Years Gone By

Recently, I came across a new group of Pagans, one I hadn't heard of before: Modern Minoan Pagans. It was through YouTube, a filmed workshop at this past year's Mystic South Conference, and I've been reading their research and shared experiences off and on for the past few months.

They aren't a reconstructionist group (they aren't trying to resurrect the old path exactly as it was), but it was this reintroduction to a group with a lot of historical research embedded in it that threw a different light on our own Scriptures for me.

For instance, re-reading the first part of the Holy Mythos you can see that we retain two separate calendar years: the old agricultural year, and the later solar year. It was through the reconstructed myths of Dionysus (a god that likely originated on Crete and was later introduced to the Greeks) that I realized the connection. Dionysus had his roots, so to speak, in the agricultural year, the life and death and rebirth of the crop itself, but as the years passed and the religion changed over time, he became more associated with the solar year, becoming the dying and reborn Sun marking the Solstices.

We can see the old agricultural year contained in our own Scriptures in a few places, first in Her going down to the Nether World:

 

1. Now from the time when the daughter of heaven had passed through the first gate of hell, a barrenness had fallen on the earth: neither bird had sung nor any flower showed its beauty forth, nor was there joy in any heart.  2. But when the Maid was slain upon the pillar of the world, an awful darkness fell upon all the earth.  3. And the rivers of the earth ceased to flow, but drained away into the salt sea, and the sea ceased to move, but stood still in awful stagnancy,  4. and there was drought in all the earth. Neither maid bore child nor ewe brought forth the lamb. Every growing thing began to wither from its roots.  5. In the nights there were neither moon nor stars, and the heat of the sun by day was terrible. (1:9:1-5 NCU)

 

The importance of the land is highlighted as it would have been in any agricultural society, dependent as they were on the crops.

 

This is more explicitly stated once She has ascended to Heaven:

 

18. “Like to the grains, My body was cut down by the scythe of death; and like to the grains did it rise anew.  19. For I am the ear of grain that is reaped in silence.” (1:10:18-19 NCU)

 

Our liturgical year preserves the solar year in its celebrating the birth of the Daughter at the Winter Solstice along with the rebirth of the Sun, but the (northern hemisphere's) agricultural rebirth at Her resurrection in the spring, which also marks our new year.

There are a few other similarities to the Minoan myths in Filianism; the comparison of the Mother looking for Her Daughter in the underworld is often enough made to the story of Demeter and Persephone, but the version the Minoans would have had, of Ariadne and Ida, is much closer to our myth, including the concept that She descends to the underworld of Her own will for a purpose.

This kind of thing makes me think that perhaps they weren't so off when some Filianis said that they had preserved or resurrected a faith from the long-gone matriarchal societies of the past. It wasn't that they had some unbroken line of priestesses teaching the truth, but that these concepts and ideas never really fade away completely: they keep showing up because they are important to us.