The Minotaur in House of Leaves The Minotaur in House of Leaves The Minotaur or Minotauros was the son born of lust to Queen Pasiphae of Crete and a bull. He had the body of a man and the head of a bull and was more beast than human. The creature was banished by King Minos to reside in the centre of a labyrinth in Knossos built by the ingenious architect Daedalus and his son Icarus. The Minotaur was nursed by Queen Pasiphae as a child but grew to devour humans, so he was safely put away in the maze contrived so carefully and trickily that
Daedalus Minos kept it for himself; and in revenge, Poseidon, with the help of Aphrodite, made Pasiphaë, King Minos's wife, lust for the bull. For Pasiphaë, as Greek mythologers interpreted it, Daedalus also built a wooden cow so she could mate with the bull, for the Greeks imagined the Minoan bull of the sun to be an actual, earthly bull, the slaying of which later required a heroic effort by Theseus. This story thus encourages others to consider the long-term consequences of their own inventions with great care, lest those inventions do more harm than good. As in the tale of