Circe: The Woman Behind the Witch

by Tanja Cilia

There is something unsettling about Circe. Perhaps it is the magic. Or perhaps it is the uncomfortable possibility that, beneath the familiar story of the enchantress, there is a woman we have never really tried to understand.

Circe is usually depicted as a witch: beautiful, dangerous and sexually powerful, living alone on the island of Aeaea, and turning unfortunate men into animals. She appears in The Odyssey as an obstacle in Odysseus’ long journey home, before becoming his lover and hostess. 

In later mythology, she becomes even more complicated. She is associated with Scylla’s transformation into a monster, with the purification of Jason and Medea after murder, and with the transformation of the ever-faithful King Picus into a woodpecker. This is an impressive collection of crimes.

But, like history, mythology has always depended upon whose side of the story we are hearing.

Circe was the daughter of Helios, the Titan god of the sun, and Perse, one of the Oceanids. Her family was formidable. Her brother Aeëtes became king of Colchis, and Gardian of the Golden Fleece; her sister Pasiphaë became the mother of the Minotaur; and her niece Medea became perhaps the most notorious female sorceress in Greek mythology.

 Hers was not an ordinary family. The House of Helios seems almost designed to produce stories about women whose powers frighten the people around them.

It is worth pausing over that idea, because mythology has a curious habit of treating powerful women differently from powerful men. Male heroes are celebrated for their strength, their cunning, and even their violence. Heracles kills his family in a divinely induced madness, yet remains the greatest of heroes. Odysseus is admired for his intelligence despite his deceptions. Zeus himself is responsible for countless acts that would be condemned in any mortal, yet his authority is rarely questioned.

Women, however, often become dangerous simply by refusing to remain within the roles expected of them. A woman with knowledge becomes a witch. A woman with authority becomes a tyrant. A woman with independence becomes a threat. Circe inherits all three accusations. 

Perhaps this explains why her reputation has endured so stubbornly. It is easier to remember the enchantress than the exile, easier to remember the sorcery than the solitude. Yet the two cannot truly be separated. Her magic grows in the same soil as her loneliness. 

And yet... Circe is different. She is not simply a goddess of destruction. She is a woman searching for somewhere to belong.

Her story is, at its heart, a story of exile. In many ancient versions of the myth, Circe is banished to Aeaea because of her use of magic. The details vary between sources, as they so often do with Greek mythology, but the essential image remains: Circe is banished from the world of the gods.

There is something deeply significant about that. Aeaea is not merely a magical setting. It is isolation made physical. 

Circe lives alone, surrounded by forests and animals. In The Odyssey, lions and wolves gather around her palace, apparently tame. Later interpretations have suggested that these animals may themselves have once been men. Whether or not we accept that literally, the image is revealing. Circe’s world is populated by creatures, but she remains fundamentally alone. She has power, but power is not the same thing as belonging. 

This is where we should begin to look at her differently. We tend to assume that anyone with extraordinary power must also possess extraordinary self-confidence. Circe complicates that assumption. She has magic, but she spends much of her story wondering who she is, where she belongs, and whether she is deserving of being loved. That makes her strangely human.

Her family certainly does not offer her much comfort. The immortals surrounding her are cold, proud, and dismissive. Her voice is mocked, her nature is questioned, and her attempts to find acceptance repeatedly fail. 

She is an outsider long before she becomes the mysterious woman on the island.

Loneliness changes people. Sometimes it makes them gentle. Sometimes it makes them defensive. Sometimes it makes them both.

There is another curious feature of Circe's magic that deserves attention. She almost never creates anything from nothing. Instead, she transforms. Men become pigs. Scylla becomes a monster. Picus becomes a woodpecker. Even Glaucos is transformed from fisherman into sea god. Change, rather than destruction, lies at the heart of her art.

Transformation occupies a special place within Greek mythology. Ovid's Metamorphoses is built upon the idea that identity is never entirely fixed. Gods become animals. Humans become trees, rivers, stars and flowers. Physical transformation often reveals an emotional or moral truth. Seen in that light, Circe's spells become strangely symbolic. She does not simply alter appearances; she exposes hidden aspects of character.

Whether Homer intended such an interpretation is impossible to know. Yet later generations have often observed that the men transformed into swine display appetites that are already present within them. The spell makes visible what was previously concealed. That idea has proved remarkably enduring because it reflects a timeless human anxiety: that beneath civilisation there remains something instinctive and animal.

Perhaps Circe's greatest power is not changing people into something they are not, but confronting them with what they might already be.

It is tempting to dismiss Circe’s relationships with men as evidence of her manipulative nature. But that interpretation overlooks something fundamental: Circe wants to be loved. Surely nothing is monstrous about that.

Her first great attachment is to Glaucos, a mortal fisherman whom she transforms into a god after falling in love with him. Her magic is partly an attempt to make herself worthy of love, and partly an attempt to give the person she loves what he wants. It does not work, because Glaucos chooses another woman, Scylla.

This is where Circe’s story becomes darker. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Circe responds to Glaucos’ rejection by transforming Scylla into the monstrous creature we later encounter in the mythology of Odysseus. She poisons the pool in which Scylla bathes, and when the beautiful young woman enters the water, monsters emerge from her body. It is difficult to defend Circe here. Jealousy can explain cruelty, but it does not excuse it. But Circe is fully human: compassionate, lonely, jealous, loving, vindictive, and ultimately capable of growth.

Yet understanding someone does not require us to approve of everything she does. Perhaps that is precisely the point. Circe is neither saint, nor monster. She is complicated, and capable of tenderness, terrible mistakes, jealousy and courage. Women in mythology are rarely afforded the luxury of being complicated.

The story for which Circe is best known has Odysseus and his surviving men arrive at Aeaea after a disastrous voyage. They have already endured the man-eating Laestrygonians, and lost eleven of their twelve ships. Only one remains.

Odysseus sends a scouting party into the island, led by Eurylochus. They discover Circe’s palace.

She welcomes them, feeds them, and gives them a potion designed to rob them of judgement before transforming them into swine.Eurylochus, who has remained outside because he suspects something is wrong, runs back to Odysseus in terror. 

Odysseus goes to confront Circe, but on the way he meets Hermes. The god gives him the mysterious herb moly, which protects him from Circe’s magic. 

When Circe tries to transform him, the spell fails. Odysseus draws his sword, and Circe is defeated.

And then, rather weirdly, the story changes direction. She restores the men to human form. Odysseus and Circe become lovers, and he and his crew remain on Aeaea for almost a year. Circe eventually helps Odysseus continue his journey, even advising him on how to travel safely through the Underworld.

The woman who began as an enemy becomes an ally. There is something worth noticing here. Circe does not remain the villain. So why do we insist on remembering her as one?

The traditional answer is simple: she turned men into pigs... which is not that big of a deal, often enough. 

Part of the answer may lie in the perspective from which the story is told. The Odyssey is, unsurprisingly, Odysseus' story. Every character exists primarily in relation to his journey home. Circe enters the narrative as one more challenge to be overcome, just as Polyphemus, the Sirens, or Charybdis must be overcome. We rarely stop to ask what the story looks like from her point of view.

Imagine the arrival from Circe's perspective instead. A solitary woman lives on an isolated island. Suddenly, armed strangers appear at her door. They vastly outnumber her. She has no city walls, no army, and no allies. Magic is not merely her gift; it is her means of survival.

Seen in that light, the encounter becomes less straightforward than the traditional retelling suggests. Odysseus is undoubtedly the hero of the poem, but heroes are not necessarily harmless visitors. The boundary between self-defence and hostility becomes much harder to define than the simple label of "wicked witch" allows.

The ancient sources do not give us the psychological explanation that modern readers often want. But later retellings, particularly Madeline Miller’s Circe, explore the possibility that Circe’s violence is connected to her experiences with men who arrive on her island and abuse her hospitality.

This is a significant reinterpretation. It turns the pig transformation from an arbitrary act of female wickedness into something closer to self-defence. Again, that does not make every act of violence acceptable. It does, however, force us to re-consider the circumstances.

After all, Zeus’s law of hospitality cuts both ways. In the ancient world, a stranger at your door was to be welcomed because he might be a god in disguise. Hospitality was sacred. But what happens when the stranger abuses the person who welcomes him?

Penelope provides an interesting contrast. She is expected to tolerate hundreds of suitors who consume her household’s wealth and threaten her son. She is trapped in her own home. Circe has no such cage; but she has magic. Perhaps the spells are her locked door. 

Circe’s family makes her even more interesting. Her sister Pasiphaë gives birth to the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull creature imprisoned in the Labyrinth. Her brother Aeëtes guards the Golden Fleece, and his daughter Medea becomes a formidable sorceress in her own right. 

The women of this family repeatedly cross boundaries between the human and the monstrous. But they do so in very different ways. Pasiphaë’s story produces a monster through desire. Medea uses magic in the service of love, betrayal and revenge. 

 Circe transforms others, but gradually becomes more interested in transformation of the self. That distinction matters.

 Circe’s niece Medea comes to her after helping Jason steal the Golden Fleece, and after the murder of her brother Apsyrtus. Circe performs the ritual purification required to cleanse Medea and Jason of their blood guilt, but she is horrified by what they have done, and sends them away.

 Even here, Circe is neither wholly merciful nor wholly cruel. She fulfils her duty, but she retains her judgement.

 The same ambiguity appears in the story of Picus. Circe falls in love with the handsome King, but he rejects her because he is faithful to his wife, Canens. Circe responds by transforming him into a woodpecker.

 Again, she cannot accept rejection gracefully. Again, she goes way too far. Perhaps Circe’s greatest weakness is that she desperately wants love, but does not understand that love cannot be compelled. That may be one of the most painfully human things about her.

 Modern retellings have done something remarkable. Madeline Miller’s Circe does not erase Circe’s mistakes. Instead, it gives them context, wherein Circe’s story becomes one of growing into herself.

She begins as someone desperate for approval. She wants the love of her family. She wants the admiration of the gods. She wants the affection of mortals. She wants to be Chosen. Eventually, she discovers that being chosen by someone else is not the same thing as choosing yourself.

Mortals become particularly important to her because they are capable of something the gods are not: change. The gods are immortal, but immortality does not necessarily make them admirable. They remain trapped in themselves, repeating the same patterns. Mortals, by contrast, grow old, make mistakes, lose people and begin again.

Circe becomes fascinated by this, and that is why she becomes increasingly human. Her exile, initially a punishment, becomes a kind of education.

On Aeaea, she learns to practise her magic and she learns to survive alone. She learns motherhood, and experiences grief and love. She makes dreadful mistakes, and faces the consequences. Most importantly, she begins to understand that she does not have to remain the person other people decide she is. Her power changes because she changes.

I would hesitate to describe Circe simply as a victim of circumstances. Victimhood is too passive a word for her. She is a woman who has suffered, been rejected, exiled, humiliated, isolated, and betrayed. But these incidents do not define her. 

 She could be jealous and vindictive, and that is a part of what makes her a formidable adversary...  and a heroine. Heroines do not have to be perfect. In fact, perfection would make Circe far less interesting.  

It is perhaps no coincidence that modern readers have embraced Circe so enthusiastically. Contemporary audiences are often suspicious of stories that divide women into saints or villains. We recognise that people are rarely so simple. The most compelling characters are those who make serious mistakes, learn from them, and continue living with the consequences.

Circe belongs comfortably among those figures. She is not admirable because she is flawless. She is admirable because she changes. Unlike many of the immortals surrounding her, she refuses to remain trapped by the identity imposed upon her. Every disappointment becomes part of her education. Every rejection teaches her something about herself. Her exile, once intended as punishment, ultimately grants her the freedom to discover who she is without the expectations of gods or family.

There is a quiet irony in that. The island that appears to imprison her becomes the place where she finally grows free.

That is why Circe continues to fascinate us. The story of the witch who turns men into pigs is entertaining. But the story of a lonely woman who has been given enormous power but very little guidance, is something else entirely. It asks us to consider what happens when someone who has been hurt discovers that she can hurt others.

Suffering does not make cruelty inevitable, but it makes it understandable, and Circe eventually learns the difference. Her greatest transformation is therefore not turning men into animals; it is the transformation of herself: from an exile desperate to be accepted, into a woman capable of standing alone.

That is why she deserves our sympathy. She is recognisably human in a world of gods. She wants to be loved, and to belong. Eventually, she stops asking whether she is worthy of being loved by others, and begins to decide what kind of life she wants for herself. 

She is a survivor. She was exiled, but she made a home. She was rejected, but she learned to choose. She was feared, but she learned not to fear herself.

After everything that happened to her, we can forgive her for getting love wrong once or twice... After all, haven’t many of us done so, too?