In Greek mythology, Pasiphaë was a daughter of the sun god Helios and queen of Crete as the wife of King Minos. After Minos failed to sacrifice Poseidon's Cretan Bull, she was cursed with unnatural lust for the beast; with Daedalus's hollow wooden cow she conceived and bore the Minotaur. She was also mother, by Minos, of Ariadne, Phaedra, Androgeus, and other Cretan royal children, and sister to Circe and Aeëtes. Some traditions treat her as an immortal sorceress and oracular goddess; others as a mortal queen.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Pasiphaë" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Family
Pasiphaë was daughter of Helios and the Oceanid Perse (or, in some accounts, the island-nymph Crete). Her siblings include Circe, Aeëtes of Colchis, and Perses. Given in marriage to Minos, she bore Acacallis, Ariadne, Androgeus, Glaucus, Deucalion, Phaedra, Xenodice, and Catreus; by the Cretan Bull she bore Asterion, the Minotaur.
II.Birth of the Minotaur
When Minos kept Poseidon's snow-white bull instead of sacrificing it, the sea god cursed Pasiphaë with passion for the animal (Bacchylides and Hyginus instead blame Aphrodite—either for neglect of her cult or as revenge on Helios for exposing her adultery with Ares). Daedalus built a lifelike hollow cow of wood and hide; Pasiphaë entered it, mated with the bull, and gave birth to the flesh-eating hybrid called the Minotaur.
Euripides' lost Cretans preserved a speech in which Pasiphaë defends herself as acting under divine compulsion and blames Minos for angering Poseidon. Obscure variants make Zeus in bull form the sire.
III.Sorcery and other myths
Like her niece Medea, Pasiphaë was imagined as skilled in magic. Apollodorus records a charm she laid on Minos so that, when he lay with other women, he ejaculated serpents, scorpions, and centipedes that killed them; Procris alone, protected by a Circean herb (or a goat's-bladder trick), could lie with him safely. In some versions Pasiphaë helped Daedalus and Icarus escape Crete by ship or by concealment while he built wings.
Authors disagree on her nature: some treat her as an immortal child of the Sun; Euripides has Minos condemn her to death; Virgil places her among the lovers in the Mournful Fields of the underworld.
IV.Cult
At Thalamae near Sparta she was worshipped as an oracular goddess; Pausanias describes a small shrine by a stream with bronze statues of Helios and Pasiphaë, and equates her with Ino or Selene. Cicero and Plutarch report that Spartan ephors slept at the shrine seeking prophetic dreams that twice stirred major political upheaval in the Hellenistic period. Modern astronomy named a moon of Jupiter after her.