Minotaur

Friday, April 1st, 2016

In Greek mythology, the Minotaur had the body of a man but the head of a bull. The name Minotaur simply means Minos’s Bull, because the beast lived in the labyrinth of King Minos of Crete — but the beast had a proper name:

In Crete, the Minotaur was known by its proper name, Asterion, a name shared with Minos’ foster-father.

I don’t remember this part of the story from any of the mythology books I got out of the school library:

After he ascended the throne of the island of Crete, Minos competed with his brothers to rule. Minos prayed to Poseidon, the sea god, to send him a snow-white bull, as a sign of support (the Cretan Bull). He was to kill the bull to show honor to the deity, but decided to keep it instead because of its beauty. He thought Poseidon would not care if he kept the white bull and sacrificed one of his own. To punish Minos, Poseidon made Pasiphaë, Minos’s wife, fall deeply in love with the bull. Pasiphaë had craftsman Daedalus make a hollow wooden cow, and climbed inside it in order to mate with the white bull. The offspring was the monstrous Minotaur. Pasiphaë nursed him, but he grew and became ferocious, being the unnatural offspring of a woman and a beast; he had no natural source of nourishment and thus devoured humans for sustenance. Minos, after getting advice from the oracle at Delphi, had Daedalus construct a gigantic labyrinth to hold the Minotaur. Its location was near Minos’s palace in Knossos.

Comments

  1. Bill says:

    I’m not surprised that this version of the story didn’t get into any of the “children’s” books they provided on the Greek Myths when I was a kid, like Hercules and Other Tales from Greek Myths.

    However, the elementary school I went to was converted from a junior high school and had a library with many late 19th century books written for grown-ups. I read all of those versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey and other books on the Greeks. But in that era, the reading public would have been scandalized by such a tale.

    So I didn’t get to read it in those books, either.

  2. John says:

    The moral or the story is that everything of beauty has to end.

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