If you have a request of your own, drop me a line and I will happily add it to the list! His father was a pure white bull, sacred to the god Poseidon. In one version of the story, Minos refused to sacrifice the bull to the sea-god, as he had promised. The ancient authors were not shy about the details of how Pasiphae and the bull came together. According to the myth, the master craftsman Daedalus of Icarus and labyrinth fame , agreed to help the besotted Pasiphae by building a wooden frame of a cow, then skinning a real cow, and stretching the hide over the frame.
Pasiphae then climbed inside, and the cow was wheeled out, and placed near the bull. Pasiphae and infant Minotaur. It was common in ancient Greek art to depict children as having adult bodies, just miniaturized. But Daedalus once again came to the rescue, offering to build the labyrinth, a maze from which the creature could never escape.
This is where the well-known myth of Theseus picks up—Theseus goes to Crete as one of these youths, and unravels the maze with the help of the princess Ariadne and Daedalus. What he did, was to ask a favor of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. He wanted her to cause Pasiphae , the wife of Minos , to fall madly in love with the creature, which she did. Here enters another famous figure of mythology: Daedalus, known perhaps best from the myth of Icarus. Pasiphae persuaded this brilliant architect of the mythological world to construct a cow — covered with real cow hyde — that was believable enough to tempt the white bull.
The plan succeeded; Pasiphae climbed inside, and so was able to consummate her strange passion. The Minotaur was the result of this union. The Minotaur is the Bull of Minos. This however was not the name his mother gave him. She called him Asterion , after the stepfather of King Minos. The Minotaur began life peacefully enough, but as he left his infancy he became ferocious. King Minos sought the advice of an Oracle , and determined that he must be hidden, for two reasons.
One was his monstrous diet — he fed on humans. Naturally, such a strange story and above all such a beast has long captured the human imagination. The Minotaur often is used to express the bestial longings of man, and therefore is a powerful allegorical figure.
There are many references to the Minotaur in popular culture throughout the centuries, and into the present time. Here, the Minotaur is guarding the seventh circle of hell, the circle for those of violent natures.
An illustration by William Blake of a later period depicts the minotaur with the head and torso of a man and the body of a bull, much more like a centaur. This is by no means the only such depiction. A famous painting by the 19th-century painter George Frederick Watts shows the Minotaur in a tower, looking out to sea and watching for the ship that will bring him his gruesome feast of innocent victims.
The painting was created in the context of the social purity crusades happening at the time, and specifically of campaigns against child prostitution. It is not at all surprising that this fantastical beast mesmerized the surrealists.
For the Surrealists, too, the depiction of the Minotaur embodied social and political ideas. For the founders the artist Andre Masson and the writer Georges Bataille , the Minotaur conjured their feelings about the violence of the age. Metamorphoses, an epic poem written by Ovid in A. Banished from Athens for killing a kinsman, the inventor Daedalus plays a key role in the Minotaur myth.
He is the one who creates the cow disguise for Queen Pasiphae that results in the birth of the Minotaur, and he designs the Labyrinth to imprison the beast. After Theseus kills the Minotaur and escapes the maze, King Minos is furious. He locks Daedalus and his son Icarus in the Labyrinth, but Pasiphae secretly releases them.
To escape from Crete, Daedalus makes wings from feathers and wax so he and his son can fly to Sicily. On their way, Icarus flies too close to the sun, and the wax melts. He plunges to the sea and drowns.
The island Icaria, named for him, is where tradition says his body was washed ashore. For Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries B. Crete started to become a trading power in the Mediterranean around B. By the middle of the second millennium B. Minoans established settlements throughout the Mediterranean world along these trade routes, and they brought their culture with them. Settlements on Greek islands reveal that even urban planning was exported: Settlements were often laid out in a Minoan style.
A Greek culture based at the citadel of Mycenae, some 75 miles west of Athens, enthusiastically absorbed and copied not just the fashionable Cretan ceramics but also the Cretan language. After B. Crete began to decline as the Mycenaean Greeks started to dominate the eastern Mediterranean. Their written language, known by scholars as Linear B, was adapted from the language of the Minoans and is now known to be an early form of Greek. From to , British archaeologist Arthur Evans, working on a hunch that Mycenaean Greece was heavily influenced by Crete, excavated on the island and found a royal palace at the site of Knossos and many artifacts featuring bulls.
The name Minos does not appear to be a mythical invention. Historians now consider that Minoan power and culture reached its height around B. Decorated with frescoes funded by the trade in luxury goods, magnificent structures from this time, dedicated to religious and administrative activities, were found by Evans in his excavation of Knossos. This rite may have been practiced at sacred ceremonies and sacrifices to the gods.
A symbol of fertility in many religions, bulls were ritually killed using the double-edged ax or labrys, an emblem of royal power. As no archaeological remains of a maze have ever been found on Crete, some researchers have suggested that the term could be synonymous with the palace itself. The Labyrinth could come from this vast complex of rooms. A proposed etymology for the name comes from the word for the sacred ax, labrys, and its use in animal sacrifice.
Solving labryinths has been explored by science. The princess Ariadne helps Theseus defeat the Minotaur, but he abandongs her on the island of Naxos during the voyage back to Athens. In some versions of the story, the wine god Dionysus commands Theseus to leave her there, so that he can marry her, but in others Theseus discards Ariadne to marry her sister Phaedra.
Another theory is that the design of the mythical Labyrinth grew out of a structure that was not a maze at all, but a dance floor. Homer describes such a floor in The Iliad , on which the aristocratic youth of Crete cavorted, designed by Daedalus, the same genius who designed the Labyrinth in the myth. Perhaps, it is speculated, the mosaic evolved into the sinister maze.
To the Greeks of the sixth and fifth centuries B. It was also one that their ancestors had overcome, and the story of the Minotaur reflects that cultural belief. In the classical era, Theseus of Athens was their local hero, a prince who brought glory to Athens through his many adventures. Theseus was embraced by Athenians as a symbol of their city. Defeat of the Persian navy at Salamis in B.
During this period, representations of Theseus and the Minotaur on pottery spiked considerably. Some scholars believe that artists used the Minotaur as a symbol for a foreign enemy: Crete was the foe in the old world—as Persia was in the current one.
Theseus represents the glory of Athens as he subdues the monster to free his home from the dominion of Crete. All rights reserved.
History Magazine.
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