[11][12] Like her doublet[clarification needed] Europa, the consort of Zeus, her origins were in the East, in her case at the earliest-known Kartvelian-speaking polity of Colchis (Egrisi (Georgian: ეგრისი), now in western Georgia[13][14][15][16]).

[18][19][20] The myth of Pasiphaë's coupling with the bull and the subsequent birth of the Minotaur was the subject of Euripides's lost play the Cretans, of which few fragments survive.

[28][29] In some more obscure traditions, it was not Poseidon's bull but Minos' father Zeus disguised as one who made love to Pasiphaë and sired the Minotaur.

[35] While Pasiphaë is an immortal goddess in some texts, other authors treated her as a mortal woman, like Euripides who in his play Cretans has Minos sentence her to death (her eventual fate is unclear, as no relevant fragment survives).

In Virgil's Aeneid, Aeneas sees her when he visits the Underworld, describing Pasiphae residing in the Mournful Fields, a place inhabited by sinful lovers.

[36] In the general understanding of the Minoan myth,[37] Pasiphaë and Daedalus'[38] construction of the wooden cow allowed her to satisfy her desire[39] for the Cretan Bull.

Through this interpretation she was reduced from a near-divine figure (daughter of the Sun) to a stereotype of grotesque bestiality and the shocking excesses of lust and deceit.

The geographer Pausanias describes the shrine as small, situated near a clear stream, and flanked by bronze statues of Helios and Pasiphaë.

Cicero writes in De Divinatione 1.96 that the Spartan ephors would sleep at the shrine of Pasiphaë, seeking prophetic dreams to aid them in governance.

According to Plutarch,[44] Spartan society twice underwent major upheavals sparked by ephors' dreams at the shrine during the Hellenistic era.

In one case, an ephor dreamed that some of his colleagues' chairs were removed from the agora, and that a voice called out "this is better for Sparta"; inspired by this, King Cleomenes acted to consolidate royal power.

Again during the reign of King Agis, several ephors brought the people into revolt with oracles from Pasiphaë's shrine promising remission of debts and redistribution of land.

[45] However, further studies on Minoan religion indicate that the sun was a female figure, suggesting instead that Pasiphaë was originally a solar goddess, an interpretation consistent with her depiction as Helios' daughter.

Fiona Benson's third collection of poetry, Ephemeron, contains a long section entitled Translations from the Pasiphaë in which she retells the Minotaur myth from the point of view of the bull-child's mother.