One of the great things that comes from having a blog like this is when there is some feedback from a reader. A few days ago I got an email from a Mr J.T. (name supplied) about my reference to Pasiphae (the Queen who fell in love with a Bull) and a possible solution about how she managed to get the animal to mate with her. (The original article is here.)

J.T. wrote:

I saw your website and was quite impressed by your prospective book about Greek Mythology and erotica. The artwork looks very well done. I have tried my hand at short stories and novels in the past (alas…with little monatary success) and know how hard it is to find a publisher. I wish you the best of luck. I was most curious about your take on the myth of Pasiphae and the bull. I had once tried my hand at setting this myth to paper but found it very difficult. It’s an intriguing myth - few myths have a mortal taking the initiative (and a woman mortal at that!) and without a god involved, but an actual animal! I wasn’t sure how I wanted to tell the story - I could see portraying Pasiphae as an early feminist, a dim witted trophy wife, a haughty Queen, tragic figure, a figure in need of humiliation, and so forth. I wasn’t sure if I wanted her cursed or to act of her own accord. The biggest problem I had was the cow - its cumbersome, but that also makes it interesting. I wasn’t sure if I wanted her fitting to be an act of humiliation, comedy, or erotica. Anyway, just curious what path you took this with this myth, if you don’t mind sharing. It’s a wide open myth and one seldom retold from the Queen’s perspective, which makes it all the more intriguing in my opinion. Best of luck on finding a publisher.

For what it is worth - and by way of an answer to J.T. - here is the story of Pasiphae as told in my (unpublished) 10 Sexiest Moments in Mythology.The book is written both for enthusiasts for Greek mythology and for people who might become enthusiasts on further acquaintance. So it tends to underscore a racey approach with a scholarly detail. On re-reading the Pasiphae piece, I think that some of the other nine stories in the book are more fun because I have managed to put a modern day spin on the recorded facts. The Pasiphae story tells it the way it is and always has been and it is the drawing and the solution to the conundrum of how Pasiphae did it that makes it stand out.

All the stories have illustrated notes and in this posting those for Pasiphae follow the story. In the book the notes are altogether at the end and run from page 22 to page 39!. Of course, with the 10 stories come ten Ian Tovey illustrations which I think are worthy of publication in their own right. (Many thanks, J.T. for saying that you liked them.) Once the book is published I think that we shall see the illustrations take on a life of their own as posters, greeting cards and so on and in other people’s writings on the subject. For obvious reasons, I am having to be careful not to put too much up on the Internet.

PASIPHAE - A TALE OF LOVE IN THE DUST

The imagination of artists challenged by a load of bull

There is nothing in Greek mythology that places a greater strain on the reader’s credulity than the story of how Pasiphae, wife of Minos, King of Crete, managed to get herself pregnant by a large white bull.
The numerous fantastical elements of a legend that begins with the gift of a bull in response to a prayer by Minos to Neptune and the bull’s miraculous appearance before a delegation of citizens when it thunders ashore from the Sea God’s watery lair (thereby underpinning Minos’ authority as ruler), followed by Neptune’s anger when Minos decides to renege on the deal and put the bull to stud instead of straight away sacrificing it back to him, and Neptune taking his revenge by making the Queen fall head-long in love with the beast, are very much all in a day’s work for the Mount Olympus divinities.
The result of the coupling: a monstrous creature that is half-human, half-beast, called “Minotaur”, and so dangerous that it must be caged inside a labryntine maze and fed seven young men and seven young women annually, is likewise the common stuff of mythology. It is the circumstances of the coupling between Queen Pasiphae and the bull that provides the glue for the two parts of the narrative that present so formidable a hurdle for the imagination to jump.
What we are asked to believe (by such noted authorities as Apollodorus and Ovid and also Philostratus) is that Pasiphae, overtaken by her passion for the bull, persuaded the great craftsman Daedalus to make a counterfeit cow out of wood, hollow inside and covered with hide outside. We can be sure that it would have been a good likeness because Daedalus was known to be able to do sculptures that could walk about and even speak. Daedalus fitted his device with an access hatch through which the royal personage could insert herself. It had wheels allowing it, once she was inside, to be rolled into position in the sun soaked
enclosure in which the bull was kept. Once there, intercourse could take place. This is the sum total of what we are told and, on the face of it, it was a mission impossible.
There is no enlightenment to be gained from artists. Most painters have shied away from the subject . They would have been conscious of the inherent difficulty of rendering in a coherent way a set of impossible facts. There is a well known Pompeian wall painting showing Pasiphae, dressed as if for a garden party, alongside a spindle-legged cow fixed to a trolley. The proportions of the cow relative to the lady and the size of the hatch are such that not even the magical abilities of Daedalus could have got her inside. Not surprisingly the expression on Pompei Pasiphae’s face is one of resignation rather than anticipation.
Presumably, because they were baffled, Renaissance painters - required though they were by market forces to seek out every opportunity to portray the female nude - rarely attempted the subject. Pasiphae would, of course, have had to prepare for the coming encounter by removing her clothing, either in its entirety or to a revealing (and so more titillating) extent.
It is not possible to argue that the element of bestiality per se made Pasiphae’s tryst a taboo subject because there are many examples in Renaissance art in which Jupiter has assumed an animal form for the purpose of seducing a female goddess or mortal. The actual act, while easy to imagine, is rarely depicted. An exception is Leda and the Swan in which Leda and the swan traditionally adopt the missionary position (swan on top) and only the point of penetration is hidden. This story about Pasiphae and the bull is different because the actual act is not easy to imagine and requires a mechanical solution that would have taxed even so inventive a genius as Leonardo da Vinci.
In our own day bulls used to produce semen for artificial insemination are trained to mount simple wooden structures incorporating an artificial vagina. What is required here,
however, is a contraption that presents Pasiphae’s vulva to a rampant bovine with its
member homing in like a cruise missile but which looks exactly like a real cow.
Generations of artists have missed the only possible solution to the conundrum. Daedalus must have constructed his hide covered wooden cow with a body big enough for Pasiphae to assume a crouching position inside it with her legs spread apart. She would have entered it on her knees via a slit in its belly when it was turned upside down. Once in position, with padding placed around her and the edges of the slit sewn together, the cow would be turned the right way up. Pasiphae would have awaited the bull Leda fashion - lying on her back!

PASIPHAE NOTES

Sources: In addition to the sources named in the narrative, a modern day discussion of Pasiphae’s arcadian lovemaking deserves honourable mention. It comes in the 1967 novel The Maze Maker by Michael Ayrton. He gives a graphic account of the proceedings that largely corresponds to the author’s view as to how it must have been done. Ayrton has the Queen assuming a crouching position having entering the artificial cow when it is upside down. Ayrton does not, however, make it clear whether she is laying on her back after the cow is uprighted, ready to receive the bull in the missionary position, or on her knees so as to take him a tergo.
Artistic Legacy: The opportunities were there for the taking had artists been more imaginative in their approach to the subject. In The Maze Maker Ayrton ticks off the boxes moment by moment. When the Queen arrives ready for the great event only the women in her retinue accompany her into Daedalus’ workshop. They reverently raise her from her litter and disrobe her. “She stood naked and as white as cream,” says Daedalus, who Ayrton has telling the story himself. “They lifted her and laid her in the cow and spread her open. That I, a man, should have been present was only permitted because I had made her bovine bed and was needed to bed her in it.” Daedalus (per Ayrton) says that no one spoke or regarded him. To them he was just a “sexless ministrant performing an ordained rite.” [Imagine how a Caravaggio or an Artemisia Gentileschi or a Rembrandt would have captured the scene.] “But I was a man,” Daedalus continues. “When I looked down on Pasiphae and saw her hunger laid tight against the soft opening in my effigy, I rose hard as a man [an opportunity here for a Tom of Finland] and shook so that my hands could scarcely arrange even the slight comfort of the padding I had prepared for her hips.” Pasiphae is then trundled into the field and the bull - the god Poseidon (aka Neptune) in disguise, according to Ayrton - trots up slowly and after scenting her his “obsidian black spear” slides out and goes home to the hilt, striking her like the blows of an axe. At this point, much to its maker’s alarm, the double-braced forelegs of the artificial cow crack and give way at the knees. “But still he beats upon her and the liquid of his flood splashes back across his straddled hocks, spuming and drenching his hooves.” When it is over Daedalus feels his own legs wet. Ayrton was a sculptor, painter, theatrical designer, filmmaker and art critic as well as being a writer of elaborately crafted prose. He died in 1975 aged 54.
It’s a small world: The lives of Pasiphae and Procris (wife of Cephalis who we have already met) later cross. The Queen, who was a sorceress, had put a spell on her husband Minos, a notorious womaniser. Its effect was that all the women having intercourse with him were killed by snakes, scorpions and millipeds ejaculated into their vaginas. According to some accounts, Procris did allow herself to be bribed into sharing his bed, first making sure that he would not harm her by giving him a Circean root drink. If this was the same potion that the goddess Circe used to turn Ulysses’ soldiers into swine it was heady stuff. But it seems to have worked for Procris.

Ian Tovey will be the subject of a Glossary Gloss in the near future.

I have been wondering whether the picture behind the curtain (as envisaged by the Horrible Hogarth in the National Gallery’s Marriage a La Mode) might have involved bestiality. Hogarth, we know, drew upon well known works by old masters (not so old in his day) for his pictures within pictures. This has taken me on a detour from the first detour, and I shall be reporting later today.

The incidence of bestiality in mythology (from which the artists of the Renaissance drew inspiration) mostly involves male-god-on-female-mortal. An exception to the general rule is to be found in the story of Pasiphae who had herself concealed in a specially made mock-up of a cow so that she could couple with a bull with which she had become infatuated. This was one of the stories in the Ten Sexiest Moments in Mythology (if you are a publisher please click here and email me) and it required considerable ingenuity (you could say thinking out of the box) to come up with a plausible solution to the logistics of the situation. Here, to be going on with, is Ian Tovey and my take on the question of how it could be done.

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