2. Julia Margaret Cameron is known for portraits of celebrities of her era. However, she also created photographic illustrations inspired by the English Pre-Raphaelites. She spent time with Dante Gabriel Rosetti, one of the founders of the movement. Pre-Raphaelite women tend to be represented either as redeeming angels or dangerous seductresses; their value in such paintings tends to be symbolic and rooted in Bible stories or mythology.

 

This photograph is a study for a portrait of the goddess Circe (known to the Greeks as Demeter). The young girl has long, loose hair – a feature of many Pre-Raphaelite women. Nor is it rare for such female figures to be crowned with laurel leaves, flowers or stars. But why is Circe crowned with bunches of grapes here?

 

The fruit is meant to remind the viewer of the episode in Homer’s Odyssey, where Circe offers a potion, laced with Pramnian* wine, to Ulysses’ shipmates; the drink transforms the crew into pigs, trapping them on the island of Aeaea: “She brought them in and made them sit on chairs and seats, and made for them a potion of cheese and barley meal and yellow honey with Pramnian wine; but in the food she mixed baneful drugs, that they might utterly forget their native land. Now when she had given them the potion, and they had drunk it off, then she presently smote them with her wand, and penned them in the sties. And they had the heads, and voice, and bristles, and shape of swine, but their minds remained unchanged even as before. So they were penned there weeping, and before them Circe flung mast and acorns, and the fruit of the cornel tree, to eat, such things as wallowing swine are wont to feed upon.” (The Odyssey, Book 10, ll. 230-43)

 

Circe lives on a deserted island, in a forest of wild beasts who seem domesticated. These animals are, of course, men that she has transformed with the help of her wine-based potion. Thus she changes Ulysses’ crew into pigs when they arrive on her island. Eurylochus is the only one of the party to escape the spell.

 

Hermes had given Ulysses a magic plant – the holy ‘moly’ – which has black roots and milky white flowers. Ulysses uses the herb to resist Circe’s magic, then pulls out his sword; frightened, Circe invites the hero into her bed. Still mindful of Hermes’ warnings, Ulysses makes the witch swear ‘by the Gods’ not to harm him. This done, the pair unite and Circe undoes the spell, giving Ulysses’ shipmates back their human appearance. A year goes by before Circe helps the crew to leave the island, advising them to visit Tiresias in the Underworld.

 

We can add to these explanations, given in Homer’s original text, by noting that Pramnian wine is produced on the hillsides of the mountain of the same name, situated on the island of Icaria in the Aegean Sea, not far from Samos. It is here that Zeus is said to have ‘given birth’ to Dionysus, the ‘twice-born’ (see below). Circe also shared her bed with Bacchus/Dionysus, with whom she had a son, Cornus.

 

The pairing of these two divinities seems quite natural: together, they symbolically ensure man’s survival, one of the pair providing staple foodstuffs and the other providing wine. This being the case, it is no surprise that Julia Margaret Cameron chose this particular hairstyle for her subject!

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* Pramnian wine was “a rude, austere wine, black in the shade and purple in the light. Hippocrates recommended it for hemorrhages” (Charles-Joseph Panckoucke).