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The Minotaur’s journey from myth to monster is a maze in and of itself, and along the way we’ll even encounter gods and demons.
Hello, I’m Conan of Coco’s Homebrew, and welcome to From Mythos to Monsters, where we look at how different mythological beasts have been reinterpreted in the modern fantasy genre. If you like this series and want to support me in making it, check out my Patreon.
Now, let’s go back into ancient times and find out exactly what has been prowling in the Labyrinth.
The Minotaur was a creature of Ancient Greek mythology which had the head of a bull and the body of a human being. While our modern understanding of the Minotaur is as a species of monster, the creature of Greek myth was actually one of a kind.
In case you don’t know the legend of the Minotaur already, let’s quickly go over it. The word Minotaur translates to Bull of Minos. Minos was a king who was given a bull by Poseidon, god of the sea, to sacrifice- however, after Minos refused to kill the bull, Poseidon punished him by making Minos’ wife fall in love with the bull, and after some off-screen fun she gave birth to the Minotaur. Real dick move, Poseidon.
Minos then imprisoned the Minotaur in a Labyrinth, a confusing maze built for the king by Daedalus, the father of Icarus. Minos then started sending nine Athenians into the Labyrinth every nine years, because Athenians killed his other son Androgeos. The third time this happened, an Athenian named Theseus volunteered to enter the Labyrinth and was able to finally slay the Minotaur.
It was during the early Middle Ages when the notion of minotaurs as a species of monsters arose, with the The Cosmography of Aethicus Ister, a 7th or 8th century text, describing Amazonian people raising Minotaur cubs for use in war. To be fair, this text was known to be a less than reputable source of information, even featuring a flat map of the world. At this time all the way until the Renaissance, the most widely available account of the story of the Minotaur described it simply as “half bull and half man”, which also led to the creature often being wrongly depicted more like a centaur, rather than the bull-headed monster it was originally described as.
The Minotaur would continue to commonly appear in art and literature for centuries later. For example, it briefly appears in the 14th century epic Dante’s Inferno, guarding the entrance to the seventh circle of hell. Dante’s guide, Virgil, taunts the creature by reminding it about how it was totally naughty word up by Theseus, distracting it for long enough to enable them to proceed.
In the 20th century, the Minotaur also became associated with the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. While Picasso was undeniably a hugely influential artist, he was also a creepy bastard who was not nice to women. Rather than reflect on his misogyny, he blamed it on the beast he said lurked inside of him, and used the Minotaur as the avatar for which to depict this beast in this artwork. He found the monster to be an evocative symbol for this monstrous side of himself, since he was raised in an area of Spain that was known for its bullfighting.
Well, before we go on to explore the Minotaur in modern fantasy, I want to spend a moment talking about the demon Baphomet, whose legend eventually becomes intertwined with the Minotaur’s depiction in fantasy.
The name Baphomet emerged in the 14th century after the Knights Templar were accused of demon worship. The knights were tortured into making forced confessions, describing how they were seduced by Muslims into worshipping an idol of a demon named Baphomet. This wasn't even a real demon, by the way: the first record of the name ever appearing was during this inquisition, and was almost certainly just a corruption of the name Mohammed, or perhaps the word mammet, the Arabic word for a false idol. Our idea of Baphomet today came from artwork produced in 1856 by Éliphas Lévi, which depicted him as an androgynous winged goat. That’s two evil monsters which are both part human and part farm animal; you might be able to see where this is going.
In the early 20th century, we began to see the idea of a minotaur as a fantastical species of creature, rather than a single monster. One of the most famous examples is in The Chronicles of Narnia book series, which features a race of evil minotaurs who serve as soldiers to the antagonistic White Witch.
We then get to 1977 with the rise of Dungeons & Dragons and the 1st edition Monster Manual, which for the first time featured the Minotaur.
In older editions of the game, Minotaurs were rare and incredibly powerful monsters, created either through curses placed on humans or through other Minotaurs breeding. Unlike real bulls, they were carnivores who needed to hunt to eat, and to do this they used heightened senses that allowed them to track their prey with uncanny accuracy even through mazes. Once they finally caught up to their quarry, they would charge it down with their horns and gore them for severe damage.
However while their abilities largely remained the same in future editions of the game, the minotaur would gradually become a weaker and less rare monster, designed for lower level parties to fight as a boss or for higher levels as a horde enemy that would attack in threatening herds.
In terms of their lore in D&D, minotaurs lived in dungeons or thick forests, or sometimes in massive underground labyrinths just like in their original legend. In the setting of Faerun, one such place is simply known as the Labyrinth: it's a massive maze of lava tunnels deep beneath the earth, originally created by a cult of evil dwarves who worshipped a demon named - guess who - Baphomet.
You see, in 1982 D&D introduced its own version of Baphomet, the demon I mentioned earlier who the Knights Templar were supposedly worshipping. In the game, he was the Demon Lord of Beasts who represented the brutal and savage behaviour of animals. Taking inspiration from the image of the demon popularised by Éliphas Lévi, D&D’s version of Baphomet was also an anthropomorphic creature: however, rather than being a goat, in the game he was depicted as a hulking minotaur, and fittingly the realm of the underworld he ruled over was known as the Endless Maze. We’re not really sure why the developers of D&D chose to intertwine the legend of Baphomet with the story of the minotaur, aside from the fact that they both look like they belong on a really naughty word up farm together.
Regardless, in the game’s lore, Baphomet is said to have created Minotaurs, and while not all Minotaurs worshipped him, those that did would wreak brutal havoc in his name.In 3rd edition, there was even a new type of Minotaur called a Baphitaur, created through magical experimentation using demon’s blood. These Baphitaurs were, as the name suggests, more closely connected to Baphomet than other Minotaurs, and were said to prowl the tunnels of the Labyrinth - however, they never appeared again after this edition.
The blood that was said to have been used to create Baphitaurs came from a type of demon called a goristro, a creature unique to D&D which was most likely also inspired by the myth of the Minotaur due to its close resemblance to them. In fact, while nowadays they look somewhat different to Minotaurs, in 3rd edition, the goristro was just straight up depicted as a colossal, anthropomorphic bull.
So, as storytellers, what should we take away from this maze of interconnected myths and fables about the Minotaur? Well, I personally believe that the idea in fantasy of the Minotaur as a semi-intelligent race of creatures doesn’t do justice at all to the legend that inspired it at all. What’s more, the idea of it being a creature that is ‘good at mazes’ is also a poor interpretation of its abilities, since the original Minotaur was just as trapped in the Labyrinth as his victims were, and it had no supernatural ability to traverse it.
In fact, while it may be completely baseless from a mythological perspective, D&D’s ideas of creatures like the Baphitaur and Goristro are in my opinion actually much more faithful to the idea of the Minotaur than the game’s actual Minotaurs. That’s because, unlike actual Minotaurs, these monsters are not described as civilised; they are rare, terrifying, dangerous beings that can’t be reasoned with, and who were brought into existence from terrible occult forces beyond our reality - much like the Minotaur himself was in the original legend. So, in your world, I’d suggest your Minotaur be a monster in the truest sense of the word: something unknowable, powerful, and terrifying.
Okay, we’ve finally found our way out of the Labyrinth and so can bring this thread to a close. You can click the image below to check out my Patreon.
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