I. Corral
II. Labyrinth
III. Asterion

Minos' own sense of vanity is what led to Pasiphaë's lust for the bull given as a gift from Poseidon. The sins of the father thus became the very seed and body of his illegitimate son, the Minotaur/Asterion/Asterius (named after Minos' own paternal figure). Hidden away in the Labyrinth, Asterion was fed virginal Athenian youths, sacrificial tribute for the death of Androgeos, one of Minos' sons whose death/murder is often attributed to Athens by various means.

Here the fable presents itself—familial shame quite literally fed and sustained by familial trauma. The father's vanity, which influenced the mother's infidelity/perversion, which becomes the monster hidden at the center of a secret maze, utilized as a means of justifying blood sacrifice, wrath, rage, vengeance.

I have long viewed Asterion/Asterius through the lens of a queer child, whose heterosexual parents view their offspring with terror, secreting them away from the world where they may serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy to the parents' own fears and shortcomings. Family "sin" has "created" a monster, but this imposition of misplaced guilt causes monstrous behavior. Thus does the monster become monstrous. There is no other presented choice.

As the child gains greater awareness of self—traversing their own internal labyrinth of identity—they find the presuppositions placed upon them by outside forces have shaped their own understanding of self. What was a metaphorical monster thus becomes itself, locked away at the center of a labyrinth constructed at their birth. Much in the same manner as Kafka posits that each person has their own inaccessible pathway to the Law, guarded by increasingly unyielding guards, each identity has—at least the propensity—to become malformed by the anxieties of the generation which begat them.