The Cretan Bull : Retelling the Minotaur's Myth

What if the Minotaur didn't have to be a monster? I first wrote this reimagining of the Minotaur's story over a decade ago for the Douglas Adams Prize, and it has evolved over the years.

Statue of the Minotaur. Found in Athens. Roman copy of an early Classical statue by Myron. National Archaeological Museum of Athens.

It began on the shores of Crete, when the waves parted in a foaming mass and a bull emerged, crocus white and docile as a dove, with horns like polished olive wood. The sea god Poseidon had been feeling underappreciated, so he decided to drop king Minos of Crete a hint by sending him a Divine sacrifice. The bull strode majestically up to the royal palace and, when the king set eyes on it, he could not bring himself to kill such a wonderful beast. Surely, Poseidon would be satisfied with the finest bull from his own herds?

Minos had the white bull be penned in a special enclosure, fed on milk and sweetened grass. The great black bull from Minos’ herds was promptly sacrificed - in case Poseidon started getting impatient. As the knife cut its throat, the bull’s blood ran down its velvet black flanks and onto the temple floor like a crimson sea.

The rites and rituals complete, it was time for everyone to feast on prime steak. Poseidon had not seemed very hungry. All the gods were really interested in was the gesture; they were too satiated by nectar and ambrosia to bother with bloody haunches. So, Poseidon seemed satisfied, and the white Bull seemed content to be the only male in a herd of thousands of cows.

But Poseidon had indeed noticed Minos’s trickery. He wanted to teach him a lesson. The Sea God told his sister Aphrodite, the goddess of love, to set her troublemaking son, Eros, to work with his infatuation-inducing bow and arrows.

It took a while for Minos to notice that his young wife, Pasiphaë, had started making eyes at his new acquisition. The look on her face reminded him of when the handsome young king had burst into her apartments and swept her off to be his queen, many years ago.

The Bull played it cool, he didn’t usually have to chase females. They came to him.

At night Pasiphaë lay dreaming of the Bull’s glossy white flanks, rippling in the sunlight as the beast walked. She pictured the horns that spanned a shield’s breadth and could have pierced armour. Minos tried not to admit the reason for his wife’s sudden new pet name for him. He tried not to notice how Pasiphaë languished at the gate of the Bull’s enclosure, watching with longing as he chewed nonchalantly on his fodder. Or the way she gasped quietly when she saw him mount one of the eager black cows. That year the herd nearly tripled in size.

Minos himself was the son of Zeus and the beautiful Europa, whom Zeus had abducted in bull-form and swum across the Aegean Sea to Crete. A penchant for animals was a fatal flaw of the women in Minos’s family.

Eventually Pasiphaë went to Daedalus, the chief craftsman, and had him build her a hollow wooden model of a cow. She had it placed in the centre of the enclosed field, and shut herself inside, to all intents and purposes a sprightly young heifer ready to mate. She even made a few provocative mooing sounds in the hope that might entice the white Bull closer.

Poseidon’s Bull took his time. He knew by now that he was something special, and having had the run of a thousand cows, he was in no particular hurry to investigate the new arrival. He eventually sauntered closer, tossing his head excessively at the gathering flies to display his great muscular neck and shining horns. But the cow did not go weak at the knees as he had expected. She stood stock still, apparently far more interested in the farmhouse in the distance than the beefcake approaching her.

This piqued his interest. This wasn’t what usually happened.

He walked closer purposefully, expecting the cow to skip coquettishly away or at least turn her head. But she did neither. This was more than he could stand. The Bull bellowed in frustration, the sound rolling over the olive groves like an army’s battle cries. Then the cow made a strange sound, somewhat like a ‘come hither’ moo but also like a pigeon. Was she mocking him?

This was where his manners ended. A lesser bull might have found the mixed signals intimidating, but he galloped towards her, snorting with indignance. Without any further posturing he got down to business.

Pasiphaë had failed to consider the logistics of inter-special relations and she found the reality quite a shock. When he had dismounted and wandered off for a post-coital cud-chew, she extricated herself from the wooden cow and - with no small difficulty - walked back to the palace. She was overwhelmed with regret at giving in to her desires: it had been a most mad lust.

She soon became pregnant. The thought that the secret of her illicit encounter would be known terrified her. The offspring of such a union could hardly pass for that of Minos.

In due course Pasiphaë gave birth, with pains that rent her nearly in two. The child was not endearing by any standards: a small hairy boy with a calf’s head. His only redeeming feature was that he had his mother’s wide blue eyes. She could not bear to see him. He reminded her of her guilt and disgust, as well as the longing she'd had for that virile white animal. The boy was named Asterion, ‘the starry one’, but crueller voices at court called him the Minotaur: the Bull of Minos.

Pasiphaë nursing the infant Minotaur, red-figure kylix from Etruscan Vulci, 4th century BCE

The king could not kill his wife’s son and the son of Poseidon’s Bull though. So, he had Daedalus build a great labyrinth below the palace: a deep, twisting, inescapable maze. He plunged the bull-boy into the darkness, hiding his shame as deep as was humanly possible.

The Minotaur might have grown up to become a brutish cannibal that fed on the blood of young, unfortunate innocents. He might have stayed in the black depths of the maze for the rest of his life, awaiting the arrival of some intrepid hero looking for a spot of glory.

The story could have gone that way.

There was another possibility.

Pasiphaë found herself making excuses to tour the palace basement multiple times a day. Every time she came to the Labyrinth door, she pressed her face to the grating, hoping for a glimpse of her Minotaur.

He grew to become a strapping young man-beast - thanks to his divine heritage and his high-protein diet of chicken carcasses. He had the beauty of his father, with shining horns, hide as white as milk, and was taller than any man and muscled like a Titan. He also had his mother’s stunning blue eyes, which would have melted a gaggle of teenage girls. The Minotaur could not talk, but he came striding to the door whenever she called. He let her to stroke his velvety nose with a finger pressed through the bars, breathing slowly and staring at her with his cornflower-blue eyes.

Minos was not pleased about his wife visiting the creature in the bowels of the palace. He began to feel neglected - jealous of the Minotaur. Every time he passed the white Bull’s enclosure, he felt that the animal looked at him with supreme contempt. This was more than Minos’s pride could bear. He, the king of Crete, son of Zeus, felt threatened by a walking T-bone steak. He decided not to do anything though: upsetting either Poseidon or his clearly unhinged wife couldn’t end well.

It would pass, it had to.

Minos was right to feel threatened. Pasiphaë could not forget her bull lover or her son, kept always in the dark. She began to pick out flaws in her husband that she could not believe she had overlooked. His hair was greying and lustreless; he drank far too much wine; and it had been a very long time since he had visited the gymnasium. She despaired, though. The Bull only knew her as another cow in the field, another heifer in the herd. Would he ever want her as a woman? Or would there forever be a hollow wooden cow lacking in the relationship?

The Bull had indeed noticed the beautiful young woman who watched him. Every time she was near, the wind brought a familiar smell; it reminded him of that young cow, the one who had ignored him. The herdsmen were very dismayed when the Bull lost his interest in the cows. Every time Pasiphaë went near the Bull, she was death-stared by hundreds of jealous heifers.

She didn't care though. Pasiphaë would walk with the Bull in the dusty summer sun, her arms laced around his neck, hanging garlands of pale cornflowers from his horns. She would lie against him in the golden hay fields, dreaming of what might be. Minos didn’t admit to inquisitive visitors that the reason for his wife’s ‘enthusiasm for agriculture’ was that she was having a clandestine affair with his prime bull.

 Gustave Moreau, 'Europa and the Bull' (1869)

Things might have continued thus: Pasiphaë and her white-flanked lover; Minos turning a blind eye; the bull-man deep in the maze. Until a young Athenian hero came to wreak bloody revenge.

That could have been what happened. 

Instead, one day, Pasiphaë came down to the Labyrinth from the sun-drenched fields. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, a feeling struck her like a thunderbolt from Zeus. She could no longer bear it: the magnificent free beast and her boy, Asterion, in the dark maze. Pasiphaë could not see him trapped any longer.

She flung herself at the door and wrestled with the vast bronze bolts holding it. She entered the Labyrinth, calling for her bull-boy. Asterion came jogging out of the blackness and stopped when he saw his mother standing before the open door. He had grown over the past few months, now seven feet of sinewy muscle. The white sheen of his fur glowed in the torch light, his blue eyes glinting like cut sapphires. There was no time to waste. Pasiphaë sprinted up through the palace, calling her son after her.

They ran out into the sunlight, Asterion stunned for a moment as his eyes felt the sun for the first time. They ran to the gate of the bull’s enclosure. Pasiphaë called to her bull-lover, who galloped towards her, head held high and snorting vigorously. He did not usually have much to do with the calf-rearing end of matters, but the strange beast with Pasiphaë was familiar to him. The blue eyes transfixed him, just as hers did. The smell was familiar. Asterion knew his father, whom his mother had told him so much about.

He wrenched open the gate and they all ran together - out of the palace grounds, out in the sunshine, out onto the seashore where the waves crashed and billowed to the piercing cries of gulls.

Poseidon’s Bull, his lover and their child: away from gates and mazes and monsters; free as the Sea-God’s swirling waters around them.

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Read more about the Minotaur in an excerpt from my recent book, 'Enchanted Creatures', at LitHub.

or check out my exploration of the myth in The Minotaur on the Couch at Cosi's Odyssey. For another retelling, check out 'The Gorgon's Head'.

Do check out my latest book, Enchanted Creatures: Our Monsters and their Meanings as well as my other writing.

Minotaur Myth Retelling -- Copyright Natalie Lawrence 2026