Minotaur

Greek Minōtauros combined Minōs (the name of Crete's king, possibly derived from an older Minoan word) and tauros (bull). The Minotaur's origin myth was grotesque: Poseidon sent a magnificent white bull to Minos for sacrifice; Minos kept it for himself; Poseidon punished him by inflicting Pasiphae (the queen) with desire for the bull. The offspring was the Minotaur: human body, bull's head, living in the labyrinth that Daedalus built beneath Knossos.

Minos demanded tribute from Athens every nine years: fourteen young men and women were sent to Crete and fed to the Minotaur. The Athenian hero Theseus volunteered as one of the tribute victims, entered the labyrinth with a ball of thread (clew) from Minos's daughter Ariadne, killed the Minotaur, and followed the thread out. The myth gave English the word 'clue' (from clew — a ball of thread that leads you out).

Arthur Evans's excavations at Knossos (1900–1935) found a Bronze Age palace of extraordinary complexity, with frescoes showing bull-leaping ceremonies. Some scholars argue that the Minotaur myth preserved memory of Minoan bull-cult: the complex Knossos palace became the labyrinth, the bull-worship became the monster. Archaeology and mythology found each other in Crete.

The Minotaur recurs in modern art and literature as a figure of the monstrous self — the part of the human that is animal, trapped in the maze of its own nature. Picasso's Minotaur series (1933–1934), Jorge Luis Borges's The House of Asterion, Dürrenmatt's The Labyrinth: the bull-headed creature keeps returning because the labyrinth is always interior.