BABA YAGA / WITCH
Baba Yaga has a fanciful character, and researchers are cautious when it comes to defining her status. Some maintain that Baba Yaga is simply a (Slavic) witch, while others are ready to grant her a much more complex and individualised role in the system of Slavic demonology.
Let us look first at ordinary witches: who they are, what they look like and what they do. According to Tihomir R. Ðorđević, witches are mainly old women with ‘devilish souls’. ‘A woman is called a witch if she possesses a sort of devilish soul,’ according to Vuk Karadžić, ‘which emerges while she sleeps at night and turns into a butterfly, a hen or a turkey which flies from house to house, eating people up, especially little children: when she finds someone asleep, she hits them with a rod of some kind on the left breast, their chest splits open, she plucks out their heart and eats it, then she closes up the hole again. Some of the victims die straight away, others live on for a while longer, according to her whim as she eats their heart; and then they die, just as she intended.’5
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Slavic languages have many names for witches: ved’ma, vid’ma, vedz’ma, veštica, veštićina, czarownica, wiedzma, jedza, cipernica, coprnica, štrigna, štriga, morna, brina, brkaća, konjobarka, srkaća, potkovanica, rogulja, krstaća, kamenica, ćarovnica, mag’josnica, and others besides. Synonyms have a protective function, and the protection they offer is mostly used to protect children. People often refer to a witch as she over there, for fear of uttering her name.
Like many other mythical beings, witches have a talent for metamorphosis. (In contemporary popular culture they are ‘morphs’.) A witch can turn herself into a bird, a serpent, a fly, a butterfly, a frog or a cat.6 Most often they turn into a black bird (raven, crow, black hen and magpie). There is also a popular belief that moths are really witches, so it is best to throw them on the fire or scorch their wings. The next day, you need to find out which ‘baba’ in the village ‘got burned in the fire’, ‘roasted right through like a roasted devil’ or simply passed away. That baba is – was – a witch. ‘A hen with scorched feathers, or any other bird that a witch turns into, can also give the witch away.’ There is a sort of moth that is actually called a witch. People believe that any woman who is touched by the wings of this ‘witch’ will be barren.
It was believed that when a witch falls asleep, a butterfly or bird flies out of her mouth, ‘and if she turns over, the butterfly or bird cannot return whence it came, so it will die, and so will the woman. It can happen that the bird or hen flies away, the sleeping woman’s husband turns his wife around so that her head is where her feet were, the hen cannot go back into the woman’s mouth and the woman dies. When the grieving husband puts his wife back in the position she had when she fell asleep, the hen can go back into the woman again, and the woman comes back to life.’7
Witches can be recognised by ‘the wart of some kind that every one of them has on her head, the same as the long cockscomb on a strutting cockerel’. Witches are cross-eyed, they are prone to vomiting (hence the saying ‘He threw up his guts like a witch’) and they don’t sink in water. A witch has the ability to change her physical size, ‘she can make herself absolutely small, so that she can pass through the narrowest crack, through a keyhole, and emerge on the other side.’ (T. R. Ðorđević)
In Herzegovina, a witch is a woman with a moustache ‘like a young man’s first whiskers’. Baba, a character in P. P. Njegoš’s epic poem The Mountain Wreath says: ‘It is an easy thing to recognise a witch: grey hair and a cross under her nose.’8 Hence, a witch has ‘big whiskers and hairy thighs’; a witch is ‘plethoric, with a foul temper and a cross under her nose’; witches are always ill-humoured, they always wear an evil expression and they have ‘shaggy legs’. A witch is ‘whiskery, with bushy eyebrows, bent-backed, her eyes sunk deep in her head’. A witch has ‘thin little moustaches, bloodshot eyes and sharp teeth, but the moustache is the surest sign’. Hairiness is not such an issue in Bosnia. On the contrary, the Bosnians maintain that a witch is ‘a woman with no hair in her armpits or her lower body’.9
Mythical beings are distinguished from humans by their physical size: they are significantly smaller or larger than people. In Istria,10 they believe that the plague is a gigantic woman. According to Serbian beliefs, the witch called karakondžula is a large fat creature. In Montenegro, they used to believe that Mother Wednesday was an enormous female, ‘wide as a haystack’, with great bosoms, grey hair and steel teeth.
Like other mythical beings, witches have some kind of physical defect, which may be expressed as a surplus, a deficiency or an imbalance. It is sometimes believed of witches that they have a rudimentary tail, or even rudimentary wings. Slovenian folklore mentions preglavica, a headless woman in white who only appears at midday. Her Russian counterpart is called poludnitsa. The Croats believed in faceless female demons: dead mothers coming back to give suck to their babies. Great dangling dugs are not reserved to Baba Yaga alone. The Serbs used to believe in the existence of the giant mother (divska majka) who would knead dough with her breasts. The kuga in Konavle11 and the koljara in Montenegro have great dangling dugs that they can sling over their shoulders. The goddess Kshumai (worshipped by the Kaffirs of the Hindu Kush), the mythical peri (Farsi: pari) and the Arabic salauva – they all have the same traits. Alavardi (also Alabasti) is an immemorial mythical being familiar to many Asiatic peoples. She is a tall woman with pendulous breasts that she tosses over her shoulders.
Witches may have only one eye and no nostrils, or only one nostril. One of Baba Yaga’s legs is made of bone (or iron). Blindness or monocular vision is typical of mythical beings. Baba Yaga is blind (or grumbles that her eyes hurt). She identifies her ‘guests’ – random passing travellers – by their human scent, because, as far as we know, she cannot see them.
Mythical beings give themselves away by the noises they make (they whistle, laugh, clap their hands, etc.). If a human catches their attention, certain mythical creatures will repeat the human’s words over and over, like an echo. Baba Yaga uses repetitious phrases and can be recognised by her remarkable wheezing breath: ‘Oof … oof … oof.’ Many of those attributes – specifically ‘noisiness’, hand-clapping, whistling, repeating words (echolalia) – could be put down to autism, while simple infirmity, difficulties with walking, blindness and dementia were due to sheer old age. In folklore, however, such longevity has been crowned with a mythic halo. This is why it is believed that witches live ‘for a very long time indeed’, longer than mere mortals, and ‘give up the ghost’ only with great difficulty. Baba Yaga herself is about a hundred years old. There is a folk belief that witches continue to do evil after they are dead. Therefore, when a witch dies, ‘it is worth slitting the tendons at their ankles and under their knees with a black-handled knife so that she will not return home from the grave and do people harm’.12
In some areas of Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga is considered to be the ‘aunt of all witches’; elsewhere she is seen as the ‘mistress of all witches’, or even as ‘the devil’s sister’, while in Belarus, she has a difficult role to play: death delivers the souls of the deceased to Baba Yaga, and she and her underling witches have to feed these souls until they gain the requisite feathery lightness.
Remarks
Now we come to the first, and completely random, correspondences between your author’s manuscript and Baba Yaga. It is not without significance that the author gave one of her heroines, Pupa, a medical vocation: gynaecology. Midwives, sorceresses, healers, ‘witches’ all had an important and irreplaceable role in childbirth.
Although the physical appearance of your author’s heroines has no link with the aforementioned signs for recognising witches – otherwise every older woman could be a witch – let us mention some details anyway. The author’s mother wears a wig and often lets out a sort of groaning noise – uh-hu-uh-hu! Baba Yaga is well known for her puffing: Oof, oof, oof! Pupa has a beak-like nose, she is uncommonly thin, half-blind and h
ighly sensitive to smells. Kukla has big feet. Beba has conspicuously large breasts and the little girl Wawa has eyebrows that meet in the middle.
By the way, in not-so-far-off times, all middle-aged women were bound to look like ‘witches’. Our own time is char ac terised by panic over ageing, obsessive efforts to delay and disguise the onset of old age. Fear of ageing is one of the strongest phobias among contemporary women, and increasingly among men as well. This very fear gives powerful impetus to the cosmetics industry. Naturally, the ‘anti-Baba Yaga’ industry feeds this fear and lives off and by it.
Hair removers help to keep our skin smooth: they lift the hairs from joined-up eyebrows, moustaches, whiskers from our chins, armpits and legs (no more shaggy thighs!), and the latest fashion is not only for removing the shameful hair but for styling it. Wigs, hair restoration and transplants have practically done away with female baldness. Dental implants have put a stop to toothlessness, and if they had been invented in the times when artists’ canvas overflowed with portraits of lovely ladies, their faces would have stretched in beaming grins; instead, they all had pursed lips or wore an enigmatic smile like the Mona Lisa. The cosmetics industry, the growth of plastic surgery, along with its increasing affordability: all this is changing the physical appearance of the inhabitants of the richer portions of the globe. The recent achievement of the first face transplant may stimulate a new appetite: for a total makeover, the transform ation of mortal ‘frogs’ into deathless ‘princesses’. The age-old belief that witches drink blood has turned, today, into the real and highly profitable practice of blood transfusion or replacement, a therapy that is widely believed to rejuvenate the organism and prolong life. Only rich people can indulge in such treatments, which they do in exclusive private clinics. The Astana cycling team from Kazakhstan and its star Aleksandr Vinokurov were asked to withdraw from the Tour de France in 2007 after Vinokurov tested positive for using blood transfusions as doping.
To end with, let us just add – as solace for witches! – that a negligible minority of humankind (let’s call them ‘vampires’) still drinks the blood of the majority of humankind (let’s call them ‘donors’), and does it so ‘innocently’, through a clear plastic tube, just as if they were sucking juice through a humble straw.
THE HUT
‘The fence around the hut is made of human bones, skulls with eyes intact are stuck on the posts: instead of bolts on the gate – human legs; instead of a latch on the door – a hand; instead of a lock – a mouth full of sharp teeth.’
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Baba Yaga’s hut terrifies the passing traveller. The first things the hero or heroine sees are the skulls; beyond the hut itself there is most often nothing at all. (‘There stands the hut, the path no further runs. Only the darkling dark, nothing else to see.’) The hut looks highly unwelcoming. Often there isn’t so much as a window or a door; the hut stands on hen’s legs and turns eerily around on the spot.
If he wants to enter, the passing traveller has to know how. Heroes like Prince Ivan (Ivan Tsarevich) usually blow into the hut and call out: ‘Little hut! O little hut! Stay still, little hut, as you once did, with your front to me and your back to the forest.’ Or: ‘Little hut, o little hut! Turn your eyes to the forest and your door to me. I shan’t stop here long, just a single night. Let the lone traveller in.’
Girls, by contrast, are warned in advance what they must do to humour the dangerous hut: ‘There, my girl, a birch tree will whip your eyes, so tie it down with a ribbon; there the door will creak and thump, so oil the hinges well; the dogs will attack you, so throw them some bread; the cat will scratch your eyes, so give it some ham.’
Vladimir Propp argues that the myths of many tribal cultures contain two worlds: the world of the living and the world of the dead. A wild beast stands on the boundary (wild animals guard the entrance to Hades), or perhaps a hut with zoo morphic traits. In many tribal cultures a hut like Baba Yaga’s is involved in the initiation rites for young males when they enter the adult world. First they have to be devoured (by the hut itself, whose door puts us in mind of jaws) in order to be born again and join the adult world.
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Thus the hero stands before Baba Yaga’s hut and says: ‘Little hut, o little hut, turn your front to me and your back to the forest.’ The young man is afraid, many have died on this spot, which is proven by the skulls on the fence, but even so, he pleads to be let inside (‘Let me come in, to eat salted bread!’). Meanwhile Baba Yaga in her hut murmurs, satisfied: ‘All alone you came to me, like a lamb to the slaughter.’
When they gain entry to the hut, the heroes come face to face with a new terrifying sight: ‘On the stove, on the ninth brick, lies Baba Yaga with her bone leg, her nose touching the ceiling, her slobber seeping over the doorstep, her dugs dangling over the lug,13 sharpening her teeth.’ The descriptions of Baba Yaga vary: stretching from one corner of the hovel to the other, in some accounts, she rests one leg on a shelf and the other on the stove; sometimes she tosses her breasts onto the stove or hangs them ‘over a pole’, or even ‘shuts the oven door with her breasts’, while snot trails out of her nose, and she ‘scoops up soot with her tongue’. Very occasionally the descriptions are unambiguously sexual: Baba Yaga leaps out of the hut with ‘sinewy rump’ and ‘polished cunt’. Baba Yaga has become so much a part of her hut, growing into it, that the hut dances up and down instead of her, or spins on its axis like a child’s top.
How do the heroes cope with their fear? Before their first meeting with Baba Yaga, they appear very impudent: ‘Come on, old girl, what’s all the fuss about? What’s all the racket for? I want food and drink, get the steam-bath ready, then I’ll tell you all the news.’ We recognise a stereotype in the tone and substance of these words: this is how men in patriarchal societies address their women. One does not expect such behaviour from a young man when he meets an old woman for the first time, but curiously enough, the magic formula does the trick. Hearing the tone and substance of his retort, Baba Yaga is tamed in a trice, and she does everything he asks straightaway. The young traveller’s uncouth familiarity is the key that unlocks her door.14
The hero comes face to face with vagina dentata, and behold! He lives to tell the tale.
Let me add at once that, while the obscenity of old women is nothing rare in the mythico-ritual world, it is rarely sexual. Obscenity has its ritual nature and its obvious purpose. Baubo is the famous old girl who pulled up her skirts and exposed her genitals to Demeter. By mocking the absurd role of wise consolatrix (which everybody expected her to play), Baubo managed to make Demeter laugh.15 The Japanese goddess Ame-no-Uzume tempts the sun goddess Amaterasu out of her cave with an obscene dance, to drive away the darkness that had fallen on the earth. In some parts of Serbia and Bulgaria, there was a custom that the old women would lift their skirts and show their vulvas as a way of defending their village from hail, and thereby save the harvest. Old women in southern Serbia would even strip naked and run round the house to drive away the hail, imploring as they went:
Don’t you, dragon,
fight my monster,
it’s devoured lots like you!
or,
Flee, you monster, from my monster!
Flee, you monster, from my monster!
They can’t both be master here.
The vulva – the ‘dragon’ or ‘monster’ – had a magical strength that could dispel clouds. People believed that the clouds were led by dragons, so the lines ‘Don’t you, dragon, fight my monster’ pitted the vulva against the clouds. Let’s not forget that Baba Yaga rules over the powers of nature: she often appears in the role of mistress of the winds.16
Baba Yaga has an initiatory meaning for male and female heroes alike. Female initiation rarely has a sexual character, while the male equivalent is explicitly so: on the psychoanalytic level, the meeting with Baba Yaga is a confrontation with vagina dentata, the mother, the granny, the ugly old crone who is a grotesque inversion of his future bride.17 Certain n
ative North American tribes have a myth of the Terrible Mother, who has a fish concealed in her vagina that gobbles men up. The hero’s task is to vanquish the Terrible Mother, more exactly to break the teeth of the fish that lives in her vagina.
Remarks
The hut, vagina dentata, is a male castration fantasy. Your author’s text proposes a remarkable inversion by means of the character of Kukla. Kukla is a victim of her own vagina dentata. The inci dent that occurred at the outset of her sexual life decides her entire later life. Kukla’s problem is two-fold: her sexuality and her creativity are both petrified. She is like the Medusa, who was not made to look in the mirror by others; she did it by herself. She has no children, and only begins to write when her husband dies. And she does so, naturally, hidden behind his name.
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Myths S.) Page 22
