by Tim Harry

Created on: March 07, 2008

The legends of Ancient Greece are filled with stories of heroes and villains, of gods and mythical creatures. Alongside the centaurs, the Minotaur is the most recognised of those creatures. This though is in spite of the fact that the half-bull half-man appears in only one story line, though that line does overlap with the stories of Theseus and Daedalus.

The story of the Minotaur starts with King Minos of Crete. Before becoming king, Minos was in an argument with his brothers about who was to be the next ruler. To aid his case, Minos claimed the backing of the gods. Praying to Poseidon, Minos was rewarded as the god of the sea sent a sign of his approval. This sign took the form of the Cretan Bull, a snow-white animal, which Minos was to sacrifice to Poseidon as a sign of Minos' fealty. Minos though so admired the Bull, that he sacrificed another animal in its place, either in the belief that Poseidon wouldn't notice or wouldn't mind.

This belief was of course badly mistaken. In revenge, Poseidon transposed Minos' love of the Cretan Bull onto his wife. Minos' wife, Pasiphae, was cursed to fall in physical love with the bull. Pasiphae had no option other than to give into her unnatural urges, Pasiphae asked Daedalus, the legendary inventor and artisan, to assist her.

Daedalus designed and constructed a hollow wooden cow on wheels. Pasiphae entered it, and the wooden cow was wheeled out the meadow where the Cretan Bull grazed. Suffice to say copulation occurred. After the allotted time Pasiphae gave birth to a son who was called Asterion. Asterion means ruler of the stars' a name attributed to the newborns grandfather. The son though was no ordinary boy, born as he was with a male body but the head and tail of a bull.

In his early years, Asterion was treated as any normal boy, even being nursed by his mother. As time passed Asterion grew and became more ferocious, terrorising the Cretans. It was at this time that Asterion became known as the Minotaur, Minotaur meaning Bull of Minos'. Minos, following the advice of the Oracle of Delphi, instructed Daedalus to design a gigantic labyrinth to imprison his son in. The Labyrinth at Knossos, was the most complex ever built, an infinite number of passages would cross over each other, whilst there seemed to be no start or end to the maze. It was said that it was so complicated that even Daedalus had trouble getting out of it after he had constructed it.

Thus it was that Asterion spent his delinquent years alone within

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