Free Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters by Matt Kaplan Page A

greedy. After becoming king, he decided he liked the bull so much that he kept it as a pet rather than sacrifice it. This angered Poseidon, who “devised that Pasiphaë [Minos’s wife] should develop a lust for it [the bull]. In her passion for the bull she took on as her accomplice a genius architect named Daidalos… . He built a wooden cow on wheels, . . . skinned a real cow, and sewed the contraption into the skin, and then, after placing Pasiphaë inside, set it in a meadow where the bull normally grazed.” Minos’s wife wound up getting pregnant by the bull. 26 Nine months later, when she gave birth, the result was the Minotaur.
    Minos’s wife nursed the monster during its early years until the beast started eating people in the household. Minos was understandably concerned, but since he had already wronged the gods by keeping the white bull as a pet, he was not eager to anger the gods again. The ever-helpful Oracle at Delphi confirmed that his instincts were correct and that he would indeed be in serious trouble if he plotted the death of the Minotaur. This left Minos in a bind. He could not kill the beast, but letting it roam the palace where it could eat everyone was out of the question. To solve his problem, Minos had Daidalos build a maze underneath the palace where the Minotaur could effectively be imprisoned.
    Minotaur. Greek, Attic bilingual eye-cup. c. 515 BCE. Art Resource, NY.
    With the Minotaur stuck in the labyrinth, one might think the story of the monster safely concluded, but the beast continued to cause trouble. The Greek poet Callimachus described it making “cruel bellowing” from its labyrinthian jail, and so to keep the monster calm, Minos arranged to have it fed foreigners on a regular basis. Dozens of hapless people met their fate in the maze, but eventually Minos made the mistake of sending the Athenian hero Theseus inside. Using a ball of string given to him by Minos’s love-struck daughter Ariadne to leave a trail behind him, Theseus killed the Minotaur and escaped the maze.
    The idea of a Minotaur is firmly in the realm of fantasy and myth. There are no animals alive today or found in the fossil record that combine the traits of humans and bulls in any way. Moreover, even if such a creature did exist, the biology would not work. Unlike, say, humans and bears, which have teeth and digestive systems that can manage both plants and meat, bulls are obligate plant eaters and cannot chew or process meat. Since there are no fossil mammals that suggest the merging of a bull and human skeleton, it is more likely that the concept for a beast that was half man and half bull stemmed from Greek interpretation of the culture found on Crete between 3000 and 1100 BC.
    The people of ancient Crete, the Minoans, were ahead of their time. Women are depicted in paintings as having been leaders. The cities had intricate plumbing systems. Tools of war are almost entirely unseen in the archaeological record. Paintings of dolphins and bullsabound with art revealing Minoans engaging in games with bulls, grabbing them by the horns, and vaulting off of bulls’ backs. They are somewhat reminiscent of Spanish bullfights except that no works of art have yet been found showing a Minoan attacking or slaying a bull. Archaeologists speculate that Minoans were engaging bulls for sport and that the art depicts a favorite activity of the culture.
    By the time the Greeks emerged as a strong and healthy civilization, the Minoan world had effectively collapsed. The reasons for the collapse are debated. Some suggest that invaders with iron weapons overwhelmed them while others posit that a tsunami or severe earthquake wiped out the society. Regardless of the cause, it is possible that the mythmaking Greeks heard stories, passed along by word of mouth, of a people on Crete “who were one” with bulls. Some artwork showing humans and bulls grappling may have further inspired the idea of a half-man, half-bull monster.
    But