has its challenges!

It’s been quite the challenge, building a Minoan pantheon from scraps and garbled fragments of myth and folklore.

The Minoans were a vibrant culture centered on the Mediterranean island of Crete, but their civilization ended more than three millennia ago. No, I’m not talking about the Thera eruption. The Minoans managed to survive that catastrophe and rebuild. But they were weakened by the natural disaster and fell prey to conquering outsiders.

First, in about 1450 BCE, most of their cities were destroyed by the Mycenaeans, who had occupied Knossos and were trying to take over the rest of the island. Then, in about 1350 BCE, Knossos itself was destroyed, possibly by the remnants of the Minoans who had hidden out in the mountains and had finally had enough.

There were still people living on Crete at that point, of course, but they were struggling to maintain their culture and lifeways, living in smaller villages and settlements. And then the Late Bronze Age collapse happened. By about 1100 BCE, everything that looked like Minoan civilization was gone: the big cities with their temples and paved roads and piped-in water supplies; the art, so recognizable from the height of Minoan times; the population, now dwindling as people struggled to eke out a living in scattered settlements and lonely farmsteads.

Several centuries later, classical Greek civilization emerged, carrying with it the remnants of Minoan mythology that had survived via oral traditions and folkloric currents.

Those remnants were recorded by Hellenic writers with their own agendas (standard human-culture operating procedure, really). Certainly, some of the Minoan myths had already shifted and changed over time, but they changed even more as they were used to support the rising culture of the city-states of Greece.

This is similar to the way Celtic myths and folklore were recorded by the Romans, altered as desired for their own propaganda purposes.

So this is what we have to work with, combined with what archaeology, archaeoastronomy, dance ethnology, and comparative mythology can tell us to help us fill in the blanks.

The Minoans were a Bronze Age civilization, but they maintained many of the Neolithic religious and cultural practices of their ancestors. So their worldview was very different from that of Iron Age cultures, and even from many of their Bronze Age contemporaries. Their neighbors probably thought they were those weird old-fashioned people!!

This is all a very long way of saying, it’s been quite an adventure, finding the Minoan deities and figuring out who they are. The pantheon has turned out to look very different than we expected when we started. We have a Sun Goddess and a Moon God instead of the other way round, a pantheon headed by husbandless Mother Goddesses, and three sacred realms instead of four elements.

We can’t guarantee that the pantheon we’ve built is exactly the way the ancient Minoans experienced their family of deities. But it works for us as modern Pagans, and more importantly, the deities seem pleased with it.

I’m slowly working my way through the family of deities, making sure each one has their own entry on the Minoan Path blog in addition to the series I wrote about where to find the deities in Minoan art.

My newest entry is today’s post about the Serpent Mother, an iconic yet enigmatic deity who continues to intrigue:

Meet the Minoans: The Serpent Mother

I’ll end this post with the benediction we use in the Tribe to end meetings and other non-ritual events:

May your days be filled with wonder.
May your work be filled with meaning.
May your life be filled with joy.

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About Laura Perry

I'm an author, artist, and creator who works magic with words, paint, ink, music, textiles, and herbs. I'm the founder and Temple Mom of Ariadne's Tribe, a worldwide inclusive Minoan spiritual tradition. My spiritual practice also 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. I’m also an avid gardener and living history demonstrator.