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As far as I gather from your accompanying letter, your author undertook to provide a text based on the myth of Baba Yaga. By the way, I was touched by your admission that you ‘don’t have a clue’ about Baba Yaga yourself. Nevertheless, you only have to surf the Net a bit to see that, while Baba Yaga may not be Oprah Winfrey or Princess Diana, she isn’t a completely obscure mythical nonentity either. A shamanist group in northern Holland is named after her; likewise a table-lamp shop somewhere in Poland, a Polish–American magazine (Baba Yaga’s Corner), a home for the elderly and infirm, a family hotel and a language school in Germany. Restaurants, patisseries and health-food shops seem to be drawn to the name Baba Yaga, a circumstance which, bearing in mind Baba Yaga’s own culinary preferences, is not without its amusing side. A number of fitness centres also bear her name, maybe because their owners think Baba Yaga must have some connection with – yoga?! There is a German dressmaking business called ‘Baba Yaga’, a Dutch ‘spiritual website’ (where interested parties can purchase crystal balls and teapots) and a women’s choral society, likewise Dutch. The character of Baba Yaga has also served as an artistic stimulus to theatre companies and pop groups, art projects, film directors, comic strips and animators, the authors of graphic and non-graphic books, horror and porno websites, blogs and adverts. For example, there is a Serbian advertising slogan for the Porsche Carrera GT: ‘the Baba Roga of the roads’ – Baba Roga being the Serbian equivalent of the Russian Baba Yaga.
Along with these broad uses and abuses of her name, I suppose the average non-Slavic reader does not know much about Baba Yaga. Even for most Slavic readers, she is just a hideous old hag who steals little children. Which brings me precisely to the problem that we share. You modestly admit that you don’t have a clue, and are asking me to explicate the correspondences between your author’s text and the myth of Baba Yaga. In these circumstances you will surely agree that the task you set me is by no means an easy one.
To make my reply as clear and simple as possible, I have compiled a ‘Baba Yaga For Beginners’ – a short glossary of themes, motifs and mythemes linked to Slavic mythology, and therefore also to ‘babayagology’. At this point I should remind you of the notorious fact that Slavic mythology is only conditionally ‘Slavic’. Myths, legends and oral traditions are like viruses. Similar ‘stories’ exist everywhere – in Slavic forests, on African deserts, the foothills of the Himalayas, in Eskimo igloos – and they seep through to our own time and our own mass culture, to TV soaps, sci-fi series, Internet forums and videogames, to Lara Croft, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Harry Potter.
Perhaps there is no need to mention that my ‘Baba Yaga for Beginners’ is more or less a compilatory work, for compilation is what we scholars do. The following works were invaluable in preparing my glossary: the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Slavic Mythology (Slavjanskaja mifologija, Enciklopedicheskij slovar), the Russian two-volume encyclopaedia of world myths (Mify narodov mira), Vladimir Propp’s well-known study The Historical Roots of the Wondertale (Istoricheskie korni volshebnoj skazki), various scholarly studies and reviews (e.g. the excellent Codes of Slavic Culture / Kodovi slavenskih kultura), the most recent and comprehensive study of Baba Yaga – Baba Yaga: the Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale, by Andreas Johns, and the ever-inspiring books of Marina Warner. I won’t burden you with scholarly references, but I can supply a more extensive bibliography should you need it.
Here, then, is how things stand. First: your author is a writer, and any interpretation in literature is ‘legitimate’. There are no better and worse literary interpretations, there are only good and bad books. Secondly: myths are memes, ‘units of cultural transmission’ or ‘units of imitation’, as defined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Myths take themselves to pieces, add bits on, mutate, get transformed, adapt and readapt. Myths travel; in travelling, they retell and ‘translate’ themselves. They never reach their destination, they are locked forever in a transitional–translational state. There is usually no single, clear-cut mythic story: there are only numerous variants. It is like this with the story of Baba Yaga. Thirdly: the lack of explicit references to Baba Yaga in your author’s text stems in part from the muddle around the figure of Baba Yaga herself, around her ambiguous character and authority, and partly from popular superstition. For the Slavs, as for many other peoples, the utterance of names is swathed in taboos. As such, the source of your author’s ‘discreet’ handling of Baba Yaga’s name may lie in folklore taboos related to witches and witchcraft.
The Montenegrins, for example, believe that punishment awaits anyone who looks for a witch. They spread the legend of how Jesus when he fled from persecution found shelter with an old witch, whom he blessed with these words: ‘Whoever would seek you out is doomed to fail.’ It follows that witches cannot be identified because Jesus blessed them when his persecutors tried to capture him in Judaea, and he hid with a witch, and how she did not betray him, and he blessed her so that her activities would remain secret from everybody. (This, according to Tihomir R. Ðorđević in his Witches and Fairies in our Popular Tradition and Belief / Veštica i vila u našem narodnom predanju i verovanju.)
In short, Baba Yaga plays a supporting role, but her interventions in a fairytale are crucial, and it is difficult to say anything about her without mentioning her part in the tale and her relationship to the other characters. Baba Yaga’s roles in fairytales are changeable: sometimes she helps the principal hero or heroine to reach their goal, and at other times she puts obstacles in their way. Overall, I shall do my best to steer you towards the basic ‘facts’ about the mythical figure of Baba Yaga: who she is, where she comes from, where she lives, what she looks like, what she does and so forth. Then we will go over some of the details that may seem unnecessary to you – too comprehensive, and in fact boring. I assure you, however, that every detail has its place in our Baba Yaga puzzle. As we go along, I shall try to draw your attention to the significant links between Baba Yaga and your author’s fictional diptych. The purpose of my commentary will not be interpretative or evaluative, and it will emerge within the separate entries as ‘Remarks’. These ‘remarks’ of mine should be taken as personal interventions which put you under no kind of obligation whatever. For that matter, nothing here puts you under any obligation.
I would wish you to understand the following text as one path through the forest of meanings, in other words a path through a fairytale turned inside out. I shall try to make the path as easy as possible (because it is my job to roam around the forest and peer under every shrub, while it is yours to pass through it). All I ask is that you should be a little patient. Why? Because only patient and steadfast heroes – those who are ready to cross seven mountains and seven seas and wear out three pairs of iron shoes – can expect a reward at the end of the tale. Whether this is what’s waiting for you, I cannot say; that is for you to find out.
Yours very cordially,
Dr Aba Bagay
BABA YAGA FOR BEGINNERS
BABA
Baba1 comes from the Indo-European, whence it spread into many languages. In Slavic languages, the principal meaning of baba is an old woman, grandmother, lady. In colloquial Russian, a baba can be any woman (e.g. horoshaya baba, a good-looking woman), likewise in other Slavic languages. Baba can be a married woman (e.g. moja baba, my wife). Baba can also be a female with bad traits: a fishwife, a gossip, a quarrelsome nag, a shrew. Baba is also a colloquial expression for a cowardly, fearful man. Babica means a midwife, whence the word babinje, which means the postnatal period. Slavs also use the word baba to refer to female mythic characters, particular days, atmospheric effects, astronomical events, illnesses and so on.
Female demons are often called babas. Mother Wednesday (baba Sereda) watches over the weavers at their looms and stops women from using them on Wednesdays (or it might be any other day). White Lady (Belaja baba) is a watery demon, while Bannaja baba (banniha, bajnica, baennaja matushka, obderiha
) is a spirit that lives in the traditional Russian steam bath (banya). In Ukraine, the Wheaten Lady (Žitna baba) is the spirit of the fields; and the Wild Lady (Dika baba) is the female demon that leads young men astray. Witches, fortune-tellers and healers are all called – baba.
Baba also turns up in the names of illnesses (babice, bapke, babushki, babuha, babile, etc.). In Bulgaria, Baba Šarka is a folk name for measles. Baba Šarka is homeless, footloose and gluttonous. When she turns up in someone’s home, nobody is allowed to prepare any food for nine days. Then Baba Šarka abandons the inhospitable house to look for somewhere more generous. Baba Drusla and Baba Pisanka also bring sickness into the house.
Baba is also connected with the popular concept of time. Baba Marta personifies the third month of the year, especially in Bulgaria, but also in Serbian and Macedonian folklore. In Croatia and Serbia, Baba Korizma (Lent) walks with seven sticks, and she throws away a stick for every week of fasting. In Serbia, snowy days in March are called ‘baba’s days’, ‘baba’s billy-goats’ or ‘baba’s kids’. In Romania and Ukraine, Baba Jaudocha (also Jeudocha or Dokia) is accountable for all wintery precipitations. Snow falls when she shakes her fur coat. Many regions have a carnival custom of ‘burning the baba’. In Croatia, people mark New Year’s Eve symbolic ally by burning a doll, called Baba Krnjuša, so that the new year can take her place.
In Slavic folklore, astronomical and meteorological phenomena are also named after baba. Moonlight is called ‘Mother Moonshine’, and the moon itself is ‘Baba Gale’. ‘Baba’s belt’ is a metaphor for rainbow, and ‘baba’s millet’ for hail. Bad weather usually comes out of ‘baba’s smock’ in the sky. In Poland, when there are dark spots on the moon, people say ‘Baba is churning butter’ or ‘Baba’s baking bread’. When it is rainy and sunny at the same time, Polish children chant ‘Rain is falling, sun is shining, Baba Yaga’s butter’s churning’. When the first snow falls, the Casubians say ‘The old woman has gone to the dance’. Carpathian farmers use the expression ‘the old woman is freezing cold’ to describe the high mountains dusted with the first snow. In time of drought, Polish peasants believe that an old witch is squatting in an oak tree (meaning, in a nest), keeping eggs warm and that the drought will go on until the chicks hatch. In Bulgarian folklore, baba is a picturesque synonym for day and also for night.2
So, lots of things are called baba. In Slavic harvest festivals, the last sheaf is called the baba, and the peasants celebrate the end of harvest by dressing this sheaf in women’s clothes. One kind of mushroom is called a baba, in Slavic languages, as is a butterfly, two kinds of fruit (a pear and a cherry), a cake or pastry (called babka in Polish) and a fish. Baba crops up in the names of mountains, towns and villages (Velika Baba, Mala Baba, Stara Baba, Babina Greda, etc.). ‘Baba’s summer’ is a colloquial expression for a long mild autumn, an Indian summer.
Many Bulgarian sayings are linked with the word baba. The expression ‘There’s one thing baba knows, and she never stops saying it’ is used for someone who is forever telling you the same thing. ‘Baba’s fiddle-faddle’, ‘baba’s babbling’: these are synonyms for nonsense, silliness. There are similar sayings in the language of the Croats, Bosnians and Serbs. ‘There went the old woman with the cakes’ is a saying that refers to a missed opportunity. ‘Baba wants what baba dreams’ is a saying with unambiguous sexual connotations, but it means that when somebody mentions something, that’s what they’re hoping for, which is, in fact, a popular equivalent of Freud’s theory of parapraxis. ‘The old woman’s busy fiddling and faddling’ (Trla baba lan da joj prođe dan) is what people say when somebody fritters away their time, loafing around or being pointlessly active. Mixing ‘old women and frogs’ (babe ižabe) means mixing things that would otherwise have no connection with each other. ‘Any old woman can do that’, or ‘even my old woman can do that’, means that anybody can do whatever it is, even the most incompetent person. ‘Whatever grannie says, she only talks about cakes’ is another way of referring to somebody who won’t stop talking about the same thing. ‘Too many midwives, crippled child’ means that too many cooks spoil the broth. ‘If grandma had balls, she’d be grandpa’ is another saying. At the same time, babo or baba means father in some languages (Farsi, Arabic, Turkish, Italian), but it can also refer to an older male member of the family, any old man or a holy man.
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All things considered, the Slavic world is positively teeming with babas! On the other hand, let us not forget that all these ugly, sexist notions, proverbs, sayings and beliefs involving ‘grandmas’ were thought up by ‘grandpas’. Who, naturally, reserved the more heroic parts for themselves.
BABA YAGA
Baba Yaga, along with her innumerable variants in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian (Igaya, Iga, Yega, Yagaba, Yagabova, Egabova, Egibitsa, Yegiboba, Yaganishna, Yagivovna, Yagichina- Babichina, Yaga-bura, Egibishna, Yagishna, Yega, Lyaga, Oga, Aga Gnishna, Yagabaka), and in other Slavic languages (Indži-baba, Ježibaba, Jedibaba, Jedubaba, Babaroga), is a female anthropomorphic being, an old hag-cum-sorceress, a witch. There have been many interpretations of her name. Some authors hold that Jagok, Egga, Iga, Yuga, Yazya, Yaza, Yeza, Yagishna, Ajshi-baba, and other similar designations all have a single Old Slavonic stem: ega or esa, which is close to the Lithuanian engti and the Latvian igt, and which mean, approximately, evil, horror, nightmare, sickness.
Baba Yaga lives in a forest, or on the edge of a forest, in a cramped little hut that stands on hen’s legs and turns around on the spot. She has one skeleton-leg (‘Baba Yaga, bony leg!’), dangling breasts that she dumps on the stove or hangs over a pole, a long sharp nose that knocks against the ceiling (nos v potolok ros), and she flies around in a mortar, rowing herself through the air with a pestle, wiping away her traces with a broom.
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Baba Yaga is a unique oral–textual ‘patchwork’ of folklore and mythico-ritual traditions (shamanism, totemism, animism, matriarchy), and her status, function and authority change from tale to tale, from one zone of folklore to another, from male story-tellers to female. Baba Yaga is a text that is read, studied, told, adapted, interpreted and reinterpreted differently at different times.
Baba Yaga’s origins are not all that clear. One theory has it that she was the Great Goddess, the Earth Mother herself. Another, that she was the great Slavic goddess of death (Yaga zmeya bura); a third, that she was the mistress of all the birds (hence the hut on hen’s legs and the long nose like a beak); a fourth theory has it that she was a rival of the Slavic goddess Mokosh, and that she evolved over time from a great goddess into an androgyne, then into the goddess of birds and snakes, and then into an anthropomorphic being, until she finally acquired female attributes. Some associate her with the Golden Baba, an archaic goddess from the age of matriarchy, and they see the hen’s legs beneath her hut as the vestige of a fertility cult.
Baba Yaga appears as a spinner and weaver, roles which always symbolise power over human destiny (Baba Yaga gives the heroes a ball of thread that will lead them to their goal), but also as a warrior who sleeps with a sword over her head and fights against knights (sometimes she appears as a mother of dragons). In some tales, Baba Yaga has power to turn people to stone (like the Medusa); in others, power to command the forces of nature: winds, tempests and thunder (which is why she is sometimes associated with the Slavic god Perun). Vladimir Propp, whose influence in this field of research has been immense, holds that Baba Yaga is the mistress of all the forest fauna, of the world of the dead, and also the priestess of initiations.
The elusive and capricious Baba Yaga sometimes appears as a helper, a donor, sometimes as an avenger, a villain, sometimes as a sentry between two worlds, sometimes as an intermediary between worlds, but also as a mediator between the heroes in a story. Most interpreters locate Baba Yaga in the ample mythological family of old and ugly women with specific kinds of power, in a taxonomy that is common to mythologies the world over.
Along with many points of cont
act with other ‘babas’, Baba Yaga has earned her own name and individuality. Although Baba Yaga is widespread around the Slavic world, ‘the problems of Baba Yaga’s genesis, mythological nature, function and semantics in fairytales are highly complex and provoke continual debate.’3 Some authors even maintain that the name Baba Yaga is unknown in Slavic mythology, and that she belongs exclusively to the world of fairytales. What’s beyond dispute is that Baba Yaga sprouted in mythological soil, but also that, as a character, she took shape in Russian folktales between the 18th and 20th centuries, when hundreds and hundreds of versions of these tales were written down. Baba Yaga grew out of the complex and long-lasting interaction between folklore and mythico-ritual traditions, the tellers of folktales, folklorists and commentators; out of the blending of Indo-European and pre-Indo-European mythologies. Maria Gimbutas includes Baba Yaga among the ‘goddesses inherited from Old Europe, such as Greek Athena, Hera, Artemis, Hecate; Roman Minerva and Diana; Irish Morrígan and Brigit; Baltic Laima and Ragana; Russian Baba Yaga, Basque Mari, and others, are not “Venuses” bringing fertility and prosperity […]. These life-givers and death-wielders are “queens” or “ladies” and as such they remained in individual creeds for a very long time in spite of their official dethronement, militarisation, and hybridisation with the Indo-European heavenly brides and wives.’4
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Myths S.) Page 21
