Pasiphaë

The hiding place Daedalus builds

Pasiphaë climbs inside a wooden cow. Daedalus has built the hollow body on wheels, covered it with hide and left it in the meadow where Poseidon’s bull grazes. The device makes her look like an animal the bull will approach, hiding the person made to carry her husband’s punishment. No disguise protects her once it has done its work.

Apollodorus says Poseidon causes the desire after Minos keeps the bull he had promised to sacrifice. Diodorus gives the same chain of blame: Minos substitutes an inferior animal, the god becomes angry with him and Pasiphaë receives the compulsion. The act belongs to her body. Its cause lies in a bargain between two men.

The daughter of the Sun

Pasiphaë belongs to the family of Helios before she becomes queen of Crete. Apollodorus identifies Aeetes as a son of the Sun and Perseis, then names Circe and Pasiphaë as his sisters. Minos marries her. Diodorus names their children as Deucalion, Catreus, Androgeos and Ariadne, while other accounts add Phaedra.

That genealogy makes Pasiphaë the aunt of Medea and the sister of another powerful woman of transformation, Circe. The family is formidable. Yet the Cretan bull story does not let her use inherited power to avoid the god’s design. She has to ask a mortal craftsman for a constructed body.

What happens to the child

Pasiphaë bears Asterius, whom Apollodorus calls the Minotaur. He has a bull’s face and a human body. Minos confines him in the Labyrinth in obedience to oracles, and Daedalus’s work moves from enabling the conception to hiding its result.

The sequence gives Pasiphaë no choice over the desire and no authority over the child’s fate. Poseidon reaches Minos through her; Minos answers by placing her son in an enclosure. He disappears behind its turns. Pasiphaë’s part ends at the moment her child is taken into the structure built by the same man who made the cow.

Knossos later put that consequence on silver. A stater struck between 425 and 360 BC shows the Minotaur running on one face and a square Labyrinth on the other. The coin does not show Pasiphaë, but both images depend on what she is forced to bear. The city keeps the son, not the mother, in view.

The spell placed on Minos

Another account reverses their positions without making anyone safe. Apollodorus says Pasiphaë bewitches Minos because he has affairs with many women. Whenever he sleeps with another woman, wild creatures leave his body and kill her. Procris survives only by giving Minos a Circaean root before she shares his bed.

Pasiphaë can therefore punish her husband’s conduct, but the deaths fall on the women he pursues. The pattern resembles the bull story in its transfer of cost. There is no clean victory in it. A grievance aimed at Minos reaches other bodies first.

How Pasiphaë answers Minos

Diodorus gives Pasiphaë one final decision. When Minos threatens Daedalus for making the wooden cow, the craftsman fears the king’s anger. Pasiphaë assists him and supplies a vessel in which he leaves Crete with Icarus. A second account in the same passage has her hide Daedalus while Minos searches every boat on the island.

Apollodorus gives the escape wings; Diodorus gives it a ship and Pasiphaë’s intervention. Both remove the craftsman from Minos’s reach. In Diodorus, the woman Daedalus once concealed inside his work is the person who conceals him.