Compendium · Thessalian Witch / Moon-Drawer

Mycale

Mycale is the Thessalian witch named in Ovid's Metamorphoses as a woman who could draw the horned moon down from the sky by her spells. She belongs to the most famous cliché of ancient magic, the drawing-down of the moon, the mark of the witches of Thessaly. Behind the folklore sits a real woman, the astronomer Aglaonice, who could predict lunar eclipses and let people believe she was pulling the moon out of the sky.

Type: Thessalian Witch / Moon-Drawer
Origin: Greek and Roman myth; the witches of Thessaly. Named in Ovid's Metamorphoses
Period: Classical antiquity; Ovid wrote c. 8 AD

In the Dictionnaire Infernal of 1863, Louis Le Breton drew Mycale as a hooded woman standing at the edge of a marsh at night, a wand held out over the black water, a full moon low behind her. Collin de Plancy gave her two sentences: a sorceress who brought the moon down by the force of her charms, and the mother of two famous Lapiths. The engraving is Le Breton’s, but the woman in it was already close to two thousand years old, and she carries the single most famous idea in all of ancient magic.

The witch in Ovid

Mycale is named in the twelfth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in the middle of the brawl between the Lapiths and the Centaurs at the wedding of Pirithous. Two brothers die together when a Centaur hurls a burning altar into the crowd, and Ovid pauses on one of them to note his mother: Mycale, who was known, he says, to have often drawn the struggling horns of the moon down out of the sky by her spells. That is the whole of her: a line of family history in the middle of a battle, with a reputation attached to it that needed no explaining to a Roman reader.

It needed no explaining because Mycale is from Thessaly, and to the ancient imagination Thessaly was the country of witches, the place later Europe found again in the Harz and the Blockberg. To call a woman Thessalian was already to say what she could do.

Drawing down the moon

Pulling the moon out of the sky is the oldest and most repeated cliché of Greek and Roman magic. It runs from Aristophanes, where a character suggests hiring a Thessalian witch to draw down the moon so his debts, dated by the lunar calendar, can never come due, through Plato, Horace, Virgil, and on to Lucan’s monstrous Erichtho. The scholar Daniel Ogden calls it one of the most familiar commonplaces of literary magic in the whole classical world.

The act came with a physics of its own: as the witch hauled it down, the moon was said to sweat a foam or a dew, and that lunar spume, the virus lunare, was the prize, an ingredient for love-charms and poisons. The moon came down struggling and shedding light, and a woman with a wand stood in a field to collect it, which is the scene Le Breton drew.

Did You Know?

The Latin poets had a stock phrase for it, deducere lunam, “to lead the moon down,” and a matching belief that the victim of the spell suffered as the moon did. To “labor” or “toil” at the moon, laborare, meant that the moon was in eclipse and that a witch was working on it, one word for the astronomy and the magic together. The language kept no clean line between them.

The astronomer behind the witch

Plutarch is where the story crosses back into something checkable. Writing his advice to a young married couple, he warns the bride against superstition and gives an example: Aglaonice of Thessaly, the daughter of Hegetor, who was thoroughly acquainted with the cycles of the full moon and knew in advance when it would be caught in the earth’s shadow. She used that knowledge, Plutarch says, to convince the women around her that she was drawing the moon down herself.

Aglaonice was a real astronomer of the second or first century BC, from the same Thessaly that produced the legend. She could predict a lunar eclipse, and she staged her spell for the night the moon would darken on its own. The trick and the science share a country and nearly a gesture: a woman stands under the moon at the moment it goes strange and calls the change her own work. The likeliest reading makes the witch and the astronomer one figure seen from two sides, the woman the poets remembered as a Mycale and the woman the record kept as Aglaonice.

In the compendium

Mycale sits with the witches and the moon-powers. Her nearest kin here is Hecate, the goddess who stood behind this kind of night-work, patroness of the crossroads and the drawn-down moon, along with the Strix, the screech-owl witch of Roman fear. She is the one in that company who comes closest to fact. Where most of the witches in the compendium are pure story, Mycale stands one step from a woman we can name, an astronomer who knew when the moon would fail and let everyone watching believe her wand had done it.

Sources

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 12 (the battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs), lines on Mycale and her sons
Plutarch, Advice to Bride and Groom (Conjugalia Praecepta), on Aglaonice of Thessaly and the eclipse
Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire Infernal (Paris, 1863), ‘Mycale’
Daniel Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds (2002), on drawing down the moon

Primary Sources

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 12 (the battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs), lines on Mycale and her sons
Plutarch, Advice to Bride and Groom (Conjugalia Praecepta), on Aglaonice of Thessaly and the eclipse
Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire Infernal (Paris, 1863), 'Mycale'
Daniel Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds (2002), on drawing down the moon

Related Beings

Cosmic Principle

Common Questions

Who was Mycale?

Mycale is a witch from Greek myth, named in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a woman of Thessaly who could draw the moon down from the sky by her spells. Ovid mentions her as the mother of two Lapiths, Broteas and Orios, who die in the battle between the Lapiths and the Centaurs. She is one of the few named examples of the Thessalian witch, the stock figure Greek and Roman writers used whenever they wanted a woman who could command the moon.

What does 'drawing down the moon' mean?

It is the most famous power ascribed to witches in the ancient world: pulling the moon out of the sky, or down to the earth, by incantation. Greek and Roman writers from Aristophanes to Lucan treat it as the signature act of the witches of Thessaly, often tied to love magic and to gathering the lunar foam or dew that was said to drip from the moon as it was hauled down. Mycale is one of the named women credited with it.

Is there a real explanation behind the moon-drawing witches?

One documented case points to eclipse prediction. Plutarch writes of Aglaonice of Thessaly, an astronomer of the second or first century BC, who knew the cycles well enough to predict lunar eclipses. She timed her ‘drawing down of the moon’ to fall on the night the moon was about to darken, and let the other women believe she had pulled it from the sky. The witch and the astronomer come from the same country and turn on the same trick, seen from two directions.

Did the Dictionnaire Infernal invent Mycale?

No. Collin de Plancy’s 1863 Dictionnaire Infernal gives her a short entry and a Louis Le Breton plate, but the figure is older by nearly two thousand years. De Plancy calls her sons Broteas and Orion; Ovid’s text names them Broteas and Orios. The engraving, of a hooded woman pointing a wand at a moonlit marsh, is the demonologist’s picture of a story he took from the classical poets.