There are lots of different strains of witches in literature, from the hag (Macbeth’s Weird Sisters) to the foreign witch (Sycorax and Medea) to Circe’s own type, the sexy witch. But they all have one thing in common: they are women with more power than other people—men especially—think they should have.

This is why the Greeks needed myth: for that boundary, to know where they stood amidst the infinite. No one can simply coexist with the ocean, storms, the cypress trees. They had to codify the elements with language and greater meaning, and create gods out of them—gods who looked suspiciously like themselves—so that even if they were powerless over