Circe Screams a Mythological #MeToo

The #MeToo movement has opened a Pandora’s Box of women’s voices, an explosion of personal narratives into the collective consciousness. Although started as a means to expose men behaving badly in the sexual harassment arena, the hashtag has quickly taken on broader meaning as a door opener to the fact that women’s voices and authentic experiences are throbbing at the gates of contemporary culture, waiting to be heard in all their warts and glory. The largely whitewashed, male-told, or one-dimensional femmes of cinematic and literary past are starting to emerge, mouths wide open, ready to deliver their own sides of the story. One such voice that has been unleashed, through the deliciously rich writing of Madeline Miller, is that of mythology’s first witch in the recent book Circe. We’ve encountered Circe before, in those long annals of myth, the goddess of sorcery, illusion, and necromancy who lived on the mythical island of Aiaia after being banished by Zeus who was intimidated by her unbridled, raw power. We saw her in The Odyssey as the rage-filled woman who turned Odysseus’ men into pigs before safeguarding his own voyage home. But we’ve never heard from Circe herself, or been given a full glimpse into her interior life, until now. When we meet Circe, she is a young girl just on the verge of discovering her innate gifts. A family runt with non-appealing looks, she falls in love with a mortal fisherman. It is through her love for him, and her grand desire to make him a God, that she first discovers her fluidity with Pharmaka, or utilizing nature to create magic. It comes through intuition rather than instruction, catapulting the notion that when a woman is in touch with her interior realm as her most trusted guide, rather than the external world of patriarchal authority and social direction, she is able to become a fully self-individuated force of nature. Once banished to her island, isolated from social contact with nothing other than the roots, woods, trees, and animals, she is free to bloom into a formidable woman who goes on to have many epic encounters with other iconic mythological characters throughout the ages. She is the wild crone in the woods, the forebear to the burnt witches of Salem, the woman less concerned with appearances or reputation because she is being true to her own divine feminine nature. Circe reminds us that feminine nature is not feminism. The divine feminine does not feel a desire to be equal to a man. On the contrary, she is compelled to share her own unique gifts with the world, from a deeply soulful, compassionate, and yet sometimes feral place. Only in being true to herself can a woman truly complement the contributions provided by men, creating a symbiotic dance between the masculine and feminine that is the harmonious foundation for completeness in life. Ultimately, in the end Circe is respected for this unapologetic way of life. As a writer, this has sparked an incredible impetus in my own work, both as a woman and a person concerned with genuineness. It opens my mind to wonder what other great female stories there are imprisoned in the throats of heroines throughout the ages. It makes me conscious of the fact that my own female characters can bloom beyond even the three-dimensional world, into a whole new lexicon for this day and age. Circe goes beyond merely presenting a glorious exploration into the universal witch archetype. The book in fact becomes a metaphor for the alchemy that occurs when a woman cultivates her identity from the inside out and then shares it with the world in full integrity, despite the disturbing of the waters that may occur.