 In "The Odyssey", Homer wrote that Athena used her magic wand to make Odysseus old, and then young again, and that Circe used her magic wand to turn Odysseus's men into pigs.Italian fairy tales put wands into the hands of the powerful fairies by the late Middle Ages.In the 1700s ballads "Allison Gross" and "The Laily Worm and the Machrel of the Sea", the villainesses use silver wands to transform their victims into animals, in emulation of the Odyssey that preceded them.