30 You might further recall (from, e.g., Ovid’s Metamorphoses) that this bull ends up begetting on Minos’s queen the Minotaur, a hideous teratoid monster who has to be secreted in a special labyrinth and propitiated with human flesh, and who basically symbolizes the moral rot at the heart of Minos’s reign. That rot is, as Joseph Campbell describes it, a certain kind of alienated selfishness:
The return of the bull should have symbolized Minos’ selfless submission to the functions of his role. By the sacrilege of the refusal of the rite [of sacrifice], however, the individual cuts himself as a unit off from the larger whole of the community…. He is the hoarder of the general benefit. He is the monster avid for the greedy rights of “my and mine.”