Circe, sorceress in love

I. Female divinities associated with magic

Book X of the epic poem The Odyssey helps to cement the image of Circe as a fearsome sorceress, the seductive woman as an obstacle in the path of the hero who wishes to return home. The goddess is depicted as an expert in the magical arts for her knowledge of potions and spells that transform men into animals. To defeat her, Ulysses will have to use not only his strength, but especially the mysterious moly plant, whose species is still a matter of speculation. It has been suggested that the transformation into an animal would have been figurative, due to some kind of hallucinogen, and that the moly would have acted as an antidote. 

This would in keeping to the widespread use in Antiquity of pharmakeía, the use of plants for magical purposes, but also for healing since the boundaries between medicine and magic were still blurred. Circe is portrayed as powerful, not so much to convey an image of empowerment, but because she displays a knowledge that is considered threatening to the male protagonist, capable of literally robbing him of his virility, as a divinity warns the hero. Ulysses defeats Circe through moly and violence, using fear as a mechanism of male control over female, as she appears in this image, fleeing in fear from Ulysses while dropping her wand and her jar of mixtures. Circe is presented as an archetypal Other due to her status as a woman and a sorceress, paving the way for other misogynistic representations of famous witches already in Antiquity. However, in her subsequent reception, we do find representations of Circe that attempt to give her a voice of her own, with one of the most recent and representative examples being Circe (2018) by the American author Madeline Miller.

Carlos Sánchez Pérez