19d • General discussion
Two Heritages and waiting on the process
While waiting for my book formatting to be completed, thought I'd share another snippet from my upcoming Sacred Journey
A Memoir of Loss, Love and Coming Home to Yourself.
A CHAPTER...
Two Heritages
Visiting Crete, Belonging to Sicily and Scotland, 2024
At the end of my decade of sacred journeying, the journey turned toward the places where my blood comes from. Not the sacred sites of other people's traditions. My own.
As with most things in my life, Crete arrived through synchronicity.
I was attending a retreat called: The Celebration of Being Woman being held in Crete.
The retreat centre already had my name on the door. I arrived to find that the previous retreat had left the name Maria on the door of the room that would be mine.
The universe is sometimes not subtle.
On the first evening, the sun and the moon were in the same sky, the solar and the lunar, the masculine and the feminine, in perfect balance over the oldest goddess island in the Mediterranean.
A friend had asked me about my heritage. I could speak at length about my father's side: the Cucinotta’s, Sicily, the volcanic island, the migration to Australia. But when she asked about my mother's family, she noticed how much I struggled. I had grown up with vagueness. A shrug. Her parents were from the UK somewhere. Nothing specific. No town. No story. No detail. Just a kind of fog where the maternal line should have been, which, when I think about it now, was the mother wound showing up in the most literal way possible. Even the geography of her had been lost.
My friend put the few details I had into an ancestry programme. And within hours, a lineage I had never known materialised on a screen in front of me. My mother's father was from Lothian, Edinburgh. My maternal grandmother's family were from Ireland.
Edinburgh. Ireland. Two homelands I had never been told were mine.
The Goddess Culture of Crete
What I did not fully understand before I arrived on Crete was that I was stepping onto what may be the oldest goddess-worshipping ground in Europe.
The Minoan civilisation flourished on this island from roughly 2700 BCE to 1450 BCE, more than a thousand years before the classical Greek culture most of us were taught in school. And what made the Minoans extraordinary was this: their religion was centred on the feminine.
There was no Zeus here. No Olympian hierarchy of male gods ruling from a mountaintop. The Minoans worshipped a Great Mother Goddess, a figure of immense power who appeared in many forms across their art, their temples, their sacred caves. She held the whole cycle in her body: birth, life, death, and rebirth. And she was honoured not as one among many gods, but as the central animating presence of the entire culture.
The most famous image of her is the Snake Goddess of Knossos, a small figurine discovered in the ruins of the great palace. She stands with her arms raised, holding a serpent in each hand, her eyes steady. She is not demure. She is not decorative. She is a woman holding power in both hands and meeting your gaze without apology.
The serpent was her sacred symbol, not the sinister creature of later biblical mythology, but an emblem of renewal, of transformation, of the ability to shed one's old skin and emerge remade. In the Minoan world, the serpent belonged to the feminine.
Can't wait to share the details of when the book will be ready, like everything in life, there are processes that must be followed to truly birth something into the world,
Love Maria x
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Two Heritages and waiting on the process
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