Pasiphaë

A daughter of the Sun

Pasiphaë came from the family of Helios, the sun god, before she became queen of Crete. The ancient writer Apollodorus names Aeetes as a son of the Sun and of Perseis, and names Circe and Pasiphaë as his sisters. Minos, the king of Crete, married Pasiphaë. The historian Diodorus names their children as Deucalion, Catreus, Androgeos and Ariadne. Other accounts add Phaedra.

That family line makes Pasiphaë the aunt of Medea, the daughter of Aeetes. It also makes her the sister of Circe, another powerful woman who could transform others. It is a formidable family. Yet in the story of the Cretan bull, Pasiphaë cannot use that inherited power to escape what the god has planned for her. She has to ask a human craftsman to build her a body.

The bull and the wooden cow

The trouble began with Minos. Apollodorus says the god Poseidon made Pasiphaë desire a bull after Minos kept the bull he had promised to sacrifice. Diodorus gives the same chain of blame. Minos sacrificed a lesser animal in its place, Poseidon grew angry with him, and Pasiphaë received the desire. The act belonged to her body, but its cause lay in a bargain between two men.

The craftsman Daedalus built a hollow wooden cow on wheels and covered it with hide. He left it in the meadow where Poseidon’s bull grazed. Pasiphaë climbed inside. The cow disguised her as an animal the bull would approach. It hid the woman who had been made to carry her husband’s punishment, and it protected her only until its work was done.

The Minotaur

Pasiphaë bore a son, Asterius, whom Apollodorus calls the Minotaur. He had the face of a bull and a human body. Following the advice of oracles, messages from the gods, Minos shut him inside the Labyrinth, a maze. The work of Daedalus moved from making the birth possible to hiding its result.

Pasiphaë had no choice over the desire and no say over her child’s fate. Poseidon reached Minos through her, and Minos answered by shutting her son away. The child disappeared behind the turns of the maze. Her part ends when he is taken into a building made by the same man who made the cow.

Knossos later put that result on silver. A stater, a silver coin, struck there between 425 and 360 BC shows the Minotaur running on one side and a square Labyrinth on the other. The coin does not show Pasiphaë, yet both images depend on the child she was forced to bear. The city kept the son in view, not the mother.

The spell on Minos

Another story reverses their positions, and no one is safe in it either. Apollodorus says Pasiphaë bewitched Minos because he had affairs with many women. Whenever he slept with another woman, wild creatures came out of his body and killed her. A woman named Procris survived only by giving Minos a Circaean root, a herb named after Circe, before she went to bed with him.

So Pasiphaë could punish her husband’s behaviour, but the deaths fell on the women he pursued. As in the story of the bull, the cost passed to someone else. Nobody wins cleanly. Her grievance was aimed at Minos, but it reached other people first.

Pasiphaë helps Daedalus escape

Diodorus gives Pasiphaë one last decision. Minos threatened Daedalus for making the wooden cow, and the craftsman feared the king’s anger. Pasiphaë helped him. She provided a ship in which he left Crete with his son Icarus. A second account in the same passage has her hide Daedalus while Minos searched every boat on the island.

Apollodorus has Daedalus escape on wings. Diodorus gives him a ship and the help of Pasiphaë. In both, the craftsman gets beyond the reach of Minos. In Diodorus, the woman Daedalus once hid inside his work is the one who hides him.