Max Dashu begins the course, Secret History of the Witches, by tracing the roots of the “witch” in ancient European oral traditions. Using Circe as a starting point, Dashu reveals that the word witch became a label to be feared, hunted, or vilified for women that were once goddess figures, priestesses, and healers - revered as guardians of deep knowledge and sacred powers. For example, one of the oldest surviving written sources about a “witch” figure is Homer’s Odyssey. But even here, Circe - Kirkē in Greek - isn’t originally a witch at all. She is a Titanis, an immortal goddess from a lineage that predates the Olympians. In the shift from matrilineal, nature-centered myth to patriarchal order, her power is reframed as dangerous and deceptive.

Dashu turns us to The Odyssey, where Kirkē is described as polypharmakos - “skilled in many enchantments” - and is known for her potent potions and magic words. She lives alone in a sacred forest, surrounded by and speaking to the plants, lions, wolves, and river nymphs. Eons before the messy interpretations of later folklore, she is portrayed as an awe-inspiring goddess of nature, mystery, and language. Yet, when Odysseus and his men arrive she becomes feared. The Greek poets turn her story into a warning: a lone, powerful woman is a threat to male authority.

We also see early artistic depictions of Circe as African, particularly in vase paintings from Thebes around 500 BCE. These show her as a weaver, echoing Homer’s description of her singing at her loom, creating a great, imperishable web, the work of a goddess. This imagery preserves memory of her sacred origins even as the story recasts her as a sorceress. These vases are the earliest visual traces of the witch’s wand and the potion-filled cauldron - symbols that would evolve and persist for millennia.

From Circe, Dashu moves to her niece, Medea, who belongs to a lineage of old nature goddesses. She is a granddaughter of Helios, the sun god, and serves as a priestess in a sacred grove in Colchis (modern-day Georgia), home to a dragon with whom she shares a powerful communion. Ancient poets such as Pindar describe her as breathing prophetic words from her immortal mouth. Yet again, her divinity is diminished in the retellings throughout history.

Medea's knowledge of herbs, potions, and resurrection marks her as a master of regenerative power. In early iconography, she is shown reviving animals - and even people - in her cauldron. One famous story depicts her demonstrating this power to an aging king by reviving a ram. But the tale twists: after gaining his trust, she tricks his daughters into killing him under the promise of renewal. Here, her role as healer and priestess is transformed into that of a cunning villain. As with Circe, the depiction becomes darker the more her autonomy and authority threaten male control.

These stories, Dashu emphasizes, are not simply myths. They are traces of earlier cultural memories. Of oral traditions in which powerful women held sacred roles in community and cosmology. The demonization of Medea reached its apex in Euripides’ Medea, where she is blamed for killing her own children. But this account was challenged even in antiquity: the Corinthians, who had a shrine to Medea and her children, rejected that version as slander. In their lore, she remained a venerated figure.

Despite the bends and distortions, this revival hints at older traditions where these women were not witches in the modern sense, but custodians of life, death, and transformation.