The Witch Of Portobello – It’s Still A Paulo Coelho Fiction

If you are new to Paulo Coelho – a Brazilian writer who has sold more than 85 millions books worldwide in 63 languages – I would certainly recommend “The Alchemist” and the trilogy “By the River Piedra I sat Down and Wept”, “Veronika Decides to Die”, and “The Devil and Miss Prym”. I think those are classic especially “The Alchemist”. The trilogy has a similar theme and is the most emotional piece of work involving the love of two people. There after, I would recommend “The Valkyries” – yet another classic that reminds me of “The Alchemist” – and “Eleven Minutes”, one of his best selling novels. If you are a Christian or you are open to an old story from the Bible, “The Fifth Mountain” is a great read. In there, Paulo Coelho has brought the story of Elijah alive. There are other works by Paulo Coelho that I have also read but I am not going to list them here for now.

“The Witch Of Portobello” is an interesting piece of work. Right from the beginning of the story, the protagonist Athena who was adopted by the wealthy Lebanese Christians and later migrated to the Western world was dead. And the remaining story attempts to reconstruct Athena’s life through the stories told by the people around her. This includes Athena’s mother, her teacher, her student, a journalist who was obsessed with Athena and researching on the topic of Vampirism (as an afterthought, I think this journalist is Paulo Coelho himself as he did write a less famous book called “Practical Manual of Vampirism”), and more. It is interesting because when you stitch up the versions of the story from different people, you see different facets of that subject. However, if you trim away all the emotional elements, the core of the story remains unchanged: it is an account of Athena’s journey into learning the various aspects of life, finally saw her special ability manifest, and how she surrendered herself to the Goddess and became a controversial spiritual leader in London. And of course, from the storytelling point of view, the question remains: how did Athena die?

The entire journey of Athena, in my opinion, is loosely based upon Jung’s four stages of individual progression: Persona, Shadow, Soul, and Wise Old Man or Great Mother (note: this is mentioned in the book from the perspective of a historian). Persona is the mask we use everyday, a self-centered view of the world around us. There comes the Shadow stage when we attempt to free ourselves from our Persona and start to look inwards. We may realize our weaknesses, our dark side, and some of us may regress back to the Persona stage. After realizing what we are lack of, we are open to the knowledge around us – the Soul stage. We improve ourselves despite the fact that we may not be unaccustomed to what we learn. Some of us may be able to channel all these knowledge into a solid center and become the Wise Old Men or Great Mothers – saints, tamers of spirit, or prophets. This four stages of individual progression is what Athena’s journey about.

I do enjoy reading “The Witch Of Portobello” and I read from his blog sites that many readers find the book inspiring and life-changing. As shown in the quote below, Paulo Coelho does not teach us directly via his books and he learns from his students (by the way, one of the popular theme of his books is to explore the feminine side of divinity). You can check out his “The Experiment Witch” project. I still recommend you all to read “The Witch Of Portobello”, perhaps after you have read some of his greater books if you have not already done so.

The witch of portobello knows all. But the best way of knowing the meaning of life is by learning from one’s student. A teacher can only make us aware of our capabilities but finding the right path is up to the student. There are many ways to achieve happiness by being close to the Mother.

Related Site: Paulo Coelho’s Blog Site