name “Minotaur” summons the image of a man with the head of a bull, a raging hybrid that often serves as a generic stock creature in games and films. If this is all you know, however, then you don’t truly know the Minotaur.
To understand this creature, sometimes known as Asterion or Asterius, we must confront him where he lives: within the labyrinth of mythology, history, and the human psyche.
Before we go further, let’s remember the basic myth of the Minotaur, as presented in Hellenistic tradition and works such as Ovid’s “The Metamorphoses.”
Once, on the isle of Crete, a king by the name of Minos sought to secure his rule. He prayed to Poseidon for a sacrificial beast he might offer up. But when the sea god sent forth a white bull from the frothing surf, Minos found it too beautiful to sacrifice. Instead, he sacrificed mortal bulls and incurred Poseidon’s wrath.
The sea god bewitched Minos’ wife Pasiphae to fall in love with the Cretan Bull, and she soon gave birth to a monstrous hybrid: the Bull of Minos or the Minotaur.
In A. S. Kline’s translation of “The Metamorphoses,” Ovid describes the Minotaur as a “strange hybrid creature.” And the creature was strange — a “twin form of bull and man” that emerged out of divine wrath and unnatural love. It embodied both shame and sacredness. Minos could only hope to hide – but not kill – the terrifying creature.
Thus, Minos employed the master craftsman Daedalus to construct the labyrinth: a tortuous maze that was practically impossible to leave. Here he housed the bellowing Minotaur and fed it the blood of prisoners sent to Crete as a tribute by other nations.
Yet all monsters meet their slayer in the end. The Athenian hero Theseus took the place of a tribute sent to Crete, but he befriended Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos.
She gave him a ball of string to unwind behind him and details on the twists and turns that would lead him to the strange beast at the labyrinth’s heart. There, he slew the Minotaur and followed the string back to the surface.
That’s the gist. Myths, however, emerge from long traditions of multiple tellings. Like the labyrinth itself, the origin of any given myth becomes a twisting, tangled maze that defies an easy solution.
Just when we think we’ve emerged from its trappings, we find ourselves – in the words of Ovid – lost to the “windings of alternating paths.”
The story of the Minotaur is intrinsically tied to Crete and the Bronze Age Minoan civilization that thrived there. The early 20th-century British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans actually coined the term “Minoan civilization” as a reference to the mythical King Minos. As such, the myth continues to haunt our modern thoughts of these ancient peoples.
You might assume the Greeks believed Crete to be an evil land, full of brutal kings and profane monsters, but this doesn’t seem to be the whole story.
According to Nicoletta Momigliano, professor of Aegean Studies at the University of Bristol and author of the forthcoming book “In Search of the Labyrinth: The Cultural Legacy of Minoan Crete,” Greek attitudes toward Crete were rather ambivalent.
In reality, Momigliano writes, the exact nature of the Minoan rule is much debated – and the political system likely changed over the two-millennia long Minoan Age.
Scholarly interpretations include both royal rule and a gender-balanced elite class that might be compared to a council or corporation. King Minos, however, isn’t the only element of myth largely missing from the discernible history of Crete. The labyrinth is, too.
“There is no building in Minoan Crete that can be described as a complicated maze (i.e., a complicated system of paths or hedges designed as a puzzle through which one has to find a way),” Momigliano writes. “But the ruins of Minoan palaces, especially the largest one, Knossos, can have a labyrinthine appearance.”
Minotaur is a collision of the human and the bestial – a perfect symbol of the oft-pondered dual nature of man. He is both victim and tormentor. He is the punisher and yet a punishment himself, imprisoned in what Joseph Campbell dubbed as Minos’ “house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from him his monster.”
