Weekly Reader: The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho; A Magical Dark Novel About Goddess Worship With A Beguiling Mysterious Protagonist
By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoiler: Paulo Coelho’s novel, The Witch of Portobello could be a Spiritual Successor or an Unofficial Sequel to his Brida. While Brida is a beautiful story about a young woman taking her first initiative steps into becoming a witch, The Witch of Portobello features a woman who not only begins training as a witch. She goes beyond her training to becoming a leader and teacher of others, even beginning her own religious movement.
I am not spoiling anything by revealing that Sherine “Athena” Khalil, the eponymous Witch is dead. That is revealed in the beginning of the book. The book contains various first person narratives of who Athena was and how she affected the people around her. Like Rashomon, each person brings their own biases and agendas into the book creating a protagonist who is enigmatic, charismatic, and who could be an enlightened being, a troubled lunatic, or a conniving fraud. It depends on the narrators’ points of view and your own.
What is known about Athena makes for interesting reading as Coelho dissects her the way he does his other protagonists like Santiago, Veronika, and Brida. Athena was born in Romania to an unwed Romany mother and was adopted by Samira R. Khalil and her husband, a well-to-do Lebanese couple. While they name her Sherine, they are aware of Anti-Middle Eastern sentiment and suggest that she get her name changed.
Overhearing her uncle mention Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, young Sherine decides that is to be her name. This passage involving Athena's name change foreshadows Athena's interest in shaping others, almost the world, to fit her needs and her connections to a Higher Power that she believes is directing her actions.
Athena is often seen as a woman who is always searching for some deeper meaning and purpose to her life. One character described her as “a woman of the twenty-second century living in the twenty-first and made no secret about that fact.” In other words, she is someone who sees beyond her physical world and has a hard time living in it.
Athena bounces through several jobs until she settles on working at a bank for a time. She marries quickly to an engineering student, Lukas Jessen-Petersen, not out of love or desire but so she can become a mother. It is no surprise that two years after giving birth to her son, Viorel, they get divorced.
She goes to Catholic Church but when she is denied communion because of her divorce she walks out in a fury. The priest is adamant at first but after Athena and Viorel leave his church, he dreams that he sees Jesus Christ who says “It has been a long time since they let me in (the Church).” revealing that strict dogma in the male-dominated church had replaced love and forgiveness that Jesus spoke about.
Athena comes into her own when she takes direction in her life through three passages which explores an eventual connection to Spirituality and Goddess Worship. The first passage is when she joins her landlord in a dancing ritual. This dance gives her a fresh perspective and connection to a Higher Power. She is so influenced by the dance that she leads her co-workers at the bank into dancing sessions. At first the dancing confuses her manager. But, when he sees how happy and centered his employees are, he relents and she begins engaging her colleagues in dancing sessions at the beginning of each day. This shows her growing influence over others.
The second and third passages happen when she takes a trip to Romania to meet her birth family and rediscover her roots. First, she is reunited with her birth mother who introduces her to the concept of Goddess Worship by referring to St. Sarah, the patron saint of the Romany. Second, she meets Dr. Deirdre “Edda”O’Neil who teaches Athena to embrace her inner wisdom and intuition.
Athena takes to those lessons so well that when she returns to London, she reshapes herself into a teacher and guru. She begins teaching classes by channeling a spirit called Hagia Sofia who answers deep questions that Athena's friends and students ask. She also leads them in dance and meditation courses to awaken the Goddesses inside themselves.
This is when Athena becomes unclear to the people around her and she becomes a target of controversy and suspicion. Her meetings in Portobello Road, London (a street in London famous for its street markets) become the target of protests headed by Rev. Ian Banks, a Christian Conservative who protests what he calls “the Satanic heart of England.’
Athena also encounters uncertainty within her inner circle. Herron Ryan, a skeptical journalist who first encounters Athena in Romania while he is researching a documentary on the history of Dracula, is curious about Athena's following and drawn by her charisma. He is both suspicious of and enchanted by her.
Another Narrator that is equally appalled and fascinated with Athena is Andrea McCain, an actress and one of Athena's students. She doesn't like Athena as a person. Andrea thinks she is a neglectful mother to Viorel and a slut who makes a habit of seducing other men particularly Andrea's boyfriend, Herron. Though she doesn't like Athena personally, Andrea relates to the meetings and finds them effective.
Because we get multiple narratives but not Athena's, we are left wondering who she is. Is Hagia Sofia real? Is she a con artist trying to get money from lost souls? Is she a cult leader buying into her own hype and obtaining a Goddess complex? We don't know and that's what makes her so fascinating.
Her death is also mysterious. It gets one line of mention with no foreshadowing beforehand so no one knows exactly who killed her and why. An epilogue gives a possible solution but still leaves a lot of unanswered questions. With a character like Athena who is shrouded in mystery, a conventional ending would have been anticlimactic. Instead she leaves the book just as she entered: a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Like Brida, Coelho uses a lot of Goddess and magic imagery to describe his lead character. To use Goddess terms, Brida is the Maiden, the young innocent beginning her lessons and discovering her path. Athena would be the Mother, an experienced woman in the prime of her life both literally to Viorel and figuratively to her followers as she guides them in their sessions. Now all we need is for Coelho to write a book about an older woman to be the Crone. Then he could turn his duo of magical ladies into a trio.
