Ecology of the minotaur: cults and herds

While many minotaurs are solitary monsters that endless haunt the halls of their accursed mazes or aimlessly rule over them like the beast in Beauty and the Beast or the ogre in Puss in Boots, others form social groups.

Cults of Baphomet

The traditional depiction of minotaur "society" has most commonly been the cult of Baphomet, who fantasy gaming made into the god of minotaurs. In traditional gaming lore, a minotaur or group of closely related minotaurs live in a maze. Since they are an all-male race of cannibals, they reproduce by abducting human females, raping and impregnating them, then eating the poor girls once they no longer serve a purpose. According to 5th edition, minotaurs were originally (and still are being) created by subjecting human cultists to a ritual that made them minotaurs and their descendants inherited this without needing to perform the ritual over every new birth.

As I said before, I do not want to treat the minotaurs as just another race of beastfolk and I feel that a convoluted ecology makes them less magical and drags them further from their mythological roots. So at least in my setting, the cults of Baphomet have to perform the rites whenever they wish to make a minotaur. Because of the profound physical and mental changes, adult initiates will demonstrate a weaker self-preservation instinct compared to those transformed as children or unborn. Although the ritual may hypothetically be performed on women, the orthodox cult seems to only recruit men.

Herds

Herds are a social structure introduced in the third party product Maze of the Minotaur: Masters & Minions, Horde Book 2. There minotaur herds are structured in a manner reminiscent of lion prides and to a lesser degree beehives. The social statuses or castes afford to minotaurs include bull lord (the leader of a herd), minotaur (which I label "brave" to distinguish it), minotrice (female minotaur), minotrice maze mage and tauron (underdeveloped minotaurs used for manual labor). Due to influence from Mazes & Minotaurs, in my setting the castes display various degrees of anthropomorphism and mutation.

Now you may have noticed a contradiction. Masters & Minions gave the minotaurs a naturalistic ecology (at least more so than their disturbing AD&D ecology) and I previously criticized naturalistic ecology as being unnecessary. Well, now I am being a hypocrite and including both cursed minotaurs and a naturalistic ecology in the same setting.

To be honest the herd ecology is not really natural: it is being artificially maintained above and beyond the standard curse. Normally the curse is never so consistently prevalent across generations as to create a self-sustaining race. Alternately, these herdfolk are bovine beastfolk that suffer the curse of the minotaur. Either way it results in the herd society as laid out in Masters & Minions. I would not sweat the details too much.

To be detailed...

• Tribes (Herdfolk)
• Minoans (Golden Minotaurs)