Minotaur

The Minotaur was a diabolic beast from Greek mythology. It was the hideously deformed offspring of a human and a bull. The Minotaur was kept captive in a maze or labyrinth and killed by the hero Theseus.

Half-man, half-bull, the Minotaur was the result of King Minos’s refusal to sacrifice a bull to the god Poseidon. The Gods punished him by making his wife fall in love with a bull.

His wife became pregnant and gave birth to a horribly disfigured son. It had the body of a human child and the head of a bull. The only thing it ate was human flesh. The parents decided their son was a terrible monster and named him “The Minotaur”.

King Minos was disgusted with his malformed, bull-headed son and constructed a huge underground maze, called “The Labyrinth”. This maze was built around the Minotaur in order to keep it captive. The king hoped that the Minotaur would never be able to figure out how to escape the labyrinth.

But the hideous Minotaur still had to be fed. Each year, King Minos brought seven young girls and seven young boys from Athens to the labyrinth. Once there, the kids were told they were being sacrificed to the Minotaur and were promptly locked in the maze. The kids wandered around in the dark until the Minotaur came across them and tore them limb from limb before devouring their bodies.

When the hero, Theseus, heard about this, he was enraged and decided that the only way to end the cruel sacrifices of children, was to kill the Minotaur. With the help of Minos’s daughter, he managed to find his way through the maze until he stumbled upon the sleeping Minotaur. He beat it to death and made his way back out of the labyrinth by following a thread he had tied to the entrance.