The Bull From the Sea

Reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces and was struck by this passage, about Minos of Crete, who did not, as he had promised, sacrifice the bull sent by Poseidon in answer to his prayer; the consequence was the birth of the Minotaur to his wife Pasiphae

He had converted a pubic event to personal gain, whereas the whole sense of his investiture as king had been that he was no longer a mere private person. The return of the bull should have symbolized his absolutely selfless submission to the functions of this role. The retaining of it represented, on the other hand, an impulse to egocentric self-aggrandizement. And so the king "by the grace of God" became the dangerous tyrant Holdfast -- out for himself. . . . By the sacrilege of the refusal of the rite, however. the individual cut himself as a unit off from the larger unit of the whole community, and so the One was broken into many and these then battled each other -- each out for himself -- and could be governed only by force.

Think about that for a while.