Circe Coloring Pages
I know!!!! There's WAY too much text on this page for a coloring site (ignore it if you like!), but I've always been a fan of Circe and have been imagining and reimagining her for years. And that's before I read the absolutely incredible book about her by Madelline Miller. I'm obsessed.
If you're sharing these stories with younger children, my favorite to share is Strangers... it's a bit of a sweeter version of the scary witch from the Odyssey who turns men into pigs (that story is in Hero)... in Strangers we end up with Circe turning some messy, oblivious men (who tramp dirt on her floors!) into kittens and puppies who grow up to be (sort of lazy and harmless) lions and wolves which I think resonates better with younger kids.
Jump to: Beginnings | Her Home | Her Gift | Strangers | Family | Hero | Endings
Because the page is so long, I've listed the most well known images right off the bat without much context.
If you scroll past that you'll find text describing Circe's entire life with images to go along. While some versions of Circe's stories are more adult, I've tried to gentle some of the more mature moments to keep things suitable for children. In my opinion, this entire section is suitable and interesting for all ages. The coloring pages are designed with a 10-12 year old in mind but are still beautiful and complicated enough for grandma (me!) to enjoy coloring.
Circe's Story
Between Sun and Sea
Circe was the daughter of Helios, the sun god, and Perse, a sea nymph, and she was a quiet girl who noticed small things.
Every morning her father rose from the eastern edge of the world and drove his golden chariot across the sky, and every evening he sank into the western sea. He was too bright to look at for long, so Circe learned his face in other ways. She knew it from the long shadows on the sand and from the way the water turned the color of hammered copper at sunset.
Her mother’s world lay below the waves. It was cool and green and slow, with rippled sand and drifting weed, and light that came down in wavering ribbons. Perse taught her the names of the currents and how to hear a tide turning before it turned.
Circe loved them both, but she began to notice that she didn’t quite fit either place. Her father’s road was too high and too bright to rest on, and her mother’s halls were lovely, but she couldn’t stay in them the way her mother could. She belonged to the shore in between, and on the shore she was always a visitor.
One evening she sat at the edge of the water, watching the sun go down.
“Where is the place that is mine?” she asked her mother.
Perse looked at her for a long moment. “Where you can see us both,” she said.
So Circe went looking. She walked along many coasts and crossed many strips of water, and none of them felt right until she came to an island far from anywhere.
Its valley was green and quiet, with a clear stream running through it and pale rock rising in soft slopes on either side. At noon the sun stood straight above it, and at dusk the sea shone on every side, so that the same light lit the sky and the water.
Circe stood still in the middle of the valley. Above her was her father’s sun, and all around her was her mother’s sea, and for the first time she didn’t feel like a visitor. She chose to stay.
The Marble Palace
Circe had a valley and nothing to put in it, so she started to build.
She wanted a house of marble, white and cool like the pale rock above the stream. It took her a long time. She laid the floor herself, in small squares of black and white stone, and it never came out as even as she wanted, though after a while she decided she liked it better that way.
Then came the halls, wide ones with ceilings high enough for the morning light to get in. She made couches and studded them with silver, and when they were done she sat on each one in turn to see which was best and never could decide. She set out golden dishes on a long table, though so far only she had eaten from them.
The loom came last. She put it near the open doorway, where the light fell right across it. Weaving was slow going at first, and the threads tangled and the pattern slid sideways, but she kept at it, and one day the cloth came off the loom so fine and bright that it seemed to hold the light itself. It was the kind of cloth only a goddess could make, and there was nobody to tell her so.
She sang while she worked. She never planned to, and the songs just came up out of her, some half remembered from the sea and some she was making up as she went. The valley seemed to like them, and birds sat on the windowsill to listen.
Anyone passing might have thought she’d be lonely, but she wasn’t. In the morning the sun came through the doorway and lay across her loom, and she knew whose light it was. In the evening she walked down to the shore and the sea came up over her feet, cool and familiar, and she knew whose water that was. They were both still with her, and she just didn’t have to choose anymore.
One evening she stood in the middle of her empty hall.
“It’s a good house,” she said.
The sea hushed against the shore, and the last of the light slid across the floor.
“Yes,” she said. “I think so too.”
Her Gift
The valley was full of plants Circe had never seen before, and she wanted to know every one of them.
She went out each morning with a basket. She learned them slowly, by smell first and then by taste, a leaf at a time. Some were bitter and some were sweet. One made her tongue tingle for an hour, and another put her to sleep in the grass until the shadows had gone long.
She learned that she wasn’t ordinary. A bruised leaf in her hand gave off a faint shimmer, and a herb she crushed into the stream turned the water a strange pale green. Her mother’s sea and her father’s sun had both left something in her, and she could feel it when she held the plants, like a hum.
Near the stream grew a tree with a straight, smooth branch that had fallen on its own. She picked it up, and it fit her hand as if it had been waiting. When she touched it to a stone, the stone shivered.
That frightened her a little, and she put the branch down and didn’t touch it for three days.
When she did, she went carefully. She took a small snail from the garden wall and set it on a flat rock. She touched it with the wand and said the word that had come to her, and the snail became a smooth gray pebble.
Circe stared at it. Then she touched the pebble, said the word backward, and the snail was back. It pulled in its horns, offended, and began to creep away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to know.”
She sat for a while after that, watching the snail go.
“I won’t change anything I can’t change back,” she said aloud. The valley took it in, and the stream went on running.
That evening a sparrow flew in through the open door and landed on her loom. One wing hung wrong, and it looked at her, too tired to flutter. Circe crushed a leaf into a cup of water, touched the wand to the bird, and spoke softly. The wing straightened, and the sparrow shook itself and sat on her shoulder for a moment before it flew off into the dusk.
She watched it go, and then she went back to the loom and started to sing.
The First Strangers
For a long time nobody came to the island, and Circe had almost stopped thinking that anyone would. The blackberry patch by the stream was nearly ripe, and she had been out to check it every morning, planning what she might make of them.
One morning a ship came in and Circe was startled to hear the men. They were shouting and laughing as they dragged their boat up onto the shore. Once their boat was secured, they tramped up through the valley, crushing the blackberry patch that was nearly ripe enough to harvest and startling the bird whose wing she had fixed just a few weeks past. And when they reached her home, they simply walked into her hall, picking up her golden dishes and making a mess of their silver couches with their blackberry stained boots.
Circe stood by the loom with her hands tight on the frame.
“Please leave,” she said. “This is my home.”
The men barely noticed Circe had spoken, they were so busy laughing together. One of them asked whether there was anything to eat.
She’d never been afraid before, and it was a strange feeling that began in her stomach and spread until her hands were shaking. She was one woman on an island that no one knew about, her father was far above the clouds, and her mother was far below the waves. Her wand lay on the table by the door. She remembered the promise she’d made to the valley, that she would never change anything she couldn’t change back, but the fear was louder than the promise, and she picked up the wand before she’d really decided to.
She touched it to the nearest man and then to the next, and she kept going until the hall was empty of men. Where they had been, there was a heap of small, wriggling kittens and puppies, tumbling over one another on her floor and looking up at her with eyes that were a little too knowing for their size.
She’d thought about wolves and lions for a moment, and she knew she couldn’t have stood to look at them.
“You can stay,” she said, kneeling down among them. “And if you behave yourselves, you can grow. If you’re naughty, you’ll stay just as you are.”
She carried them out to the gate in her apron and set them down in the grass. She checked on them each morning and touched each one with the wand, the way she’d mended the sparrow’s wing, and slowly the wand seemed to mend something in them too.
They grew as she’d promised, and by the end of the season there were wolves and lions lying about her gate, as gentle with her as lambs, and still fearsome to anyone who meant her harm.
That first night, though, she sat on the floor of her hall for a long time. Nothing was broken, but her house had stopped feeling like hers. She kept thinking that what she wanted wasn’t just a locked door, because a door hadn’t done a thing when the men walked through it, and that it might be better not to be the only one at home the next time someone came. She didn’t want a guard who’d have to stay forever, or a guest she’d have to look after. What she wanted was company that came and went like water, there when she wanted it and free to wander off downstream when it didn’t.
At dawn she went down to the stream where it ran clearest and knelt at the edge.
“I have a house with a great many rooms,” she said to the water. “Would any of you like to see it?”
For a moment nothing happened, and then a head came up out of the stream, and another after it, until a whole crowd of Naiads was climbing the bank with water running off their hair, laughing and wanting to see everything.
The sparrow came back that evening and settled on the loom as if nothing had happened.
Jason and Medea
The next ship came in the following summer, when the blackberries by the stream had grown back thicker than before and the Naiads had settled into the house as if they’d always lived there. Circe saw it from the doorway, and her hands went to the frame of the door before she’d thought about it. This time only two people came up from the shore, while the rest of the crew stayed aboard, and the wolves and lions at the gate lifted their heads and then lay down again when they saw that the strangers carried no spears.
The two walked up the path slowly and didn’t come inside. They knelt on the step, the man first and then the woman, who kept her veil pulled forward over her face, and neither of them spoke until Circe asked who they were.
“My name is Jason,” the man said. “This is Medea. We’ve come a long way to ask for your help.”
Circe knew the name, and when the woman looked up she knew the face too, because it had her brother’s dark eyes in it. This was her brother’s daughter. She told them to come in and sit down, and they stayed kneeling anyway, so she sat down on the step in front of them and let them talk.
Jason did most of it, while Medea looked at the stones. They were running from her father’s ships, and in order to get away they’d lured Medea’s young brother into a trap and killed him. A voice from the timber of their own ship had told them that there would be no peace for them until Circe had purified them of it. The Naiads had come to the doorway while he was talking, and they stood there quietly with water dripping off their hair onto the floor.
Circe said nothing for a long time. She noticed that they hadn’t walked in uninvited, and that Jason had left his men on the ship, and she thought that this was a great deal more than the last strangers had managed. Then she stood up.
“I’ll do it,” she said. “But I’m going to tell you what I think of it afterward.”
The Naiads lit the fire on the altar in the garden, and Circe carried out the rites one after another until they were finished. The fire burned down, the smoke went straight up into the afternoon, and Jason and Medea stayed on their knees through all of it.
When it was done she didn’t tell them it was forgiven, because she’d never promised that it would be. She stood over them with her arms folded and told them that the fire had washed the blood away and nothing else, and that Medea’s brother had been a boy who trusted his sister enough to walk alone into the dark to meet her. She told Jason that agreeing to a plan like that was no better than carrying it out, and that he ought to be ashamed to kneel on a stranger’s step and ask for peace after it. She told Medea that it was a great waste of a clever mind to spend it on a trap. Medea pulled her veil over her face and wept without making a sound, and Jason took her by the arm and led her down the path to the shore, and Circe watched them go with her arms still folded.
Circe stood at the gate and watched the ship until it was out of sight. After that the Naiads were quiet for several days, and then, one at a time and without saying anything, they drifted back down to the stream, the way water does. By the time the blackberries had ripened the house was empty again, and Circe sat down at her loom and began to sing.
Odysseus Comes to the Gate
By the time the second summer came around, the Naiads had drifted off down the stream again, and Circe had gone back to her loom and to her mornings in the blackberry patch, which was coming along well this year. She’d gotten used to the quiet, and she’d even started to like it, though she still kept her wand on the table by the door out of habit.
One afternoon she was singing at her loom when the wolves and lions at her gate got to their feet. Through the open doorway she could see a small band of men coming up the path from the shore, and a long way off beyond them she could just make out the masts of a ship with a great many more men aboard. The beasts looked the strangers over and then lay down again, since these men carried no spears and seemed to mean no harm, and the men, who had clearly expected to be eaten, laughed nervously and said the creatures were as tame as lambs.
Circe went on weaving. Her hands were steady, but her stomach had turned over the way it had the first time, and she stayed at the loom until the men were standing in her doorway. Then she rose and invited them in as graciously as she knew how and told them to sit down on her silver couches and rest. All of them came inside except one, who lingered at the edge of the garden with a careful look on his face.
She set out a banquet on the golden dishes and brought wine in a cup. She’d mixed the wine herself in the pantry before the men had even reached her step, and she’d known exactly what she meant to do when she mixed it. She told herself that she’d seen how men like this behaved, with their muddy boots and their loud voices, and that there were a great many more of them waiting on the ship. She reminded herself too that she could undo all of it, which was the only part of her old promise to the valley that she still held on to. It didn’t occur to her to wait and find out whether these men were any different.
They ate hungrily and talked about the ship and how long they’d been at sea, and when they’d finished the wine she touched each of them with her wand. They became swine, grunting and bewildered, and still, as she could see by their eyes, entirely themselves. She herded them out to a pen behind the house and shut the gate on them.
The cautious one had watched all of this from the garden, and when it was over he ran for the ship.
Their leader was a man named Odysseus, and when he’d heard the story he set out for the palace by himself without waiting to be afraid. Partway up the path a young man with a golden wand fell into step beside him, and it turned out to be Hermes, the messenger of the gods. He told Odysseus that the wine would be drugged and gave him a small herb called Moly to protect him from it. He told him to drink it anyway, and then to draw his sword and rush at her as if he meant to kill her.
Circe welcomed him just as warmly as she’d welcomed the others and handed him a golden goblet. He drank it down and nothing happened, and he drew his sword and ran at her.
She stepped back, and for a moment she was truly frightened, and then she understood. Hermes had told her long ago that a man would one day come whom her magic couldn’t touch, and here he was in the middle of her hall with a sword in one hand and an empty goblet in the other.
“You're Odysseus,” she said.
He told her what he wanted, and she didn’t argue. She went out to the pen with her wand and touched each of the swine in turn, and they stood up as men, patting each other on the back and wiping their eyes. She promised him that she would never work her magic against him or his companions again.
Then, since the rest of his crew were still sitting out in the bay with nothing to eat, she walked down to the shore with him and told them all that they were welcome to come up and rest.
A Year and a Farewell
The sailors came up from the ship that evening, and by the end of the week the whole crew had moved into her house as if they’d always lived there. Circe had never had so many people at her table. They ate through the blackberries, argued over who got which silver couch, and endlessly tracked mud across her floor... and to her surprise Circe found she didn’t mind it nearly as much as she’d expected to. They sat down when she asked them to and thanked her for the food, and the pen behind the house stood empty and was soon overgrown with grass.
Odysseus stayed longest of all. He sat at her table in the evenings and told her about the long war and the sea he’d crossed to get to her island, and she listened with her chin on her hand while the sparrow dozed on the frame of the loom. She sang to him while she wove, and he began to bring her small things from the shore, a sea-polished stone or a feather, which she set on the windowsill and couldn’t have explained why she kept. A whole year went by this way, with the seasons turning outside the doorway while the two of them forgot to count them.
It was his own men who finally spoke up. They came to him one evening when Circe was out in the garden, and told him that they’d been away from home for a very long time, and that it was time to go.
Odysseus sat for a while with his hands between his knees. Then he went and found Circe at the loom and told her.
She didn’t stop weaving right away. She’d given him her word that she would never use her magic against him, and she’d meant it, which meant that now there was nothing she could do to keep him except ask, and she found that she couldn’t bring herself to do that. She finished the row she was working on and put down the shuttle.
“Then you must go,” she said. “But there are things you ought to know first.”
She told him that he would have to sail to the far edge of the world and speak with the spirit of a blind seer called Tiresias, who would tell him what lay ahead of him on the road home. She told him that he would pass an island where beautiful voices sang from the rocks, and that no man who listened to them had ever come back, so he should fill his men’s ears with wax, and, if he insisted on hearing them himself, have himself tied to the mast. She told him about a strait with a many-headed monster on one side and a whirlpool on the other, and that he would have to choose which to risk.
“That’s a lot of warnings,” Odysseus said.
“You came here looking for a way home,” Circe said. “I’m only making sure you get one.”
She loaded his ship with food and wine until it sat low in the water, and she walked down to the shore with him on the morning he left, with the wolves and lions, who had long since stopped being anything like the men they’d been, padding along behind her as far as the gate. She watched the ship go out past the headland until the sail was a small white mark against the sky and then no mark at all.
When she came back up the path the house was very quiet. Her loom stood in the doorway where the sun lay across it, the golden dishes were stacked on the table, and the stones and feathers sat in a row along the sill. She stood in the hall for a long time with her hand on the back of a silver couch.
Then there was a splash from the direction of the stream, and a head came up out of the water, and another one after it. The Naiads climbed the bank, wringing out their hair and laughing, and one of them asked if there was anything to eat.
Circe went to find the golden dishes.