In psychological terms, the bull is the primordial unregenerate energy of the masculine archetype that is destructive to consciousness and to the ego when it identifies with it.

Therefore, it must be sacrificed, and the sacrifice brings about a transformation, so that the energy symbolized by the bull serves another level of meaning.

Edward Edinger

The Eternal Drama: The Inner Meaning of Greek Mythology

On the Symbolism of the Minotaur/Bull

In Crete, King Minos had once prayed for a demonstration of his special relation to the god Poseidon and he was given that recognition by the emergence of a beautiful white bull from the sea, with the understanding that the bull would immediately be sacrificed to Poseidon. But Minos thought the bull too beautiful to give back, so he sacrificed an inferior one. Poseidon, in retaliation, arranged that Minos’ wife Pasiphaë should develop a passion for the white bull, and indeed she coupled with it and gave birth to the monster called the Minotaur, which had a bull’s head and a human body, such a dreadful creature that it had to be hidden away in a labyrinth.

The story tells us that when one takes for oneself what belongs to the divine powers, one breeds monsters. It does not go unnoticed when the ego, as Minos did, uses the transpersonal or instinctive energies for itself alone. Then, because of offenses to the Cretan king (at this time, Athens was subject to Crete), it was decreed that every nine years Athens must supply seven youths and seven maidens to be fed to the Minotaur.

Theseus arrived on the scene just when a new batch of youths and maidens was prepared to set sail to meet the monster, and he quickly offered himself as one of the tribute youths, with the intention of destroying the Minotaur.

Here is a picture of human contents being turned over to monster purposes, a state of affairs that had come about because the original bull from the sea was not voluntarily sacrificed to the god. The primitive instinctual energies that are signified by the bull were not sacrificed to a higher purpose, and the price of that failure was that human qualities represented by the tribute youths then had to be sacrificed to the bull.

In place of a progressive developmental movement that would amount to an enlargement of consciousness, the more conscious humans were sacrificed to the less conscious Minotaur: a regressive movement.

This again brings up the symbolism of the bull. We know from archeological work in Crete that a remarkable sport existed there, a kind of bull dance in which acrobats would grab the horns of a bull and somersault onto and off its back, a prototype, clearly, of what has lasted into our own day as the bullfight.

A human being’s meeting and mastering the power of the bull seems to have a deep-seated psychological meaning. The bull stands for something that must be challenged and shown to be inferior to human power. Without this level of meaning, the elaborate rituals of confrontation with the bull cannot be understood psychologically.

Another important symbol system that made a great deal of the bull image was Mithraism, which became the major religion of the Roman legions in the first few centuries of this era, and according to some authorities, if Christianity had not supervened, would have become a worldwide religion. It had as its central image Mithras sacrificing the bull.

In psychological terms, the bull is the primordial unregenerate energy of the masculine archetype that is destructive to consciousness and to the ego when it identifies with it. Therefore, it must be sacrificed, and the sacrifice brings about a transformation, so that the energy symbolized by the bull serves another level of meaning.

Seen this way it is not too much to say that the sacrifice or overcoming of the bull symbolizes the whole task of human civilization.

Edward Edinger

The Eternal Drama: The Inner Meaning of Greek Mythology

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