Inflamed by passion for a white bull, Pasiphae made Daedalus construct a bronze cow. Then she stripped naked, slipped into the bronze cow, and pressed her genitals against the cow's vaginal opening. The white bull began lusting after the bronze cow and mounted her. From this strange union of the white bull and Pasiphae came the Minotaur.
In Athens, the king's wife had ritual intercourse with a human representative of the god Dionysus in his incarnation of the bull.
