Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Minos prayed to Poseidon to send a bull from the sea as a sign that the gods favored his claim to the Cretan kingship, promising to sacrifice it. Poseidon sent a magnificent bull; Minos, coveting it, sacrificed another in its place and kept Poseidon’s beast among his herds. In anger Poseidon made the bull savage and caused Pasiphaë, Minos’s wife (daughter of Helios), to conceive a monstrous desire for it. She confided in Daedalus, the Athenian craftsman then in Crete. Daedalus built a hollow wooden cow on wheels, covered it with hide, and set it in the meadow; Pasiphaë entered it, and the bull mounted the decoy. She bore Asterius—called the Minotaur—a being with the body of a man and the head of a bull. Minos, shamed, ordered Daedalus to build the Labyrinth, an inescapable maze, and shut the Minotaur inside; thereafter Athens paid the tribute of youths and maidens that Theseus would end. Pasiphaë’s passion is thus the hinge between Poseidon’s offended sea-sign, Daedalus’s techne, and the Labyrinth’s horror—Cretan royal sin made flesh.