{"id":4296,"date":"2025-11-04T08:54:30","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T13:54:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/?p=4296"},"modified":"2025-11-21T10:22:34","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T15:22:34","slug":"women-of-myth-history-the-greek-sorceress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/2025\/11\/04\/women-of-myth-history-the-greek-sorceress\/","title":{"rendered":"Women of Myth & History: The Greek Sorceress"},"content":{"rendered":"

My fascination with the stories of women in myth and history began with <\/span>Circe<\/span><\/i>. My first exposure to the mythological figure of Circe was in <\/span>The Sea of Monsters, <\/span><\/i>book 2 of the Percy Jackson series. Embarrassingly, it wasn\u2019t until I read the <\/span>Odyssey<\/span><\/i> for the first time my freshman year of high school that I realized the \u201creal\u201d Circe does not, in fact, turn men into <\/span>guinea <\/span><\/i>pigs, but into regular pigs. Misconceptions planted in my mind by Rick Riordan aside, I went into Madeleine Miller\u2019s <\/span>Circe <\/span><\/i>with some understanding of her character.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In Book 10 of Homer\u2019s <\/span>Odyssey, <\/span><\/i>we get the story of Odysseus and his men\u2019s encounters with Circe on the island of Aeaea. She turns almost the entirety of his search party into pigs with magicked food. Only Odysseus\u2019 brother returns to tell him what has happened. On the way to Circe\u2019s home, the god Hermes offers him an herb to protect him from Circe\u2019s enchantment. Odysseus successfully overpowers Circe, and makes her turn his men back into humans. Naturally, the two then become lovers, as Circe is intrigued by Odysseus\u2019 intelligence and Odysseus is apparently quite enamored by magical women he meets on strange islands. After a year, Odysseus and his men depart, and Circe gives Odysseus some advice for his journey at their parting. In addition to her role as a minor goddess and powerful sorceress, Circe is described as being magnificently beautiful, predatory yet intriguing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Homer\u2019s portrayal of Circe is one of a powerful and otherworldly woman, but allows for little depth and complexity outside her love for Odysseus. Miller\u2019s approach, on the other hand, is one that looks at Circe on a deeper level, offering a more holistic view of her character as an individual rather than in regards to her interactions with men. While Madeleine Miller\u2019s <\/span>Circe <\/span><\/i>does include her encounters with Odysseus, it covers much more of Circe\u2019s immortal life than this brief moment. It begins with her lonely childhood as a minor goddess underestimated and ignored by her immediate family and higher gods alike. Miller showcases Circe’s discovery of her power in sorcery and her banishment by Zeus after the intensity of her power became evident. We see Circe\u2019s dealings with gods and famous humans alike, all from the perspective of the first witch in Greek mythology. Miller <\/span>describes her novel<\/span><\/a> as \u201ca story of motherhood, of growth, of love, and of transformation.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Circe<\/span><\/i> was the book that got me specifically into retellings of mythological women, reclaiming their narratives and telling their stories through a modern feminist lens. And while <\/span>Circe <\/span><\/i>couldn\u2019t last forever\u2013the book itself says \u201cSome people are like constellations that only touch the earth for a season\u201d \u2013I fell in love with similar stories, like those I\u2019ll explore in the rest of this series. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My fascination with the stories of women in myth and history began with Circe. My first exposure to the mythological Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2348,"featured_media":4297,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,29,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wwr","category-reviews-recommendations","category-what-were-reading"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2348"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4296"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4298,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4296\/revisions\/4298"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}