Episode 131A – Oracles and Omens – Myths Your Teacher Hated

Episode 131A Show Notes

Source: Greek Mythology

This week on MYTH, we’re heading to ancient Greece to meet one of its most famous (or perhaps infamous) heroes – Theseus. You’ll discover what ancient paternity tests looked like, how to kill someone with a bed, and why not all heroes are good guys. Then, in Gods and Monsters, we’re traveling back in time for the origin story of Theseus’ greatest foe and the inventor of its prison. This is the Myths Your Teacher Hated podcast, where I tell the stories of cultures from around the world in all of their original, bloody, uncensored glory. Modern tellings of these stories have become dry and dusty, but I’ll be trying to breathe new life into them. This is Episode 131A, “Oracles and Omens”. As always, this episode is not safe for work.
It’s been a while since we’ve visited the Greeks (I think we all needed a break after the epic tale of Odysseus), so it’s about time to head back to the islands for one of the most famous heroes of Greek mythology. I use ‘hero’ very loosely here because Theseus, the main character of this story, is an asshole. But we’ll get to that. The most complete accounting of the life and times of Theseus come from Plutarch’s Life of Theseus, which in turn draws on many older sources (many of those lost to time), so that’s the one I’ll be using. He is generally considered to be a contemporary of Heracles, which sets him in the generation that took part in the search for the golden fleece and a generation before the Trojan War. It is unclear if the mythical man is based off a real historical figure who lived during the Late Bronze Age (which collapsed between 1200 and 1150 BC) or possibly someone living as recently as the 8th or 9th century BC.
Our story begins in the halls of Aegeus, king of Athens who, despite having been married twice, had no heir to his throne. This was especially distressing for someone who traced his lineage all the way back to Erechtheus I, who founded Athens itself. As many of the great and powerful did when confronted with a seemingly unsolvable problem, Aegeus sought the counsel of the Oracle at Delphi. Also known as the Pythia, she was the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at – you guessed it – Delphi and was widely known for her prophecies from the Sun God. These words were always true but usually cryptic and hard to interpret until too late.
So it was with old King Aegeus. “Loosen not the bulging mouth of your wineskin until you have reached the height of Athens lest you die of grief.” As far as answers to the question of how to get himself a son go, this was less than clear advice. Puzzling on the words as he walked away, Aegeus sought the counsel of his friend Pittheus who was king of the much smaller city-state of Troezen that lay nearby. Pittheus was renowned as a wise and learned man, so Aegeus figured that if anyone could help him figure this bullshit answer out, it was he.
“That is a very confusing piece of advice, my fellow king, but then the will of the gods has ever been opaque to mere mortals. Let me think on it a bit. While you wait, why not have some of my finest wine?” Aegeus wasn’t one to turn down free booze (especially top shelf wine), so he proceeded to get sloppy drunk. Pittheus then introduced the wine-horny man to his young, beautiful, and very single daughter Aethra. And yeah, this is going exactly where you think it is. The story doesn’t say if Aethra got a little drunk to help her through this ordeal or if Aegeus had that silver fox thing going on, but either way they fucked.
As we shall see in time, this was a huge fucking mistake. Plutarch isn’t sure whether Pittheus screwed the pooch on his interpretation of the Oracle’s words or if he correctly understood them and decided to fuck everyone over for his own schemes. See, the wineskin in this metaphor is Aegeus’ balls. He wasn’t supposed to whip his dick out and get all freaky deaky with any ladies until he got back to Athens, which is exactly the opposite of what he just did. Things never turn out well when you thwart the will of the gods, accident or no.
In some versions of the story, this is less of a drunken tryst than a secret wedding, but the outcome is the same either way. Aegeus woke up in the morning (or some months later) and decided to slip back to Athens alone. He didn’t need a third wife, just a son and heir, so he left behind a gift for his potential future child, though he left it in the form of a test. Aegeus took his sandals and his sword and hid them inside a hollow under a massive boulder that was just barely big enough for them.
“Aethra, you’re the only one who knows about these royal tokens hidden beneath that rock. Last night was awesome, really, and I have a sneaking suspicion I might have gotten you a little bit pregnant. If I did and it turns out to be the son I’m hoping for, then I need you to send him to me with all the secrecy you can muster. Seriously, tell fucking no one. My brother Pallas covets the throne and the Pallantidai, his fifty sons, would gladly murder any son of mine to ensure the crown passes to their hands. I will know that he is my heir by the sword and sandals I have left for him. When he is old enough and strong enough to roll this boulder aside and take them, he is ready to seek me out.” And then he left.
In due time, it turned out that Pittheus’ daughter did indeed get pregnant from their dalliance. In the version of the story from Plutarch, Aethra hid the true parentage of her unborn child by claiming that Poseidon (who was especially beloved by the Troezenians and acts as their patron god) was the child’s true father. This is a bald-faced lie meant to keep her and her child safe from assassin’s blades in the dark. In another version of the tale, Aethra had her own secret from that night. The goddess Athena came to her in a dream that very night after the sexy times were done and gave her some very specific and very strange instructions. Waking, Aethra slipped out from Aegeus’ arms and headed down to the beach. Wading through the shallow waters of the sea, she came to Sferia Island which lay just off the coast. Pouring out an offering of wine to Poseidon, she was only a little surprised to see the god of the oceans himself rise up out of the waters. For the second time that night, Aethra had wild, unbridled sex with a man she’d just met (though this one was a literal god). As it so often does, god semen had magical pregnancy powers and it managed to mix with the more mundane semen of Aegeus, making her unborn child a mix of mortal and divine. This was actually a fairly common trope in mythological heroes to account for both mortal and divine parentage.
Whichever version you prefer, Aethra did indeed give birth to a son, who she named Theseus. In some versions, she chose this name based on the royal tokens left by his father. In others, he had a different name as a child (lost to history) and was renamed Theseus later in life. For simplicity, we’re just going to call him Theseus. Pittheus knew good and well who the child’s father (or maybe fathers) was, so he took it upon himself to raise the child to be ready for his eventual kingship in Athens. He hired a tutor named Connidas to watch over the boy and to teach him everything he needed to know.
Time passed and the boy slowly grew into a young man. Unsurprisingly given his (maybe) divine heritage, Theseus turned out to have great physical strength and speed but he was also quite brave and exceptionally clever. Believing that the time had come, Aethra took her son to the stone where Aegeus had hidden his royal sigils all those years ago and told him to move it aside. With even more ease than his father had moved it in the first place, Theseus shoved it aside. As he looked at the finely made sword and sandals stamped with a strange sigil, Aethra told her son who his mortal father truly was and passed on the message that had been left for him.
Theseus nodded slowly as he took it all in. “Very well, mother. Thank you for finally telling me the truth. I shall leave at once for Athens and present myself to my kingly father.” “I am so proud of you, my son. We can head to the docks and see when the next ship is sailing for Attica (the peninsula on the Aegean Sea where Athens stands).” Theseus shook his head. “The sea road is the coward’s road. I will walk to Athens.” His mother was aghast at this bold declaration. She tried her best to convince him to take a boat since it would be a much faster and safer journey for him, but Theseus refused to be dissuaded.
The roads between the various independent city-states of Greece at that time were dangerous, lawless things. No king claimed them so no soldiers kept them free from thieves and murderers, of which there were plenty. The time of Theseus produced an extremely high number of young men of heroic potential, strong of arm, swift of foot, and incapable of fatigue, but most of these men were too cruel and selfish to make good use of their gifts. Instead, they used their skill and power to commit all manner of heinous crimes on anyone unlucky enough to wander into their clutches. It was a world of might makes right and most common travelers knew they were not mighty enough to make the journey safely. They traveled by sea when they could and in large, armed groups when they could not.
Not too long before, great Heracles himself had passed through this part of the world and scoured the land before him of all manner of criminals and evil doers. As we saw back in Episode 72X, the mighty hero had slain his friend Iphitus and abandoned heroing to become a slave to Queen Omphale in Lydia as punishment. With Heracles out of commission, wickedness crept back into the world and flourished. Theseus had grown up hearing the tales of the mighty hero Heracles and longed to prove himself every bit as strong and valiant as his idol, so he was dead set on scouring his own path through the most dangerous parts of Greece on his way to Athens, no matter how much it might worry his mother and grandfather.
In an attempt to persuade Theseus to give up his bullheaded, arrogant insistence of turning his trip into a quest, Pittheus told him in great detail about the various infamous robbers and murderers who lay in wait along the road around the Saronic Gulf. He told of their vicious strength and their gleeful cruelty, each of them having a different, unique form of torture they preferred to employ. This only served to make the young Theseus even more determined to prove himself equal to Heracles. The fact that he was the hero’s cousin (his grandfather’s sister was Heracles’ grandmother) only served to make him all the more insistent on this incredibly dangerous path. It would ruin his great entrance into Athens if he couldn’t provide any evidence of the greatness of his noble birth through heroic deeds. Thus he set out along the road, his mother’s fears be damned.
Full of high-minded ideas of serving justice and doing good to any innocent in need, Theseus set out. He would not strike the first blow to anyone, but he would deal the finishing blow to any cruel enough to offer violence to an innocent traveler. This is an ideal he would give up later in life, but he’s young and idealistic at the moment. By staggering coincidence (or, more likely, some twist of fate), the road to Athens took him past six different entrances to the Underworld and if this sounds like the beginning of a series of dungeons in an epic RPG, you’re not wrong.
After an unknown time of uneventful travel, Theseus came to Epidaurus, a place sacred to Apollo and the legendary healer Asclepius. There lurked the cruel murderer Periphetes, demigod son of Hephaestus. He clearly had none of his divine father’s cleverness since his preferred method of violence was to rush out with a blood-curdling scream and beat his victims into the earth like human nails, bashing out their brains with a massive iron club.
Prepared for this ambush by Pittheus’ warnings, Theseus fought back with all the cunning, strength, and skill a demigod trained by a royal tutor could bring to bear. Which, it turns out, is a lot. The story doesn’t say what weapon he used to fight Periphetes, be it his father’s sword, a staff, or his bare fists, but he prevailed. Taking his foe’s enormous club from nerveless fingers, Theseus bashed Periphetes’ own head to a red ruin, ending his reign of terror. Deciding that he liked the way the club felt in his hands, Theseus claimed the iron-bound weapon as his own signature weapon. Many vases show Theseus with said club in his hands by way of identifying him to the viewer. This was a nod (perhaps deliberate perhaps subconscious) to the story of his old pal Heracles taking the skin of the Nemean lion as his own signature trophy from his own first adventure.
He traveled on without incident until he reached the Isthmus of Corinth (which connects the Peloponnese to the rest of mainland Greece) and the second Underworld entrance. This was the territory of a robber known as Sinnis, nicknamed Pityokamptes which translates to ‘he who bends pine trees’. It’s not exactly terrifying as brutal nicknames go but it was very descriptive, which was terrifying enough once you heard the stories of his grisly execution style.
See, Sinnis liked to capture his victims and then force them to help him bend down the tall pine trees of the forest. Once they had enough thus bent and bound, he would tie his victims down between the trees, screaming and pleading for mercy. Then, he would cut the ropes so that the trees sprang back, ripping the innocent people into twitching pieces. In some versions, he would instead force them to bend the trees as before but tie them off to only one. He would then release them without warning, flinging his victims through the air to be whipped around and splattered to the ground, broken, bloody, and dying. Either way, not a pleasant guy.
Like before, Theseus was prepared for this gruesome serial killer and, with his new murder club in hand, was able to beat Sinnis into submission. Theseus had a cruel streak of dramatic irony, so he didn’t just bludgeon the man to death. Instead, he used his great strength to bend down his own pine trees, tied Sinnis to them, and then tore him apart the way he had murdered so many travelers. Good riddance to bad rubbish and though a tad excessive on Theseus’ part, not overly so.
But I said Theseus was an asshole, and we’re about to see an example of that. The now-dead Sinnis had a daughter who was as beautiful as her father was evil. It’s unclear what her stance on her father’s deeds was but, living out in the wilds, it wasn’t like she had anywhere else she could go without being raped and murdered. Her father might have been an evil monster, but he did offer her protection. With Sinnis dead, Perigune justifiably feared for her life and fled.
The story gives no indication whatsoever that she had any part at all in the murders. Theseus didn’t give a shit and pursued her across the isthmus. She ran as far as she possibly could, but Theseus was better trained and had divine blood, so he caught up slowly but surely. At last, she came to a dense thicket of shrubs, brushwood, and sharp asparagus thorns. If she could make her way inside, even mighty Theseus would never find her but she could find no way through the impenetrable thorns. Desperate, she dropped to her knees in what Plutarch describes as an innocent, childlike manner and begged the foliage to make way for her and shelter her. She vowed that, if they spared her from her pursuer, she would make sure they were never cut down or burned.
Theseus caught up to her as she prayed for deliverance. Assuring the beautiful young woman that he was not there to kill her, he instead forced her to the ground and raped her. It wouldn’t do for a hero to be a virgin and he considered Perigune to essentially be his prize for slaughtering her father. Sinnis had deserved his death, but Perigune very definitely didn’t deserve her fate. As so often happens, this sexual assault left the poor young woman pregnant. Long after Theseus had abandoned her to continue on his quest, Perigune gave birth to a son named Melanippus.
Theseus never knew any of this because, having slaked his sexual appetite, he moved on towards Athens. Soon enough, he came to Megara where he heard tale of a terrible wild boar in Crommyon. It was known, unimaginatively enough, as the Crommyonian Sow. Crommyon wasn’t exactly on his way but Theseus had developed quite the taste for heroic bloodshed. He didn’t want the eventual tales of his adventures to say that all of his glorious duels had only been fought because of necessity. He wanted to be a wandering hero, which meant deliberately seeking out this boar (who happened to be at the third Underworld entrance).
In some versions of the story, the Sow was an actual boar raised to wickedness by a woman named Phaea to murder people, allowing her to rob their bodies. In others, Phaea herself was the Sow, a nickname given to her because of the foulness of her face and the cruelty of her heart. Pseudo Apollodorus described the Crommyonian Sow as a child of Typhon and Echidna (who we met way back in Episode 26H). Whichever she was, Phaea and the Sow were clubbed to death by Theseus in short order.
With his detour completed, it was on to Megara and the fourth Underworld Entrance. This area was the lair of a cruel bandit named Sciron. He set up an ambush along a narrow path that wound along the edge of a tall, steep cliff. Sciron would overpower his victims and force them to kneel in the dust to wash his feet, their backs to the crashing sea far below. When watching them scrub his toes stopped being funny, the cruel murderer would kick them over the cliff edge to plummet, screaming, into the surf below. It wasn’t the water that proved fatal, it was the giant man-eating turtle (or perhaps some other nonspecific sea monster) that gobbled them up before they could drown. As he had with the two previous chthonic guardians of the Underworld, Theseus preferred to dish out poetic justice (the Sow hadn’t had a distinct murder style and so had just been unceremoniously killed). Ambushing Sciron as he lay in wait for his own ambush, Theseus forced the bandit towards the cliff edge and, with a wide grin, Spartan kicked him over the edge. Screaming, Sciron plummeted towards the waves and was devoured by whatever hungry beast lived in the ocean below.
In a different version of the story, mentioned briefly by Plutarch, it states that Sciron was, in fact, neither wicked nor a robber. He was instead a virtuous man, himself a punisher of evildoers. In this account, Theseus didn’t kill Sciron on his way to Athens but later when he brought his army to Eleusis and conquered the city. Sciron fell as one of the defenders of his home.
Traveling on, Theseus came to Eleusis, holy site of the Eleusinian Mysteries cult, which worshiped Demeter and Persephone and was considered the most sacred of all the mystery cults. As you probably guessed, it was also the location of the fifth entrance to the Underground and the next Labor. The city was controlled by the cruel king Cercyon. He has a fun little aside in this story, which we’ll cover briefly to show what an absolute bastard he was. He was a demigod, with his divine parent being either Poseidon, the nymph Argiope, or Hephaestus. He had several daughters, including one named Alope who had an affair with (or more likely was raped by) Poseidon.
Alope got immediately pregnant because that’s how it works; she gave birth to the child in secret, dressed it in cloth cut from her own clothes, and gave it to her nurse to abandon in the wilderness to die, a practice known as exposure. The nurse did so, but a mare (horses being sacred to Poseidon) came along to feed the child with her milk. A shepherd followed the mare and found the child, clothed in extremely fine garments, and took it home. A second shepherd saw the baby (in its royal clothes) and offered to raise the child, asking that it be given over. The first shepherd shrugged and handed over the baby but not the expensive clothes (which is what the second shepherd actually wanted). They got into a fight about it and took their dispute to King Cercyon.
The cruel king recognized the baby’s clothes as cut from his daughter’s royal garments and assumed that someone in the palace must have stolen from her. Knowing that the blame was about to land on her shoulders and the king’s notorious penchant for cruelty, the nurse spoke up and revealed what Alope had commanded her to do. Furious that his daughter had gotten knocked up without his consent (even if she’d been raped by a god), he ordered her buried alive and the child exposed again. The mare came and fed the baby a second time and the shepherds again found the child. They figured (correctly) that the gods must be protecting the child and raised him under the name Hippothous. Alope (who Poseidon didn’t bother to protect because the gods are every bit as cruel as men) died a horrible death and her body was turned into a fountain by the god in a too little too late gesture.
Cercyon was an incredibly strong man (being a demigod and all) and he was a brute in a bare-knuckle brawl. He had a fondness for standing along the main road through Eleusis and challenging travelers to an unarmed fight. If they won, they would be made king of Eleusis; if they lost, Cercyon would execute them right then and there. The cruel king also refused to take no for an answer. If he challenged you, the undefeated king was going to fight and kill you.
Unsurprisingly, Cercyon was on the road the day that Theseus came to town and he challenged the youth to his usual no-holds-barred deathmatch. The younger man gladly accepted this challenge. The two grappled in the street but Theseus also had divine strength and was an equal match for the surprised king. His long training provided him an edge over the wicked king, who had always relied on brute strength rather than skill to win his fights, and Theseus lifted Cercyon over his head and body-slammed his ass to the ground, stunning him and ending the fight.
Along with the city’s crown, Theseus claimed the king’s head as his prize and slew Cercyon in the street. This deadly match was said to have been the birth of wrestling as a sport (it had already been, as we just saw, a life-and-death combat art). Continuing his assholery, Theseus also claimed Cercyon’s surviving daughters as his by right of conquest and raped them. Are you beginning to see why I don’t like this particular hero very much? Word of the wicked king’s death spread like wildfire and the lost heir Hippothous returned to ask Theseus to return the crown to him. After learning that Hippothous was his half brother (both sons of Poseidon), Theseus did so
Leaving Eleusis behind, Theseus made his way along the final stretch towards Athens, pun intended. How is that a pun, you ask? Well, this area was the site of the sixth and final Underground entrance as well as the last chthonic guardian Procrustes, whose name means ‘the stretcher who hammers our metal’. He had once been a smith but had turned to banditry. Himself also a son of Poseidon, he had that prodigious strength that marked so many of these particularly cruel villains. In a weird twist of fate, Procrustes was also the father of one Sinnis – the very same that Theseus had already killed. So this particular showdown would be personal.
LIke most of the others, Procrustes had his own weird serial killer quirk. He’d built himself a stronghold on Mount Korydallos along the sacred path between Athens and Eleusis where people had to travel for the Mysteries. Whenever travelers would happen by, he would graciously offer them a place to sleep in his home. He even had a special bed just for guests that he humbly offered up for their use. As you’ve likely already guessed, this wasn’t actually a gesture of hospitality, it was some bullshit.
If the traveler didn’t fit this special iron bed exactly (and let’s face it, no one was ever going to fit it exactly), Procrustes would make them fit. In a later version described by Pseudo-Apollodorus, he actually had two iron beds that were identical except for their length so that he could maximize the discrepancy between the guest and the bed. If they were too short, he would stretch their bones with his smith’s tools until they were long enough (hence the name Stretcher). If they were too tall, well then he would just have to cut off their legs until they were short enough. Theseus did what Theseus do and turned the tables on Procrustes. Either the serial killer had made the bed far too short for his lanky frame or Theseus picked the smaller of the two beds and he hacked away at Procrustes’ legs until his corpse fit.
Thus were the Six Labors completed and the six robbers poetically murdered. The dangerous road to Athens made a little safer, Theseus was able to journey on and finally reach the city of Athens and his destiny. This is mythology and Theseus is a mythic hero (however shitty of a person he might be), so you know he can’t just walk in and announce himself, happy ending, roll credits. Especially since we haven’t gotten to the most famous story involving our boy Theseus, but we’re going to have to wait until next time for that because it’s time for Gods and Monsters. This is a segment where I get into a little more detail about the personalities and history of one of the gods or monsters from this week’s pantheon that was not discussed in the main story. This week’s inventor is Daedalus.
We’re doing something a little different with Gods and Monsters this time. Daedalus is not a direct character in the story of Theseus, but his shadow looms large over it. Thus to set up for the next part of the Theseus myth, we first need to travel back in time to meet one of the most famous inventors of all time – Daedalus. He was older than Theseus, a man grown by the time the younger man was born, but they were very much contemporaries. Daedalus was born and raised in Athens though his parents vary wildly depending on the version of the story. The man was unbelievably clever and soon became a skilled architect, craftsman, and inventor whose fame was renowned all over Athens and, soon enough, over all of Greece.
Depending on whose account you believe, Daedalus was the creator or inventor of carpentry (like the very concept of carpentry), the axe, the saw, glue, and many more useful carpentry tools, and masts and sails for ships (instead of rowers). He also carved numerous statues that were so lifelike and well-crafted that they appeared to be alive and on the very brink of movement. He had two sons – Icarus and Iapyx – though the latter was born quite a bit later than the former.
Daedalus also had a nephew named either Talos, Calos, or Perdix. In some versions, the nephew is named Talos and his mother, Daedalus’ sister, is Perdix so that’s the version we’ll go with for convenience. Young Talos showed more than little of the family genius and he flourished under Daedalus’ tutelage. Though he was still a small child, Talos had found the jawbone of a snake and fashioned it into a crude saw that he used to saw some sticks to build with for a child’s game. His uncle couldn’t bear the thought that some young whippersnapper might overshadow his own prodigious achievements, so he decided to do something about it. Yeah, this gets dark.
As part of one of their many lessons, Daedalus brought Talos up to the top of the Acropolis, a great monument built upon the tallest hill in Athens. Hugging the boy in apology, Daedalus hurled him from the highest point and watched as his tiny body splattered on the rocks below. He’d hoped this would look like an accident (or better yet that no one would find the body at all) but no such luck. The corpse was soon discovered and plenty of people remembered seeing them together. Daedalus was tried for murder in the Areopagus (the Hill of Ares) where the judicial court that heard capital cases sat (and was confusingly known by the same name). In some versions, Athena saves Talos by turning him into a partridge before he can strike the earth but Daedalus is still accused and convicted of attempted murder.
Not wanting to pay the penalty for his crime, Daedalus and his son Icarus fled to Crete. In some versions of the story, Daedalus had instead always lived in Crete, having been born there, but the Athenians added the bit about killing Talos in order to claim him as their native son (which seems like a pretty brutal thing to add to someone’s story so you can go yup, he’s one of ours). However it happened, Daedalus and his son found themselves in Crete at something of a bad time.
The king of Crete at this time was Minos, who was married to Pasiphae. The Queen of Crete was an immortal daughter of Helios and the Oceanid nymph Perse and is often considered a goddess of witchcraft and sorcery in her own right. Minos was a son of Zeus and Europa (who we met back in Episode 72M). Given the bovine origins of Minos birth and Europa’s arrival on Crete, it should come as no surprise that the Cretans revered bulls as sacred animals. The civilization that grew out of Crete was later known as the Minoan civilization after the legendary king (who probably wasn’t a real person). He ruled the island for generations, either because he was a demigod with a divinely long life or because he was actually two different kings named Minos who got conflated – an early good king and a later wicked king.
Adopted by Asterion, king of Crete, Minos became a prince along with his brothers Sarpedon and Rhadamanthus. In his royal capacity, the young man consulted with Zeus on the laws of Crete every nine years, making their legal system divinely ordained. He felt that he would be the best king after Asterion, but the elder king wasn’t sure and refused to name an heir. When the elder king died, all three brothers claimed the throne. Minos prayed to Poseidon for a sign to prove his own right to rule; the sea god heard and sent him a great white bull that emerged out of the depths of the sea as a sign. In exchange, Minos was to sacrifice the bull to Poseidon as part of his coronation, returning the great beast to where it had come.
Minos was made king after revealing this divine sign but he decided that the white bull was simply too fine to sacrifice. He sent the intended sacrifice to his herds and brought out another very fine but not divinely magical bull and sacrificed it instead. Poseidon, as you might imagine, was pissed. That hadn’t been the deal and he intended to punish Minos for his transgression. And by ‘punish Minos’, I of course mean punish the innocent women around him to get to him instead.
Minos had something of a wandering eye and a habit of using his kingly authority to convince beautiful young women to fuck him. Pasiphae, who had always been faithful, didn’t much care for this bullshit so she cast a spell on him that made him ejaculate snakes, scorpions, and millipedes into the women he cheated with, killing them (so maybe she deserves a little splash damage vengeance of her own after all). Only her divine vagina could either withstand or prevent this curse (the stories vary), so he was forced to be faithful. At least, until much later when a woman name Procris fled to Minos and, in exchange for his best hound and unerring javelin, she made a potion of Circaean root that cured him and allowed him to safely sleep with her. The other version is wilder. She instead took a goat bladder, inserted it into a random woman that Minos wanted to fuck, and had him ejaculate the snakes, etc. into that, trapping them and making him fertile once more when he went to bed with Pasiphae again. This is supposedly the origin story of the condom.
But back to the bull. The gods love ironic punishment as much as Theseus does and Poseidon came up with a doozy. If Minos loved that bull more than the gods, then his wife would love that bull more than Minos. And by love, I mean lust after. Day by day, Pasiphae’s unbridled lust for the white bull grew more and more powerful until it was more than she could stand. She went to Daedalus and asked for his help. Being something of a mad scientist, he had no scruples about this and complied immediately, carving her a spectacular wooden cow covered in the skin of an actual cow. It was lifelike enough to full the white bull into fucking it and hollowed out in such a way that Pasiphae could line up her vagina with the wooden bull’s and thus allow her to fuck the beast. Which she did and surprise surprise, she immediately got pregnant.
The first part of his vengeance complete, Poseidon gave his blinding rage to the white bull, turning it from a peaceful beast into a rampaging man-killer. It laid waste to the countryside until the Labors of Heracles, so we’ll wait until we get to his story to talk about the Cretan Bull any farther. The important thing here is that the child Pasiphae eventually gave birth to was a half man, half-bull monstrosity who they named Asterion after his grandfather (Asterius in some versions) but you probably know him by the nickname Minotaur, which translates to Bull of Minos. There are a few other versions of the story. In one, Minos is supposed to sacrifice the finest bull born in the herd each year and the white bull was deemed too fine to sacrifice. In another Pasiphae was cursed by Aphrodite for neglecting her temple for many years. In still another, the curse was revenge by Aphrodite against Helios for revealing her affair with Ares to her husband Hephaestus. There’s even a version where Zeus himself is the father of Asterion (in disguise of course because sky gods are assholes).
This monstrous son was a great shame for King Minos so he needed to do something to get rid of it, but he had a feeling Poseidon wouldn’t let him just kill the kid. Thus, as one does, Minos went to consult the oracles. They were more direct this time and so Minos consulted with Daedalus to construct a great Labyrinth (or a simple, guarded dancing path according to Homer) to hide the Minotaur that he had helped sire away from prying eyes. Being the world’s greatest architect, Daedalus made the Labyrinth so cunningly and confusingly that no one but himself could hope to find their way back out once inside. According to Ovid, even Daedalus nearly lost his way inside his own creation and only just found the way out. The Minotaur was imprisoned inside the Labyrinth where it was fed on wild animals and, later, human flesh (but we’ll get to that next time).
Unfortunately for Daedalus, Minos had also learned of the inventor’s part in his wife’s bovine extracurriculars and had him and his son Icarus imprisoned in a tall tower. They were left there to rot. In Ovid’s telling, they were instead locked inside the Labyrinth itself. The clever inventor could find the way out, but it was guarded. The only escape was over the sea, but Minos had all ship either burned or searched (depending on the version), making a daring boat escape impossible. And that’s where we’ll leave Daedalus and his innocent son Icarus until next time.
That’s it for this episode of Myths Your Teacher Hated. Keep up with new episodes on our Facebook page, on iTunes, on TuneIn, on Vurbl, and on Spotify, or you can follow us on Twitter as @HardcoreMyth, on Instagram as Myths Your Teacher Hated Pod, and on Tumblr as MythsYourTeacherHated. You can also find news and episodes on our website at myths your teacher hated dot com. If you have any questions, any gods or monsters you’d want to learn about, or any ideas for future stories that you’d like to hear, feel free to drop me a line. I’m trying to pull as much material from as many different cultures as possible, but there are all sorts of stories I’ve never heard, so suggestions are appreciated. The theme music is by Tiny Cheese Puff.
Next time, it’s the exciting conclusion to the story of Theseus. You’ll see why you should never trust your stepmother, why you should never let a sexy stranger lead you to a deserted island, and why you should be careful around cliffs. Then, in Gods and Monsters, we’ll take wing and fly over the ocean with the famous Icarus. That’s all for now. Thanks for listening.