The Seba library treats Pasiphae in 7 passages, across 5 authors (including Kerényi, Carl, Harrison, Jane Ellen, Hillman, James).
The name Pasi-phae is just as transparent as Ari-dela and means ‘she who shines for all,’ which can be said only of the full moon in the sky.
Kerényi argues that Pasiphae is fundamentally a lunar goddess whose name signifies the full moon, and that her relationship with Ariadne recapitulates the pre-Hellenic Cretan mother-daughter duality underlying the myth.
, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976thesis
we cease to wonder at the story of Pasiphae and the Minotaur. In Asia Minor, in Phrygia, the same conjunction, the Mother and the Child and the Bull.
Harrison situates the Pasiphae-Minotaur narrative within a pan-Mediterranean religion of the Mother, the Divine Child, and the sacred Bull, making the story intelligible as cultic theology rather than aberrant fable.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis
The wife of the king of Crete, Pasiphae, would not propitiate Aphrodite. The goddess took her revenge by infusing Pasiphae with a monstrous lust for a bull.
Hillman reads Pasiphae’s compulsive desire as Aphrodite’s revenge for neglect, exemplifying the psychological law that a refused goddess returns as an overwhelming, monstrous force.
, Animal Presences, 2008thesis
Inasmuch as the story is interwoven with the tale of Ariadne, a daughter of Minos and Pasiphae — a tale that has its place in the stories concerning the god Dionysos — I shall tell it in its proper place.
Kerényi establishes Pasiphae as mother of Ariadne and thus as a structural node linking the Cretan Minotaur complex to the Dionysiac mythological cycle.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
she was the daughter of King Minos and of Pasiphae, daughter of the Sun: a mortal maiden, but with the name of a goddess.
Kerényi identifies Pasiphae as daughter of Helios and mother of Ariadne, anchoring her simultaneously in solar genealogy and in the humanized Cretan royal house.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
The Minotaur was a child of Poseidon, Lord of the Sea, and Pasiphae, Queen in the Cretan Palace at Knossos. To discover the image of the Minotaur as a self-image is also to become one with the divine.
Stein employs Pasiphae’s role as mother of the Minotaur to interpret Picasso’s self-identification with that hybrid figure as an encounter with the semi-divine creative unconscious.
, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998supporting
the mother of the Sun was also called Euryphaessa, ‘the widely shining’
Kerényi’s discussion of lunar and solar epithets for divine mothers provides comparative context for understanding Pasiphae’s own luminous, all-shining name.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951aside