Baba Yaga

Excerpt from Marion Woodman: Dancing in The Flames

WHETHER YOU ‘ RE A KNIGHT looking for a horse, a maiden looking for fire, or a youth looking for a bride, in Russian folk tales you usually end up deep in the forest. On your journey, you may stumble upon a house, walking, hopping, twirling or spinning on chicken legs. The door is made of human bones, the bolts of human fingers; the lock is a mouth of grinning death. Around the perimeter is a picket fence with a skull on each stake. One stake stands empty, to receive your head, should you fail to meet the test. This sight alone is enough to shock the seeker out of ordinary perception. This is not a place of rational logic. The proprietor of this remarkable house is an ancient hag, the Baba Yaga, who may swoop down on you in her mortar and pestle as you ride. A broom trails behind her, wiping out any traces of her comings and goings, for she cannot be pinned down. With cackling laugh and eyes that become like points of fire, she inquires what you seek. You must stand up to her boldly and declare what it is that you want. “The kingdom ten times ten”; “a knightly horse, Grandma, to retrieve my lost bride”; “the well with the waters of Life and Death”; “I have come to ask for fire.”

Now these are no ordinary requests. One does not venture deep into the forest without good reason. One has already felt some loss, something missing, in the ordinary routines of life. One has begun to search in the depths of the unconscious for what is essential to growth, to change, to wholeness. In fact, the hag, the sorceress, the wisdom energy of the Goddess, does not appear in dreams until the traveler is strong enough to be vulnerable. The ego has to have surrendered some of its defensive control before it can tolerate con- fronting such energy. Then she appears, without ceremony, and, after determining whether your search is legitimate or not, she has one m ore question, “Do you come here of your own free will, or do you come by compulsion?” or “Have you come to do deeds, doughty youth, or to flee from deeds?”

This is the test of how ready you are to proceed in your quest. If you say, “I have come of my own free will,” your bones will become part of her adornment. If, on the other hand, you say, “I have come by compulsion,” your head will, likewise, go on the post awaiting it. The test is simply this, “Have you become conscious enough to go beyond duality?

Duality belongs in the ego development stage. It is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which symbolizes humanity’s fall up from an unconscious Eden. While Eden is characterized by participa- tion mystique, duality has to do with differentiation of energies—a necessary step in the progression toward higher consciousness. Things are identified by their parts good or evil, black or white, strong or weak—in an either/or world. The ego world in which we live exercises power over against, thus perpetuating the neurotic either/or dichotomy.

The Baba Yaga challenges us to go beyond that immature stage of development to a both/and world. Neither the undifferentiated world of early matriarchy, nor the overly differentiated world of pa- triarchy allows for a conscious world that can contain the opposites. The right answer for the Baba Yaga would go something like this, “I am here seventy-five percent of my own free will, sixty-five percent by compulsion.”

This answer implies that we have a humbler, more accurate understanding of our own nature. The truth is most of us are where we are partly through overwhelming circumstances that have landed us here and partly because this is where we want to be. Seventy-five percent one way, sixty-five percent the other. If we see the opposites in ourselves, we are less likely to judge and blame others. If we have identified too closely with the light, have too idealized an image of ourselves, then our shadow will surely come up and hit us on the backside. The same is true if we have identified with our negative side: we could be struck from behind by our goodness. Either position is a denial of our wholeness.

Excerpt from: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales

A Baba Yaga is inscrutable and so powerful that she does not owe al- legiance to the Devil or God or even to her storytellers. In fact, she opposes all Judeo-Christian and Muslim deities and beliefs. She is her own woman, a parthogenetic mother, and she decides on a case-by-case basis whether she will help or kill the people who come to her hut that rotates on chicken legs. She shows very few characteristics and tendencies of western witches, who were demonized by the Christian church, and who often tend to be beauti- ful and seductive, cruel and vicious. Baba Yaga sprawls herself out in her hut and has ghastly features—drooping breasts, a hideous long nose, and sharp iron teeth. In particular, she thrives on Russian blood and is cannibalistic. Her major prey consists of children and young women, but she will occa- sionally threaten to devour a man. She kidnaps in the form of a Whirlwind or other guises. She murders at will. Though we never learn how she does this, she has conceived daughters, who generally do her bidding. She lives in the forest, which is her domain. Animals venerate her, and she protects the forest as a mother-earth figure. The only times she leaves it, she travels in a mortar wielding a pestle as a club or rudder and a broom to sweep away the tracks behind her. At times, she can also be generous with her advice, but her counsel and help do not come cheaply, for a Baba Yaga is always testing the people who come to her hut by chance or by choice. A Baba Yaga may at times be killed, but there are others who take her place. Baba Yaga holds the secret to the water of life and may even be Mother Earth herself. This is why Baba Yaga is very much alive today, and not only in Mother Russia, but also throughout the world.

Baba Yagas Hut

In the majority of tales where she appears, Baba Yaga lives in an unusual house: it usually stands on chicken legs, or sometimes on just one chicken leg. Some scholars suggest that this underlines her connections with birds— though the eagle, or the geese and swans, that serve her in other stories are much more impressive than a chicken, that most domesticated fowl. At the same time, chicken legs might suggest that her dwelling, alive and mobile, cannot fly and probably never moves too fast or too far. One of our students recently returned from study abroad in Sweden, where she visited a swamp with houses built atop tree stumps standing in the water. With their gnarled roots, she said, the stumps looked surprisingly like chicken feet. Some of the tales specify instead that Baba Yaga’s house stands on spindle heels. Given the importance of the spindle in women’s traditional crafts, and in other parts of the tales (Prince Ivan may have to snap a spindle to free and recover his princess), this too seems to come from the culture’s deep past. Often Baba Yaga’s house turns around, as if to imitate the spinning of the earth. The word ‘time’ in Russian, vremia, comes from the same vr- root of turning and returning as the word for spindle, vereteno. A spindle holding up a ro- tating house where a frightening old woman tests her visitors and dispenses wisdom suggests a deep ritual past.
In Russian, Baba Yaga’s home is most often called an izba. The izba is a house made of hewn logs, a kind of construction common all over north- ern Russia and Scandinavia. (Immigrants brought it to the United States in the form of that superlatively American presidential birthplace, the log cabin.) The word izba is often translated as ‘hut,’ but it does not signify a shoddy piece of housing or necessarily a small one, as we see with the large, multistoried houses in the museum of Russian wooden architecture on the northern island of Kizhi. What does it tell us that Baba Yaga’s house is an izba? It is a folk house built in vernacular architecture, a traditional peas- ant house, a house in the country (not the city), made of wood, and most often situated near a forest (from whose trees it was built). When the hut or house is turning around, the questing hero or heroine must order it to stop turning with a rhymed charm. Intriguingly, everyone in the tales knows what to say to make the house stop turning—even the first sisters or servant girls in tales like “The Brother,” who fail to retrieve the kidnapped baby from Baba Yaga. In“The Frog Princess,” the prince says,“Little house, little house! Stand in the old way, as your mother set you—with your face to me, your back to the sea.” In “The Young Man and the Apples of Youth” the saying is shorter, though it suggests the same source: “Little house, little house! Turn your back to the forest, your front to me.” Baba Yaga’s house can be in the forest, in an empty field, or on the seashore. These locations all signify the same thing: they are far from the original home of the hero or heroine, on the border of another world.
When Baba Yaga goes out, she often rides in a mortar, rowing or punt- ing herself along with a pestle, perhaps sweeping her tracks away after her with a broom. Her power lets her travel by means of these everyday house-keeping implements, much as western Europeans believed that witches rode on flying brooms. Her mortar and pestle may themselves be magic objects like the fairy-tale flying carpets and invisibility hats, but she never gives or even loans them to other characters. For many centuries the mortar and pestle were crucial parts of a woman’s tool set, used to prepare herbs for cooking or medicine, or to break grain for porridge or baking. Old photo- graphs of Russian peasant households show large, deep mortars that could have held a substantial measure of grain, though they could hardly have accommodated an adult. Ivan Bilibin’s famous picture of Baba Yaga in flight is in harmony with the old photographs: the pestle is a tall, rela- tively narrow tube, not shallow like a bowl. The food-related mortar and pestle rightly hint that Baba Yaga’s house is stuffed with edible riches—the golden apples a child plays with until his rescuer finds him, or the stocks of grain, meat, and drink listed in “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” nourishing raw materials to transform into the good things of Russian peasant life: linen, wheat, poppy seed.
Baba Yaga’s house may be surrounded with a fence of bones, perhaps topped with skulls (or with one pole still untopped, waiting threateningly for the hero’s “wild head”), but even if she has an ordinary fence and gate they play important roles in the story. While Baba Yaga is sharpening her teeth to eat the nameless heroine, the girl pours oil on the hinges of the gate and manages to escape. Baba Yaga scolds the gate for not slamming on the girl, and the gate responds to her with human words. Baba Yaga is also associated with the bathhouse, which in Russia resembles a sauna. In some tales she asks the heroine to stoke the fire in the bathhouse (sometimes with bones for fuel rather than firewood), to bathe her children (frogs, reptiles, and other vermin), or to steam Baba Yaga herself. Many of the tales mention Baba Yaga’s stove. The traditional Russian stove is a large construction of brick and plaster (in a fancier house, it would be covered with ornamental tile), the size of a small room and certainly the dominant object in any room it occupies. Some stoves were built so that they heated, and took up parts of, more than one room. The stove would incorporate shelves, ovens, and hobs, nooks, or hooks for storing cookware. Such a stove would hold the fire’s heat, gently diffusing it into the house. This made it a favorite place for sleeping. The upper shelves, high above the fire and safely far away from vermin or cold drafts on the floor, would stay warm through the night. The stove is also associated with the womb, and not only in Russian: the English expression “one in the oven” also connects baking with the rising belly of a pregnant woman. Joanna Hubbs writes that the stove is moreover a re- pository of dead souls, the ancestors.4 Even more than an ordinary peasant stove, Baba Yaga’s is a conduit from death to rebirth.
To escape from Baba Yaga, characters in the tales may themselves em- ploy very ordinary objects—sometimes stolen from Yaga’s own house—and these too recur from one tale to another. Thrown behind as a character flees, a comb or brush turns into thick forest, as if the wood from which they were carved came back to life. A mirror, already magical in its ability to show the gazer his or her own face, turns into a wide, deep sea. Throwing a kerchief or towel will create an impassable river, often a river of fire. Embroidered handkerchiefs or towels may become or summon bridges over impassable waters, or they may convey secret messages: the wife’s mother and sisters in “Go I Don’t Know Where . . .” recognize the hero as her husband when he dries his face with a towel she made. Towels in the Russian village bore beautiful ritual embroidery and were used in traditional ceremonies (such as the hospitable welcome with bread and salt). To find the house of Baba Yaga, the hero or heroine may receive a ball of thread (once known as a clue in English), like the one that took Theseus in to the Minotaur. Baba Yaga lives (or rather, every Baba Yaga lives) in the heart of the labyrinth, and the hero or heroine enters there to face his or her worst fears and vanquish them. The tales include many other magical objects: in wonder tales musical pipes or rings may contain magical helpers, and in “The Three Kingdoms” (three dimensional world) each kingdom is wrapped up into a ring made of the matching metal to be conveyed back to the prince’s own kingdom.
One final traditional element in the tales deserves explanation: that is, searching for lice. Several tales mention searching for lice, or just “search- ing” in a character’s hair. On the one hand, this must have been a useful grooming practice; on the other hand, it feels good to have someone riffle through one’s hair and touch one’s scalp—especially if the hair is worn in long shaggy braids, like Baba Yaga’s. Lice were surely common in old Russia, as they were in Western Europe at the time, but the reader should be as- sured that “searching for lice” can also mean playing with someone’s hair in a pleasant, affectionate way.

Excerpt from Women Who Run With Wolves By Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

Not so long ago, women were deeply involved in the rhythms of life and death. They inhaled the pungent odor of iron from the fresh blood of childbirth. They washed the cooling bodies of the dead as well. The psyches of modern women, especially those from industrial and technological cultures, are often deprived of these close-up and hands-on blessed and basic experiences. But there is a way for the novice to fully participate in the sensitive aspects of the life and death cycles. Baba Yaga, the Wild Mother, is the teacher whom we can consult in these matters. She instructs the ordering of the house of the soul. She imbues an alternate order to the ego, one where magic can happen, joy can be done, appetite is intact, things are accomplished with gusto. Baba Yaga is the model for being true to the Self. She teaches both death and renewal. Goddess of nature. She owns sun and moon. She is death in the service of life. “What needs to die in order for my creativity and my Soul to live?” In contrast… The evil stepmother in fairy tales is life in the service of death… she will try and kill your joy, creativity, vitality. She will say… “but you need this job, art doesn’t pay the bills, you’re not good enough, who do you think you are?” That is life in the service of death. Laundering the Baba Yaga’s clothes is a fabulous symbol. In the old countries, and still today, in order to launder one’s clothes one descends to the river, and there makes the ritualistic ablutions that people have made since the beginning of time in order to renew the cloth. This is a very fine symbol for a cleansing and purification of the entire bearing of the psyche.

In mythology, the woven cloth is the work of the Life/ Death/Life mothers. For instance, in the East there are the Three Fates: Clotho, Lache sis, and Atropos. In the West there is Na’ashjé’ii Asdzáá, the Spider Woman, who gave the gift erf weaving to the Diñé (Navajo). These Life/Death/Life mothers teach women sensitivity to what must die and what shall live, to what shall be carded out, to what shall be woven in. In the tale, Baba Yaga charges Vasalisa do the laundiy to bring this weaving, these patterns known to the Life/Death/Life Goddess, out into the open, to consciousness; handling them, washing them, renewing them.

To wash something is a timeless purification ritual. It not only means to purify, it also means—like baptism from the Latin baptiza—to drench, to permeate with a spiritual numen and mystery. In the tale the washing is the first task. It means to make taut again that which has become slackened from the wearing. The clothes are like us, worn and worn until our ideas and values are slackened by the passing of time. The renewal, the revivifying, takes place in the water, in the re-discovering of what we really hold to be true, what we really hold sacred.

In archetypal symbolism, clothing represents persona, the first view the public gains of us. Persona is a kind of camouflage which lets others know only what we wish them to know about us, and nothing more. But there is an older meaning to persona, one found in all the Mezo American rites, one well known to cantadoras y cuentistas y curanderas, healers. The persona is not simply a mask to hide behind, but rather a presence which eclipses the mundane personality. In this sense, persona or mask is a signal of rank, virtue, character, and authority. It is the outward significator, the outward display of mastery.

I like very much this initiation task which requires a woman to cleanse the personae, the clothing of authority of the great Yaga of the forest. By washing the Yaga’s clothes, the initiate herself will see how the seams of persona are sewn, what patterns the gowns take. Soon she herself will have some measure of these personae to place in her closet amidst others she has fashioned throughout her life. It is easy to imagine that the Yaga’s marks of power and authority—her clothes—are made as she herself is fashioned psychologically: strong, enduring. To wash her laundry is a metaphor through which we learn to witness, examine, and take on this combination of qualities. We learn how to sort, mend, and renew the instinctive psyche through a purification the washing of the fibers of being.

Vasalisa’s next task is to sweep the hut and the yard. In Eastern European fairy tales, brooms are often made of sticks from trees and bushes, and sometimes the roots of wiry plants. Vasalisa’s work is to sweep this object made of plant matter over the floors and the yard to keep the place clear of debris. A wise woman keeps her psychic environ uncluttered. She accomplishes such by keeping a clear head, keeping a clear place for her work, working at completing her ideas and projects. For many women, this task requires that they clear a time each day for contemplation, for a space to live in that is clearly their own with paper, pens, paints, tools, conversations, time, freedoms that are for this work only. For many, psychoanalysis, contemplation, mediation, the taking of solitude, and other experiences of descent and transformation provide this special time and place for the work. Each woman has her own preferences, her own way. If this work can take place in Baba Yaga’s hut, so much the better. Even near the hut is better than far away. In any event, one’s wild life has to be kept ordered on a regular basis. It is not good enough to go to it for one day, or a few, once a year.

But because it is Baba Yaga’s hut that Vasalisa sweeps, because it is Baba Yaga’s yard, we are also speaking of keeping unusual ideas clear and ordered. These ideas include those which are uncommon, mystical, soulful, and uncanny. To sweep the premises means not only to begin to value the nonsuperficial life but to care for its orderliness. Sometimes women become confused about soulful work, and neglect its architecture till it is taken back by the forest. Gradually the structures of the psyche are overgrown until they finally are but a hidden archeologic ruin in the psyche’s unconscious. A cyclical and critical sweeping will prevent this from occurring. When women have cleared space, the wild nature will better thrive.

To cook for Baba Yaga, we ask literally, how does one feed the Baba Yaga of the psyche, what does one feed so wild a Goddess? Firstly, to cook for the Yaga, one lays a fire—a woman must be willing to burn hot, bum with passion, bum with words, with ideas, with desire for whatever it is that she truly loves. It is actually this passion which causes the cooking, and a woman’s original ideas of substance are what is cooked. To cook for the Yaga, one must arrange that one’s creative life has a consistent fire under it

Most of us would do better if we became more adept at watching the fire under our work, if we watched more closely the cooking process for nourishing the wild Self. Too often we turn away from the pot, from the oven. We forget to watch, forget to add fuel, forget to stir. We mistakenly think the fire and the cooking are like one of those feisty houseplants that can go without water for eight months before the poor thing keels over. It is not so. The fire bears, requires watching, for it is easy to let the flame go out. The Yaga must be fed. There’s hell to pay if she goes hungry.

So, it is the cooking up of new and completely original things, of new directions, of commitments to one’s art and work that continuously nourishes the wild soul. These same things nourish the Old Wild Mother and give her sustenance in our psyches. Without the fire, our great ideas, our original thoughts, our yearnings and longings remain uncooked, and everyone is unfulfilled. On the other hand, anything we do which has fire will please her and nourish us all.

In the development of women, all these motions of “homekeeping,” the cooking, the washing, the sweeping, quantify something beyond the ordinary. All these metaphors offer ways to think about, to measure, feed, nourish, straighten, cleanse, order the soul-life.

In all these things Vasalisa is initiated, and her intuition helps her accomplish the tasks. The intuitive nature carries the ability to measure things at a glance, to weigh in an instant, to clear off the debris around an idea, and to name the essence of the thing, to fire it with vitality, to cook raw ideas, to make food for the psyche. Vasalisa, through the doll of intuition, is learning to sort, understand, keep in order, and clear and clean the psychic premises.

Additionally, she learns that the Wild Mother requires much nourishment in order to do her work. Baba Yaga cannot be put on a lettuce leaf and black coffee diet. If one wishes to be close to her, one has to realize that she has appetite for certain things. If one is to have a relationship with the ancient feminine, one must cook up much Through these chores, Baba Yaga teaches, and Vasalisa learns not to cringe away from the big, the mighty, the cyclical, the unforeseen, the unexpected, the vast and grand scale which is the size of Nature, the odd, the strange, and the unusual.

Women’s cycles according to Vasalisa’s tasks are these: To cleanse one’s thinking, renewing one’s values, on a regular basis. To clear one’s psyche of trivia, sweep one’s self, clean up one’s thinking and feeling states on a regular basis. To build an enduring fire beneath the creative life, and cook up ideas on a systematic basis, means especially to cook, and with originality, a lot of unprecedented life in order to feed the relationship between oneself and the wildish nature.

Vasalisa, via her time with the Yaga, will eventually integrate some of the manner and style of the Yaga. And we too; it is our job, in our own limited human way, to pattern ourselves after her. And this we learn to do, yet we are awed at the same time, for in Baba Yagar-land there are things that fly in the night and are arisen

again at daybreak, all summoned and bidden by the wild instinctual nature. There are the bones of the dead which still speak, and there are winds and fates and suns, moon, and sky which all live in her great trunk. But she keeps order. Day follows night, season follows season. She is not haphazard. She is both Rhyme and Reason.

In the story, the Yaga finds Vasalisa has completed all the tasks set before her and the Yaga is pleased, but also a little disappointed that she cannot rail against the girl. And so, just to make sure Vasalisa doesn’t take anything for granted, Baba Yaga lets her know: “Though you managed to do my work once doesn’t mean you can do it again. So here, here’s another day of tasks. Let’s see how you do, dearie… or else.”

Vasalisa again, via the aegis of intuitive guidance, accomplishes the work, and the Yaga gives her the grumpy and begrudging stamp of approval … the kind that always comes from old women who have lived a long time and who have seen much, and somewhat wish they hadn’t, and are rather proud they have.