In Women Who Swim with Whales, Circe, island enchantress, niece of the sun god, fluent in flora and fauna, helped birth the Minotaur that defined the age of Minos. Pasiphaë, her sister, craved a sacred white bull. Daedalus, her lover, enabled both the deceptive conception and labyrinthine containment of Asterion, who had a human body and a bull’s head.