It is in this unconscious shadow aspect that we meet the Minotaur. Although, Umberto Eco makes a strangely entertaining suggestion that there has to be a Minotaur in his ‘Linear Labyrinth’
‘there has to be a Minotaur, just to make the experience interesting, seeing that the pathway through it (setting aside the initial disorientation of Theseus, who doesn’t know where it will lead) always leads to where it has to lead and can’t lead anywhere else’.
However, this does significantly downplay the psychological and mythical importance of the Minotaur. Daedalus created the Labyrinth to hide the Minotaur from society. This is our repressed, dark and even evil side.
As for what this monster connotes, the Minotaur is most commonly viewed as a symbol of destruction. When Theseus slays the Minotaur, he metaphorically kills death, and so the monster represents evil personified, a dark and terrible beast. According to myth, the labyrinth was built to hide the Minotaur, this aberration of nature, to hide the scandalous evidence of its birth.
The similarities between the labyrinth and Dante’s Hell, with its concentric rings guarded by Lucifer at the centre, are abundantly clear. The two figures are often depicted as beasts; here the Minotaur getting the torso of a man.
If we look to Dante we can see this in the way he talks
“Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straightway was lost. Ah, how hard it is to tell what that wood was, wild, rugged, harsh; the very thought of it renews the fear! It is so bitter that death is hardly more so. But, to treat of the good that I found in it, I will tell of the other things I saw there./ I cannot rightly say how I entered it, I was so full of sleep at the moment I left the true way;…”
This theme was recently explored in the movie Inception. The story involves various dream states; one of the characters is Ariadne or the architect (the same named heroine that gives Theseus the Golden Thread to escape the Labyrinth).