Pasiphae was born to Helios, the Titan who drove his four-horse chariot across the sky each day, and Perse, an Oceanid nymph of the vast salt sea, one of the daughters of the Titan Oceanus. Her brothers were Aeetes, who later became king of Colchis and father of the sorceress Medea, and Perses, while her sister was Circe, the enchantress who lived on the island of Aeaea and used magic to transform men into beasts. Pasiphae married Minos, the son of Zeus and Europa who had become king of Crete after receiving a sign from Poseidon, and together they ruled from the palace at Knossos, the centre of Minoan power. Their children included Ariadne, Phaedra, Androgeus, Catreus, Deucalion, and Glaucus, a royal family that would shape the legends of the Aegean for generations.

The tragedy of Pasiphae began with her husband's pride. When Minos asked Poseidon to send a bull from the sea as proof of his divine right to rule, the god sent a magnificent white bull. Minos promised to sacrifice it, but he kept it for himself and offered a lesser animal instead. Poseidon, enraged by this broken vow, cursed Pasiphae with an irresistible passion for the white bull. Desperate, she turned to Daedalus, the master craftsman who had built the dancing floor for her daughter Ariadne at Knossos. Daedalus constructed a hollow wooden cow so lifelike that it deceived the bull itself, and from this union the Minotaur was born, a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man, whom some called Asterion after the former king of Crete. Minos, horrified, commanded Daedalus to build the Labyrinth, a vast maze beneath the palace where the monster was imprisoned, and there it fed on human flesh until Theseus slew it.

But Pasiphae was not merely a victim of divine cruelty. She was a sorceress in her own right, skilled in the use of drugs and incantations, and when Minos took other lovers she turned her magic against him. She cursed him so that whenever he lay with another woman he ejaculated snakes, scorpions, and millipedes that killed his lovers or prevented them from conceiving. The curse was eventually broken when Procris, the wife of Cephalus who had fled Athens after a misunderstanding, gave Minos a drug that rendered him safe, though her own story ended in tragedy when Cephalus accidentally killed her while hunting. Pasiphae's vengeance was as terrible as the curse she herself had suffered, a mirror of the monstrous forces that swirled through the court at Knossos.

The Minotaur remained in the Labyrinth for years, fed by the tribute of seven young men and seven young women sent every nine years from Athens after Minos's son Androgeus was killed there. Pasiphae watched as her daughter Ariadne gave Theseus the thread that would lead him back out of the maze. When Theseus killed the Minotaur and fled with Ariadne, the monster that had defined Pasiphae's motherhood was gone, but the shame of its birth remained. Her other children met fates no less tragic: Phaedra would later marry Theseus and die by her own hand after falling in love with his son Hippolytus, while Androgeus had already been killed in Athens. The royal house of Minos was marked by divine curses from generation to generation.

Pasiphae's story does not end with a dramatic death. She remained queen of Crete, the daughter of the sun who had borne a monster and survived. In later centuries, her name became a byword for unnatural desire and the terrible consequences of broken vows between kings and gods. Her sister Circe would enchant Odysseus, her brother Aeetes would guard the Golden Fleece, and her daughter Medea would become the most notorious sorceress in Greek myth, but Pasiphae's own legacy was the Minotaur, the creature that turned her womb into a prison as terrible as the Labyrinth itself. Every retelling of the bull of Crete carries the shadow of the woman who loved a beast and gave birth to a legend.