Circe

Circe was born into one of the most powerful divine families in the Greek cosmos. Her father was Helios, the ancient Titan god of the sun who rose each morning from the Oceanus River in the East and descended into it again at night, his chariot drawn by four fire-breathing horses. Her mother was Perse, an Oceanid nymph of the vast salt sea, one of the three thousand daughters of Oceanus and Tethys who personified the rivers and springs of the world. Her siblings were no less formidable. Her sister Pasiphae married King Minos of Crete and became the mother of Ariadne, who helped Theseus escape the Labyrinth, and the Minotaur, the half-man half-bull monster born of Pasiphae's union with a sacred white bull. Her brother Aeetes ruled Colchis as king and guarded the Golden Fleece, the magical ram's hide that Jason and the Argonauts would later steal. Her niece Medea, daughter of Aeetes, became the most feared sorceress in Greek legend, a woman who murdered her own brother and later her own children. Circe herself was the most powerful of them all, a goddess of magic whose knowledge of herbs, potions, and transformation spells surpassed even her famous niece's.

She made her home on the island of Aeaea, a place of lush vegetation and tamed beasts in the distant East, not far from the entrance to the Underworld where the dead walked. Around her palace prowled lions and wolves that were strangely docile, animals that may have been men she had transformed or beasts she had tamed with her arts. She lived alone, without a husband, father, or guardian to command her, a condition that made her both free and dangerous in the eyes of the patriarchal Greek world. She wove on an enormous loom, singing as she worked, and her voice was the first thing that travelers heard as they approached her palace through the dense wood. Her epithet in Homer was polypharmakos, "knowing many drugs or charms," and her expertise was total. She could transform humans into animals, cast illusions to obscure the sun and moon, invoke the darkness of Nyx, and communicate with the dead through necromancy. She was a pharmakis, a practitioner of the magical arts who used the natural world not as a healer but as a weapon, and her knowledge made her the most terrifying woman a Greek man could imagine.

The most famous encounter in her long life came when Odysseus, the king of Ithaca and hero of the Trojan War, landed on Aeaea after losing eleven of his twelve ships and most of his men to the cannibalistic Laestrygonians, a race of giant man-eaters who had destroyed his fleet with boulders hurled from the cliffs. Starved and desperate, Odysseus sent a party of scouts to find food on the island. The men found Circe's palace in a clearing, surrounded by the docile beasts, and heard her singing as she wove. She invited them inside with a smile, offered them a feast of cheese and meal sweetened with honey and laced with wine, and then, when they had eaten their fill, she struck them with her wand and transformed them into swine. Their minds remained human, trapped in the bodies of pigs, and she drove them into her pigsty. Only Eurylochus, Odysseus's brother-in-law, had stayed outside out of suspicion, and he fled back to the ship to tell the horror of what he had seen.

Odysseus set out alone to rescue his men, and on the path to Circe's palace he met Hermes, the messenger god who moved between the worlds of gods and men with winged sandals on his feet. Hermes gave him a magical plant called moly, with a black root and a white flower, a gift from the gods that would protect him from Circe's transformation spell. He also told Odysseus exactly what would happen: Circe would offer him the drugged cup, the moly would prevent the spell from working, and when she struck him with her wand he must draw his sword and act as if he would attack her. If he did this, she would beg for mercy, and then he must make her swear a great oath by the gods that she would not harm him or his men in any way. Odysseus followed the plan precisely. The potion failed, the wand struck and did nothing, he drew his sword, and Circe fell to her knees. He made her swear the oath, and she restored his men to human form. But then something unexpected happened. Circe, defeated and bound by her oath, offered Odysseus her bed, and he accepted. For a full year he stayed on Aeaea, feasting with his men in her halls, sleeping in her chamber, and fathering three sons upon her: Telegonus, Agrius, and Latinus. The year passed in pleasure, and only when his men reminded him of home did Odysseus remember Ithaca and ask to leave.

When Odysseus finally resolved to depart, Circe did not merely let him go. She became his guide through the most dangerous part of his journey. She told him he must first visit the Underworld, the realm of Hades, the god of the dead, to consult the ghost of the blind prophet Tiresias, who alone could tell him how to reach home safely. She taught him the rituals to summon the dead, the sacrifices to make, the protections to wear, and the words to speak. She was his mystagogue, the priestess who initiates the uninitiated into the secret rites of a mystery cult, and through her guidance Odysseus became the first living mortal to enter the Underworld and return with knowledge from the dead. When he came back, she warned him of the Sirens, the singing creatures whose voices lured sailors to destruction on the rocks, and told him how to survive them by having his men plug their ears with beeswax while he himself was tied to the mast. She warned him of Scylla and Charybdis, the two monsters of the strait, advising him to steer closer to Scylla's cliff and lose six men rather than risk Charybdis's whirlpool and lose the entire ship. She warned him of the island of Thrinacia, where the sacred cattle of Helios, her own father, grazed, and told him that if any of his men harmed those cattle, destruction would follow. Every warning she gave came true, and without her counsel Odysseus would never have survived the journey home. Yet her final prophecy was the darkest of all. She told him that after he returned to Ithaca and reclaimed his kingdom from the suitors who had overrun his palace, he must take an oar inland until he found a people who did not know the sea, and there plant the oar as a sign to Poseidon. Only then would his wanderings end and death come to him from the sea, gentle and painless in his old age.</p>

Circe's story did not end with Odysseus's departure. She raised their sons on Aeaea, and when Telegonus grew to manhood she armed him with a spear tipped with the spine of a stingray, a weapon of poison and treachery, and sent him to find his father. Telegonus landed on Ithaca in a storm, ravaged the island for food, and in the ensuing fight mortally wounded Odysseus with the very spear his mother had given him. The prophecy of death from the sea was fulfilled, but not as Odysseus had imagined. Telegonus, grief-stricken upon recognizing his father, carried the body back to Aeaea, and there Circe performed a ritual that granted immortality to Odysseus's widow Penelope and their son Telemachus. In the strange resolution that followed, Telegonus married Penelope, and Telemachus married Circe herself, a union that bound the two families together in the most unexpected way. Circe also played a role in the story of Jason and the Argonauts, purifying Jason and her niece Medea for the murder of Absyrtus, Medea's brother, whom they had dismembered to delay her father's pursuit. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, she appeared as the jealous lover of the sea-god Glaucus, poisoning the water where the nymph Scylla bathed and transforming her into the six-headed monster that would later terrorize the strait. She turned the Italian king Picus into a woodpecker for rejecting her advances, and in every tale she was the same figure: a woman of absolute power who punished those who crossed her and rewarded those who respected her knowledge. From the eighth-century verses of Homer to the novels of the twenty-first century, from the warning against drunkenness in medieval moralists to the feminist reclamation of her as a symbol of female autonomy, Circe has remained the most complex and compelling witch in the Western imagination, the goddess who proved that knowledge, not strength, was the greatest power in the world.