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Competing Philosophies in Calderon's El Mayor Encanto, Amor

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Competing Philosophies in Calderon's El Mayor Encanto, Amor Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume LXXXVII, Number 2, 2010 The Figure of Circe and the Power of Knowledge: Competing Philosophies in Caldero´n’s El mayor encanto, amor JONATHAN ELLIS Oklahoma State University At first, Caldero´n’s mythological play follows the well-known story of Homer’s Odyssey. On their way home from the Trojan War, Ulises1 and his crew stop at the island of the witch Circe. Most of the Greeks search the island and arrive at the palace of Circe as their leader waits at the beach. Rather than be wary, they choose to indulge their desires and baser natures. As we know, Circe transforms all but one of them into beasts with a potion. However, from this point on Caldero´n begins to introduce significant changes into the story known from both Homer and Ovid. When Ulises confronts Circe, she gives him also a potion, but he does not drink, having learned of its danger and having learned how to render it useless.2 Defeated, Circe cries out, ‘¿Quie´n cielos airados, / quie´nma´s ha sabido que yo?’ (1515a).3 This early passage is key, indicating that she recognizes knowledge to be the basis of her power with which she attempts to control all of nature, the elements and men. However, 1 I have retained the Spanish spelling of the names throughout, in order to clearly distinguish between Caldero´n’s characters and those of Classical literature. 2 In Homer, Odysseus is aided by Hermes who provides the moly root as protection against the effects of Circe’s potion. In Caldero´n’s play, the goddess Iris provides Ulises with a ‘ramillete’ of flowers, consistent with his decision to make Juno the divine patron of Ulises in this play. Juno plays a similar role in Act I of the three-author play Polifemo y Galatea. Mira de Amescua provided the first act, Pe´rez de Montalba´n the second, and Caldero´n the third. Regarding the distinction between Iris and Mercury as messengers of the gods and Iris’ association with Juno, see the sixteenth-century commentator Natale Conte, Mythologiae, trans. and ed. John Mulryan and Steven Brown, 2 vols (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), II, 779. 3 All citations of El mayor encanto, amor are from Pedro Caldero´n, Obras completas, ed. A´ ngel Valbuena Briones and A´ ngel Valbuena Prat, 3 vols (Madrid: Aguilar, 1966 etc.): Vol. I, ed. A´ ngel Valbuena Briones (5a ed. 1966), with just the page-number given in parenthesis. All other works of Caldero´n will be cited, with both volume and page-number, from the Obras completas, Vol. I, ed. A´ ngel Valbuena Briones, 5a ed. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1966); and from Obras completas, Vol. III (Autos sacramentales), ed. A´ ngel Valbuena Prat, 2a ed. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1967). ISSN 1475-3820 print/ISSN 1478-3428 online/10/02/000147-16 # Bulletin of Spanish Studies. DOI 10.1080/14753821003693743 148 BSS, LXXXVII (2010) JONATHAN ELLIS Ulises, in order to escape the enchantments of Circe, and escape the island, must display knowledge of an entirely different sort than that of the witch. In an aside, Ulises declares, ‘Hoy sere´ / de aquesta Esfinge el Edipo’ (1518a). Clearly the struggle between the two is going to be a battle of wits: Who has the greater knowledge? This creates a dynamic in the play of opposing and competing philosophies in which dependence on natural philosophy and the occult sciences,4 seen through the lens of philosophical scepticism, must ultimately fail, while the tenets of moral philosophy lead to triumph. It is primarily knowledge that distinguishes Caldero´n’s Circe from that of Homer. In the Odyssey, she is described as a goddess, having great knowledge of poisons and potions. The Baroque Circe is quite a different figure. She relates how in her youth she received instruction with Medea, another witch, from a great magician. At some point, jealous men, fearful of such a learned woman, forbade her access to books, so she left their world to create her own island kingdom. There she moved on from more traditional studies to the darker arts mostly associated with divination: ornithromancy, quiromancy, pyromancy, necromancy. Frederick A. De Armas identifies Circe as a mujer varonil because of her studies, classifying her as a ‘scholar’.5 She has clearly developed an encyclopaedic range of knowledge.6 However, this knowledge of the external world*the macrocosm*will ultimately prove suspect, unreliable, and the witch figure who employs it must fall in defeat. Initially, however, Circe does seem to wield a great deal of power. She does transform Ulises’ men into beasts. But is significant that this occurs because they have surrendered themselves to their passions, their bestial natures. In numerous of his plays, Caldero´n presents hombre-fiera characters, men who behave as beasts controlled by their passions. In some plays, they are represented by men wearing animal skins. In this one, they actually appear to become on the outside what they have become on the inside, creatures in which reason, self-knowledge and self-control have been banished.7 In all of these plays, these hombre-fiera characters can only 4 Regarding the congruous relationship between witchcraft and natural philosophy in the Renaissance, see Stuart Clark, ‘The Scientific Status of Demonology’,inOccult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1984), 351Á74. 5 Frederick A. De Armas, ‘Metamorphosis in Caldero´n’s El mayor encanto, amor’, Romance Notes, 22:2 (1981), 208Á12, (p. 209). 6 See Antonio Regalado, Caldero´n: los orı´genes de la modernidad en la Espan˜ a del Siglo de Oro, 2 vols (Barcelona: Destino, 1995): ‘Circe, caracterizada por un saber enciclope´dico y virtuosa de las ciencias prohibidas’ (II, 217). See also W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero (Oxford: Basil Blackford, 1954): ‘In Caldero´n’s Circe, as Caldero´n portrays her, Ulysses meets the most formidable combination of erudition and voluptuous beauty that ever came his way. The catalogue of her intellectual accomplishments rivals Gower’s testimonial to Ulysses’ own learning’ (187Á88). 7 De Armas has made this same observation: ‘[T]he myth also fits in with one of his [Caldero´n’s] major concerns, the dichotomy hombre-fiera, clearly exemplified in the figure of Segismundo in La vida es suen˜ o’ (‘Metamorphosis in Caldero´n’s El mayor encanto, amor’, 208). COMPETING PHILOSOPHIES IN EL MAYOR ENCANTO, AMOR 149 triumph by re-establishing self-rule by reason, and this is only possible through knowledge of self*the microcosm*a motif that Caldero´n refers to in many of his plays, the idea that man is a small world unto himself. An examination of some of the man-to-beast transformations that occur in the play can bring to light the important philosophical tensions. When Ulises confronts Circe and initially defeats her, he forces her to transform his crew back into their human forms. One by one, they stumble out onto the stage, restored. One of them asks, ‘¿Que´ es lo que me ha sucedido / este rato que he son˜ ado?’ (1515a). The use of the word ‘dream’ brings into question whether these men actually were transformed or whether Circe has been merely manipulating appearances. In La vida es suen˜ o, questions are raised about deceptive appearances. What was the dream and what was the reality? It should be remembered that like the potion used against these Greeks, a potion was given to Segismundo to put him to sleep in order to move him and then change his perceptions of reality. Indeed, Augustine, in The City of God, describes the transformation of men into beasts as just this type of process, occurring ‘when the man’s senses are laid asleep or overpowered’.8 The Bishop of Hippo declares that demons have no real power to affect transformations; they can only ‘change the appearance of things created by the true God’ (624). Often, they cause a ‘phantasm’ to appear which leads observers to think that a man has been transformed, while he in his sleep also believes he has become a beast. Augustine specifically references the example of Circe and the companions of Ulysses, asserting that if any transformation did occur, it was done in the way he describes (625). This passage from Augustine continued to be cited as authoritative in texts more contemporary to Caldero´n that dealt with the powers and activities of witches and demons. The most famous and influential of these was the Malleus Maleficarum, first published in 1486, and known in English as the Witches’ Hammer. It contains two sections that specifically address the subject of man- to-beast transformations. Part I, Question X is entitled ‘Whether Witches can by some Glamour Change Men into Beasts’.9 The conclusion drawn is that witches do not actually have the power to transform men; they can only affect outer appearances. This can function in two ways: a person can either be made to see another human being as an animal, or a person can be made to think that he is an animal. The example is given of a man who was made to think he was a wolf, and ran through the forest naked, living in a cave. Part II, Question I, Ch. 8 addresses the Circe myth directly, echoing Augustine: Now when the companions of Ulysses were changed into beasts, it was only an appearance, or deception of the eyes; for the animal shapes were 8 Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans.
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