Thessaly, Land of Greek & Roman Magic

In the north of Greece stretches Thessaly, a vast plain surrounded by mountains, the birthplace of mythical heroes… and a major center of witchcraft in the ancient imagination. From the Classical period onward, the Greeks and then the Romans attributed a singular reputation to this fertile region: that of a land where formidable sorceresses, capable of extraordinary incantations, operated. From the mythical Medea to the witches evoked by Latin poets, Thessaly established itself as the land of enchantments and occult practices. Let us journey there.

The Birth of Thessaly’s Magical Reputation

Thessaly’s reputation as a land of magic appears as early as sources from the 5th century BCE. Aristophanes, in his comedy The Clouds (423 BCE), alludes to it humorously: a debt-ridden character suggests “buying a Thessalian sorceress” in order to bring the Moon down from the sky and keep it imprisoned, hoping thereby to stop the passage of time so he will no longer have to pay interest. The Thessalian woman appears here as a professional witch, familiar with lunar powers. A few decades later, around 380 BCE, Plato likewise bears witness to this popular belief in a passage from the Gorgias. He compares the moral compromises of political life with the dreadful effects of Thessalian spells: “for fear that we should suffer […] the same thing as the Thessalians, when they succeed, so they say, in bringing down the Moon.” The philosopher thus confirms that, in his view, ordinary people attributed to Thessalian women the supernatural power to act upon the nocturnal heavenly body.

This idea of lunar witchcraft rooted in Thessaly was undoubtedly not accidental. Ancient authors suggested that the region harbored ancient cults associated with magic: the goddess Hecate, mistress of the Moon and nocturnal enchantments, was said to have been especially honored there. In any case, from Classical Antiquity onward, the Thessalian sorceress became an archetypal figure. Her very name became synonymous with the witch par excellence, to the point that, later, a Latin author could refer to “Thessalian marvels” to designate magical acts. Writers regularly situated the most spectacular occult feats in Thessaly. All it took was for a traveler or hero to pass through Thessaly for its dangerous and fascinating specialty—the source of half its reputation—to be praised on the spot. In other words, in the minds of the Ancients, Thessaly had become the land of witches and magical rites.

Thessalian Witches and Sorceresses

Several mythological and legendary tales helped shape this image of Thessaly as a “land of witchcraft.” One of the first great sorceresses in Greek mythology, Medea, acts precisely in Thessaly. Coming from the East with Jason and the Argonauts, Medea stays in Iolcos (in Thessaly), where her occult knowledge will overturn the fate of King Pelias. The witch of Colchis indeed performs disturbing marvels there: she rejuvenates Jason’s father by boiling him in a cauldron with enchanted herbs, then deceives Pelias’s daughters by persuading them to cut their father into pieces in the hope of restoring his youth. This murder by magical trickery, committed on Thessalian soil, inscribes the idea of a terrifying occult power into local mythology. Medea herself henceforth embodies the figure of the witch capable of concocting potions and poisons, taming fabulous creatures, and manipulating life or death through her arts. Alongside her, other mythical female figures such as Circe (the sorceress who enchanted Odysseus’s companions) are mentioned as a counterpoint—but Circe acts on her distant island, whereas Medea truly acts in Thessaly, granting this region a prominent place in the mythical geography of magic.

Beyond myth, Greek and then Latin literature widely disseminated the image of Thessalian witches, enriching their portrait with striking details. As early as Hellenistic poetry, these sorceresses were credited with fearsome rituals. A fragment attributed to the historian Aglaosthenes (or to a later author), for example, reported that the witches of Thessaly could bring the Moon down from the sky in exchange for an atrocious sacrifice—giving up what they held most dear, such as a child or even one of their eyes, in return for this power. The idea of paying magic’s price in full reinforces the sinister aura surrounding these women. In the same spirit, the legend of Aglaonice of Thessaly, a priestess and astronomer of the 3rd century BCE, tells how she predicted lunar eclipses and claimed, through her chants, to cause them. Her contemporaries said that Aglaonice “detached the Moon from the sky through her magical charms” and noted that each time she performed this feat, misfortune struck her family. Here, reality—the scientific prediction of eclipses—blends with belief: the learned woman is perceived as a sorceress capable of enslaving the night star, in accordance with the Thessalian stereotype.

Latin authors of the late Republic and early Empire took up and amplified these motifs, making the Thessalian witch a recurring character in their works. Propertius, an elegiac poet of the 1st century BCE, opens his Book I by evoking love’s bewitching power and alluding to Thessalian enchantments. Powerless before his passion, the fictional lover comes to wonder “what witch, what magician could [free] him with Thessalian potions.” This passage attests that Thessalian potions—that is, the potions and spells originating from this land—were considered the most effective for love enchantment. Likewise, in his Amores and Remedia Amoris, Ovid multiplies his references to Thessalian witchcraft. At times, the poet claims that a Thessala saga (a Thessalian witch) may have cast the spell responsible for his temporary impotence in love; at others, he advises his readers not to resort to harmful herbs and magical arts from Thessalian lands, practices he considers outdated. “This is the old way of practicing witchcraft,” Ovid writes of these occult remedies, before offering the reader more rational ways to heal a broken heart. Through these allusions, the Latin writer confirms that, in the minds of his audience, Thessaly rhymed with love magic, poisons, and enchantments.

It is, however, in Roman poetry and satire that the Thessalian witch reaches her full stature, often in the guise of an old woman skilled in black arts. Horace, in his Epodes (around 30 BCE), portrays the dreaded Canidia and her accomplices preparing macabre spells. Although these witches operate in Rome, Horace explicitly associates them with occult knowledge originating in Thessaly. Thus, in Epode 5, the witch Folia, Canidia’s accomplice, is presented as an intriguer capable of making the heavenly bodies fall: “with a Thessalian word, [she would make] Moon and Sun fall from our sky.” The expression “Thessalian word” refers here to a magical formula inherited from Thessaly, powerful enough to pull the stars from the firmament. Horace thus suggests that these Italian witches derive their knowledge from the ancient magical traditions of Thessaly. Elsewhere, speaking generally of superstition, the same poet advises the wise to laugh at everything that frightens the common people: dreams, magical terrors, nocturnal ghosts, and “Thessalian marvels.” Thessalian witchcraft had become, for Horace and his readers, a synonym for frightening spellcraft.

The prose narratives of the Imperial period likewise exploited this vein. Around the 1st century CE, the poet Lucan set one of the most striking scenes of his Pharsalia (an epic of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey) in Thessaly. In Book VI, the young Sextus Pompey consults the witch Erichtho in the plains of Pharsalus on the eve of the great battle. Lucan paints a horrifying portrait of this Thessalian sorceress: she is a wild-eyed old woman who lives among tombs, feeds on dead flesh, and desecrates corpses for her rituals. Her incantations overturn the order of nature: “At a Thessalian woman’s voice, the laws of nature are suspended: the earth is covered with floods, the sun grows dark, and the sky thunders unbeknownst to Jupiter.” Erichtho notably practices necromancy: Lucan shows her collecting the still-warm blood of a dead soldier to anoint a corpse and bring it back to life—the specter torn from the Underworld then prophesies the battle’s disastrous outcome. This scene of macabre witchcraft, set on Thessalian soil itself, deeply impresses Roman readers. After Lucan, a Thessalian witch could never again be mentioned without bringing to mind this repulsive figure, capable of making the dead speak and suspending the course of the stars.

Thessaly also provides the setting for the Latin novel The Metamorphoses (or The Golden Ass) by Apuleius (2nd century CE), which is largely built around the theme of magic. The hero, Lucius, is a young Greek fascinated by enchantments: “knowing that he was in the heart of Thessaly, the birthplace of magical arts whose powerful spells are praised throughout the world,” he eagerly seeks to uncover their secrets. He soon becomes entangled in the misdeeds of formidable Thessalian witches. Apuleius first introduces the witch Meroë, who attacks an unfortunate traveler: she drains his blood while he sleeps and leaves him dying, demonstrating a terrifyingly malevolent power. Later, it is the sorceress Pamphile, with whom Lucius lodges, who reveals the full extent of local witchcraft. Each night, Pamphile transforms herself into an owl by rubbing herself with a magical ointment so that she can go and meet her lover. Discovered by Lucius, she awakens a dangerous curiosity in him. The young man in turn attempts a transformation, but a mistake changes him into a donkey—a picaresque mishap that gives the novel much of its charm. Throughout the story, Apuleius accumulates episodes presenting Thessalian occult practices: summoning the spirits of the dead, love elixirs, transforming men into beasts or stone out of revenge, nocturnal flights through the air,… The author clearly emphasizes that Thessaly was regarded as “the birthplace of magical arts,” the ideal place to satisfy [his hero’s] curiosity about witchcraft.

Notably, an earlier Greek version of the same novel also takes place in Thessaly, attributed to Lucian of Samosata (Lucius or The Ass, 2nd century). This satirical tale, very close to Apuleius’s version, features a hero transformed into a donkey after spying on a Thessalian woman’s spells. Whether it was truly written by Lucian or by another author, the choice of Thessaly as the setting was no accident: by the 3rd century CE, every reader knew that this region was “renowned throughout the world as the birthplace of magical arts and enchantments.” Lucian, moreover, ridicules belief in magic and “miracle-makers” in other works. The fact that he sets this tale of metamorphosis in Thessaly confirms once more the unbreakable link between this land and witchcraft in the ancient imagination. From then on, the myth of the Thessalian witches was firmly established, with its notable figures (from Medea to Erichtho) and recurring themes: lunar invocations, love potions, poisons, necromancy, metamorphoses… Greco-Roman Antiquity thus bequeathed to posterity a rich tableau of magic in which Thessaly occupies a privileged place.

The Legacy of an Esoteric Image

The powerful image of the Thessalian witches did not disappear with the end of Antiquity: it passed through the centuries in Western scholarship and the esoteric imagination. In the Middle Ages, the figure of the ancient sorceress partly merged with the demonized figure of the medieval witch, but scholars did not forget the Classical tales. Translations and commentaries on ancient authors during the Renaissance rediscovered these Thessalian enchantresses. Sixteenth-century humanists and demonologists, denouncing the witchcraft practices of their own time, readily mentioned Greek and Roman examples: Medea, Circe, or the Thessalian women capable of bringing down the Moon were cited as mythical precedents for contemporary maleficium. Renaissance and Baroque artists and poets also drew from this storehouse of images: witches were depicted surrounding a magical cauldron beneath the full moon, while love potions and poisons inherited from Thessaly were evoked. Montague Summers, an early-20th-century scholar, reported that in the eyes of the ancient Greeks “the Thessalian ladies were considered, more than any other people, experts in witchcraft and enchantments.” This observation, drawn from a 1927 work, shows that the tradition was still very much alive in people’s minds. Indeed, many esoteric writers of the 19th and 20th centuries perpetuated Thessaly’s mystical aura. The ancient expression “reach for the Moon,” directly inherited from the Thessalian witches capable of drawing the night star toward themselves, entered common usage to describe an impossible quest—a sign of these myths’ enduring cultural memory. Moreover, certain modern neopagan movements, such as Wicca, have symbolically reused the ritual of “bringing down the Moon” in their practices, in explicit reference to the enchantresses of Thessaly.

Ancient magical Thessaly has never entirely ceased to haunt the imagination. From authors of Antiquity to modern occultists, people have continued to celebrate—or fear—the extraordinary powers attributed to its witches. Land of mares and centaurs, the Thessalian plains were also, through the grace of literature, the domain of women with potions and incantations. This legendary construction, born from the fears and fantasies of Classical Greece, has endured through the ages. It reminds us how a region can, through the power of stories, become the privileged stage of the invisible and the marvelous. Thessaly as a land of magic thus remains a fascinating legacy of ancient culture, having nourished centuries of poetry, myths, and esoteric beliefs.

Sources:

• Aristophanes – The Clouds (423 BCE), lines 749–755 (allusion to Thessalian sorceresses and the “descent” of the Moon).

• Plato – Gorgias (around 380 BCE), 513a (proverbial mention of the Thessalian women bringing down the Moon).

• Propertius – Elegies, I, 1 (evocation of Thessalian potions for healing the pains of love).

• Horace – Epodes, V and XVII (the witches Canidia and Folia, and their use of Thessalian enchantments).

• Ovid – Amores and Remedia Amoris (references to the witches of Thessaly and criticism of ancient magical practices).

• Lucan – Pharsalia, VI (portrait of Erichtho the Thessalian and necromancy before Pharsalus).

• Apuleius – Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass (2nd century CE), Books I–III (Lucius’s adventures with Meroë and Pamphile in Thessaly, metamorphoses, etc.).

• (Pseudo-)Lucian of Samosata – Lucius or The Ass (2nd century CE), a Greek novel attributed to Lucian (the same plot as Apuleius’s, emphasizing the tradition of Thessalian witches).

• Jacques Cazeaux – “The Thessaly of the Sorceresses,” in Thessaly (Proceedings of the Lyon Round Table, 1975), 1979. Historical study of the construction of the Thessalian witch myth.

• Brian Clark – The Witches of Thessaly (paper, 2000s). Analysis of Thessaly’s reputation as a center of witchcraft in Antiquity and beyond.

• Montague Summers – The Geography of Witchcraft, Kegan Paul, 1927. A dated work discussing the tradition of Thessalian witches in Western culture.