Pasiphae

by Peter Huby

Bestiality is one of the most enduring of sexual taboos. Peter Huby explores the dangerous passion of Pasiphae, Queen of Crete, who develops an extreme and uncontrollable passion for a white bull—a passion which she persuades the inventor Daedalus to help her consummate. This is one of the most powerful and haunting of Greek myths. The novel deals with extremes—not just in its focus on the taboo of bestiality—but all extremes of passion, power and revenge. An accessible retelling of a classic Greek myth.

160 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2002

Reviews

[Bryn Hammond]

Should be called Daedalus. It's about Daedalus, and to promise a focus on Pasiphae as the publisher description does courts disappointment.

For a while my hopes were lowered by over-clever writing and too much sex without excuse in the story (I don't mean the bull, which was underplayed). But it strengthened and grew more substantial. It's an end-of-the-world atmosphere, with eruptions and ash falls and the collapse of Crete. I liked the stories of ordinary people who work the markets and Thracian slaves. The mechanical giant Talos has a melancholy story. Daedalus' inventions are fairly Leonardo. Dark but not cynical; sad and mad, and Daedalus sees his craft turned to ill...

[Keith [on semi hiatus]]

An excellent portrayal of early Greek mythology and a gem of a writer to boot, I'm so thankful to have stumbled upon this work and other future reads that came from doing so.

My interest in this story has garnered in strength from the lyrical sentences and immense screenplay written in these pages, an inspiration to my own hobby craft, many lessons have been learned.

[Malcolm Brenner]

I remember being fascinated by the myth of the Minotaur of Crete when, as a 6th grade class project, we studied the Greco-Roman gods and goddesses. It wasn't until decades later, however, that I realized that Pasiphae, wife of King Minos and part-time witch/demigoddess, had literally engineered the satisfaction of her bestiality with a freakish white bull from the sea! There's a backstory to this about offended deities, which I won't go into, but what intrigued me about the tale is Pasiphae's employment/enslavement of the exiled Greek architect and engineer Daedalus to construct a hollow wooden cow for her to crouch in and complete the act! Thus was the Minotaur conceived, but I didn't learn THAT in 6th grade!

I had always conceived of the scene in a meadow with trees, in whose shadow the bull would discover the pseudo-cow, and they might get it on several times during the day before Pasiphae's servants wheeled the contrivance into the palace and let Pasiphae, sweaty and exhausted but happy, out. In short, I liked to fantasize that there might be something if not romantic, then at least primally erotic, about the woman-bull-engineer triangle. It made a great masturbation fantasy, especially when nothing else worked. I always imagined being the bull, of course!

So it was with some mythic interest that I ordered this novel. I started it, and rapidly realized that, while this particularly violent, unhinged and depressing telling of the story, featuring Minos's madness, Pasiphae's unholy lust, earthquakes that wipe out whole villages and the supposed wrath of a cheated Poseidon, god of waters, might be closer to the truth than my fantasies, it didn't make it any easier to read!

For some reason, many British writers have a depressing outlook on life, and choose to write about depressing subjects, which appeal to depressed literary critics and readers who are wondering if there are any benefits to suicide. I think of J. G. Ballard, John Wyndham and Ian Watson as particularly striking examples.

When I got to the scene where Pasiphae is about to be mounted by the bull, it's in a dark, filthy underground stable, and an earthquake throws the bull down upon the wooden cow! Daedalus, the inventor, is at a loss about what to do... that was about as far as I got, about 75 pages in. U scrubbed it. Accurate/schmackurate, I liked my fantasies better!