Circe’s Cabinet: Pharmacy, Moly and Enchanter’s Nightshade

Every time you walk into a pharmacy, you are using a word that Homer applied to Circe. In Book 10 of the Odyssey, Odysseus’s scouts find her stone house in a forest clearing on the island of Aeaea, surrounded by strangely tame wolves and lions. She welcomes them with a meal — cheese, barley, honey and wine — into which she has stirred what the Greek calls pharmaka. One tap of her wand later, the men have the heads, bristles and grunts of pigs, though their minds stay human. That detail is the cruellest part.

One word, three meanings

The singular is pharmakon, and it is one of the most slippery words in Greek. It can mean a medicine, a poison, a magic potion, a charm, or even a dye. Homer uses it for Circe’s brew and, in the same episode, for the antidote that protects Odysseus. The Greeks did not draw a hard line between the drug that heals and the drug that harms; the same substance could do either, depending on the dose and the hand that gave it.

English inherited the healing side. Pharmacy, pharmacist, pharmaceutical and pharmacology all descend from the same root, through Latin and French. The poisoner’s side survives mostly in scholarship, but it is worth remembering when you read the warnings on a label. Circe would have understood them perfectly.

The herb with a black root

On his way to rescue his crew, Odysseus meets the god Hermes, who hands him a plant to make him immune to Circe’s drugs. Homer describes it precisely: a black root, a flower as white as milk, and so hard to dig up that only the gods can manage it easily. The gods, he says, call it moly. It works. Circe’s potion fails, Odysseus draws his sword, and the goddess, impressed, turns his men back into people — younger and better-looking than before.

What was moly? People have been guessing since antiquity. One modern suggestion, made by two physicians in the 1980s, is the snowdrop, whose bulb contains galantamine, a substance that can counter certain poisons and is used today in medicine. Others have proposed wild garlic or simply a plant that existed only in poetry. The question is open, and probably always will be.

The word did find a home, though. English botanists gave the name moly to a yellow-flowered wild garlic, Allium moly, still grown in gardens. And “moly” survives in literary English for any magic herb that protects against enchantment.

Circe in the Canadian woods

Circe left her name on a plant of her own. Circaea is a genus of small, shade-loving woodland plants with tiny white flowers and burr-like seeds that cling to fur and socks; its common English name is enchanter’s nightshade, a double nod to the goddess (it is not actually related to true nightshades). Two kinds grow wild in Canadian forests: the delicate alpine enchanter’s nightshade, which ranges far north, and a broad-leaved species that botanists call Circaea canadensis. Walk a damp trail in late summer and you may come home with Circe’s seeds stuck to your trousers — a small enchantment, but a persistent one.

Circean, and Circe now

The adjective Circean means bewitching in a dangerous way: alluring, but liable to turn you into something you would rather not be. It is rare, a little old-fashioned and very useful. Circe’s reputation has also changed in our own time. Madeline Miller’s novel Circe (2018) retells the story from the goddess’s side, as a woman alone on an island learning her craft. The word pharmakon fits that version too: she is a healer and a poisoner, and the story is about who gets to decide which.

Notes and sources

1. Homer, Odyssey 10.210–399, with moly at 10.302–306; trans. Samuel Butler (1900) and A. T. Murray (1919), via Perseus.
2. The snowdrop identification of moly was proposed by A. Plaitakis and R. C. Duvoisin (1983); it remains one hypothesis among several.
3. On Circaea in Canada, see provincial flora guides; names follow current botanical usage.