An odd question that occurred to me: why was it called the Minotaur? Minos had less to do with it than Pasiphae; it should have been called the Pasiphaetaur.
One of the three accounts from classical antiquity says, paraphrased: that stuff about the bull is lower-class nonsense; there was a man whose nickname was Tauros, The Bull, and that's who Pasiphae took as a lover. The child was called Minos (that is, Minos Jr.) but everyone could see that the child took after Tauros, so people took to calling the child Mino-tauros, "the Bull's Minos".
The other accounts are all properly patriarchal in attaching the presence of the bull to Minos' misconduct to Pasiphae doesn't have any agency but to do as the curse requires.
More modern interpretations think the bull is the local value of the pre-Olympian cult of Poseidon, and the bull is the god from before the earth-shaker merges with the god of the sea; what we've got is a story that was old and garbled when it got written down in antiquity.
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Date: 2019-09-13 12:00 pm (UTC)The other accounts are all properly patriarchal in attaching the presence of the bull to Minos' misconduct to Pasiphae doesn't have any agency but to do as the curse requires.
More modern interpretations think the bull is the local value of the pre-Olympian cult of Poseidon, and the bull is the god from before the earth-shaker merges with the god of the sea; what we've got is a story that was old and garbled when it got written down in antiquity.