Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Myths S.)

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  Only when Pupa leaves home, her ‘hut’, can she die. Leaving home is the emancipatory deed that leads Pupa where she wants to go – to death.

  Returning home, your author returns to the maternal ‘hut’ and repeats the initiation rite for the nth time. She must respect the law of Baba Yaga’s hut, otherwise Baba Yaga will eat her up. The quip about good girls going to heaven while bad girls go everywhere contains the whole female history (as seen by men), where women’s fate has been determined by two opposed poles: home (cleanliness, order, security, family) and the space outside the home (dirt, disorder, danger, chaos, loneliness). The outer space was traditionally reserved to men, and inner space, the home, to women.

  Finally, something interesting which can be read as a metaphor realised by contemporary society. The vagina dentata has fled from the field of sexual fantasy into reality. A female condom, the ‘Rapex’, has been invented by a South African woman, who wants to help African women defend themselves against rapists. Just like the Terrible Mother of native North American myths, the female condom has fish teeth in it that can wound the penetrating penis. Apparently the inventor was inspired by meeting a rape victim who said: ‘If only I had teeth down there.’

  THE MORTAR

  The mortar, a common object in everyday peasant life, plays a strongly symbolic role in European and Asian mythologies. It symbolises the womb, while its partner the pestle is – what else? – the penis. In Belarus, for example, there is a funny explanation, meant for children, of how children come into the world: ‘I fell from the sky, and landed in a mortar, I climbed out of the mortar and look! How big I’ve grown!’

  Slavs used to involve a mortar in comical wedding customs. They would fill the mortar with water, and the bride-to-be had to pummel away with the pestle until all the water was gone. There was a wedding ritual of dressing up the mortar as a female and the pestle as a male, and then this symbolic bride and groom were placed on the wedding table.

  The Russians and Ukrainians used the mortar in healing rituals. It was believed that sickness could be beaten away in a mortar, sick animals could be beaten back to health with a pestle and mortar and even a fever could be beaten to death in a mortar.18

  * * *

  The Indian Vedas, too, celebrate the mortar and soma (the drink of the gods, like nectar, though it is quite possibly really sperm), but here the sexual symbolism is raised to a cosmic level. For the mortar is a cosmic womb in which life itself is renewed, while the pestle is a cosmic phallus.

  An iron mortar is mentioned in a Russian spell from the 17th century: ‘There is an iron mortar, on that iron mortar stands an iron stool, on that iron stool sits an iron woman.’ (Stoit stupa zheleznaja, na toj stupe zheleznoj stoit stul zheleznyj, na tom stule zheleznom sidit baba zheleznaja…)

  A mortar is Baba Yaga’s means of transport, and in the mythical world she has exclusive permission to fly in it. ‘Ordinary’ witches travel by broomstick, flying up the chimney and out of the house. Baba in The Mountain Wreath, by Petar Petrovíc Njegoš, says: ‘We move around with silver oars, our vessel is an eggshell.’ This verse draws on the folk belief that witches ride in eggshells. That is why people would break eggshells into little bits before they threw them away, so that witches could not use them. And on the Croatian island of Krk they believe that witches and sorceresses can only cross the sea in eggshells.

  The mortar, Baba Yaga’s transport of choice,19 is symbolically closer to an eggshell than a broomstick. Baba Yaga rides in her own symbolic womb (which is so hypertrophied that it can even hold her standing up) and paddles through the air with a pestle-penis. Liberated from human laws that determine what we can and cannot do, the unrelenting laws of the sexes, Baba Yaga makes use of both organs, male and female, and she flies, which is a very strong mythic representation of human sexuality. This sexuality is, it goes without saying, grotesque and carnivalised. As she is an old woman (supposedly a centenarian), Baba Yaga does not only travesty human sexuality: she transvesties it.

  Of course, other interpretations are also possible: as a female, Baba Yaga’s ‘wings’ were ‘clipped’ in advance, so she was compelled to ‘fly’ in a mortar, an everyday object, like flying in a stewpot or a kneading-trough. There is also the interpretation that Baba Yaga is actually a hermaphrodite, hence a perfect human being, a Slavic folklore version of Tiresias, who – thanks to the gods – switched gender more than once (and decided in the end that being female is much better!). In Slavic carnival travesties, in Croatia for example, they carry a doll around the village; they call it ‘grandma carries grandpa’ (baba dida nosi), and it is formed of woven parts of male and female bodies.

  A popular Russian woodcut (lubok) from the early 18th century depicts an unusual scene: Baba Yaga going into battle with a crocodile. Supposedly the crocodile is Peter the Great (because that was what the Old Believers called Peter the Great: ‘the crocodile’), and Baba Yaga is his wife. Baba Yaga rides on a swine, holding the reins in one hand and a pestle in the other. Her belt is a tangle of a hatchet and a distaff, one ‘male’ object and the other typically ‘female’, although they both have a phallic shape. Hence Baba Yaga, in the imagination of the anonymous woodcut-artist, possesses both symbols of power.

  Remarks

  Pupa’s foot warmer is a modern equivalent of Baba Yaga’s mortar. This connection becomes even more obvious when the girl Wawa claims Pupa’s boot and uses it as a mother’s womb in which she falls asleep and dreams her dreams.

  Kukla, the vagina dentata, longs for a penis so that she can start up her ‘flying machine’ and become an independent flier. But in order to come by the requisite part, its owner has to die. Perhaps this is why Kukla’s men all die, or are invalids: in other words, Kukla does not need a complete man, she only needs a bit of him – the ‘pestle’. A current, a faint and gentle breeze, can be felt enveloping Kukla, who would in ancient times have been the mistress of the four winds.

  CANNIBALISM

  Baba Yaga is dogged by evil rumours that she ‘ate people like chickens’. Her hut or hovel, surrounded by heaps of human bones, plainly signals to the passing traveller that he has stumbled upon a cannibal’s lair.

  Baba Yaga’s cannibalism, from a folkloristic point of view, is linked to a ritual with a frightful name: ‘baking the child properly’ (perepekanie rebenka). This ritual was performed on children suffering from rickets (the folk name for which, in Russia and Ukraine, was ‘dog’s old age’: sobachya starost’).20 The actual witchcraft consists of ‘burning’ the sickness. This ritual was accompanied with chanting a spell: ‘Just as we bake the bread, so, dog’s old age, you’ll bake too!’ (Kak hleb pechetsja, tak i sobachja starost pekis!) During the ritual, led by the village witch-doctor, they would pretend to push the sick child into the bread oven. In other words, the bread was symbolically identified with the child, and the oven with the mother’s womb. Returning the child to the oven, meaning the womb, signified rebirth. The ailing, rickety child was not ‘fully baked’ in its mother’s womb, so it has to be ‘baked properly’ in the oven. At the same time, the oven symbolises life after death, the provisional descent into it, and provisional death.

  In most fairytales, Baba Yaga appears as an old woman living by herself. Sometimes she turns up as a mother with a single daughter, and sometimes as a mother with forty-one daughters. From a psychoanalytic point of view, of course, the most interesting thing is the motif of devouring her own daughter. Baba Yaga (like the Greek Thyestes, who is tricked by his brother Atreus into eating his own sons) gobbles up her own daughter by mistake, or even accidentally kills all her forty- one daughters.21

  The South Slavs hold that a witch can only injure her own family and friends. ‘We cannot do any harm to those who are hateful to us, but those who are dear to us, or our own kin, they have no escape,’ says the Baba in The Mountain Wreath. There is even a South Slavic saying: ‘Where else will a witch go but to her own kin?’ In a Serbian folksong, a shepherd describes his dream like this:


  Witches devoured me:

  my mother plucked out my heart,

  while my aunt held a torch to light her work.

  The people on some Croatian islands believe that ‘witches like best to pluck out the hearts of their own kin, a bit less to pluck out their friends’ hearts, and if a witch is not satisfied with her husband, she plucks out his heart as soon as she can.’ In Herzegovina and Montenegro, they believe that witches only eat children that are ‘dear and kindred to them, even if they are not their own’(!). The common folk suppose that a woman cannot become a witch until she eats her own child. In Konavle, they think a witch ‘has no strength at all until she kills her own child’. And the Montenegrins think that ‘a woman who wants to be a witch must eat up her own child first, only then can she eat other children too.’ (T. R. Ðorđević)

  Slavs think that what witches like best is drinking the blood of children and others with sweet blood. A witch ‘sups the blood with a little spoon and very soon the child withers and dies’. It is believed that witches sometimes kill older people too: ‘they drink a young boy’s or girl’s heart dry, and whosoever they drink up, is no more: they fade away and die in the flower of their youth.’

  Blood is very rarely found on Baba Yaga’s menu. There is a rare motif in a Siberian fairytale, of Baba Yaga drinking blood from the breast of Princess Marfita. The principal hero cuts off Baba Yaga’s head, but the head uses Marfita’s legs to run away.

  * * *

  It can happen that human fingers are found floating in Baba Yaga’s soup, but her basic diet is ordinary enough. What is not ordinary is Baba Yaga’s phenomenal appetite.22

  The scale of Baba Yaga’s cannibalism is modest by comparison with ordinary witches, or with the Maenads, the Bacchae, who in their trance rend the flesh of living creatures with their bare teeth, and once (according to Euripides) led by Agave, mother of Pentheus, tore Pentheus himself to pieces.

  Remarks

  Allow me to draw your attention to the camouflaged details in your author’s fiction which could be linked with Baba Yaga. In the first part, the author’s mother barely allows her daughter to have access to her space. The mother identifies herself with her house, or more precisely she is the house, and she experiences her daughter’s presence, like the things that she brings into the house, as a territorial violation. Although it is trivial at first glance, the incident with the little cupboard has a symbolic value: the cupboard becomes acceptable to the mother precisely when it has been painted, when it has undergone this transformation, when it is sym bolically ‘chewed up’ and ‘devoured’. Although these relationships are only hinted at, Pupa and Beba have traumatic relations with their own children, something which can easily be explained as symbolic cannibalism. In one place, Beba admits that she is her own son’s ‘killer’.

  MOTHER, SISTER, WIFE

  Baba Yaga’s family status is contradictory. She is a woman without a husband – a spinster. In the Czech version, Ježibaba has a husband, Ježibabel, and his mere name says everything about the power relations between that couple. It is Baba Yaga’s status as mother that causes the most confusion: sometimes a daughter, Marinushka, is mentioned, and occasionally the number of daughters grows to forty-one. Sometimes Baba Yaga appears as a mother of dragons. In one fairytale, tricked into gobbling salt and flour, Baba Yaga drinks seawater to slake her thirst, until she bursts and gives violent birth to frogs, mice, snakes, worms and spiders. Some tales mention Baba Yaga’s sisters (they are identical except in age; they are even called Baba Yaga). ‘Blue-eye’, Sineglazka, a young warrior woman from Russian fairytales, is Baba Yaga’s niece. Even so, the predominant version has Baba Yaga as an old woman who lives alone.

  Baba Yaga represents the dark side of motherhood. She appears as the wicked stepmother, the fateful midwife and false mother (in one tale, she even mimics the voice of the hero’s mother in order to lure him closer and gobble him up). Motifs of perversity crop up here and there, though rarely; in one place, she sucks the young heroine’s breasts, in another she asks her to sing her a lullaby and rock her to sleep. Baba Yaga is surrounded by (potential) symbols of female sexuality: her oven is a womb, the hut on hen’s legs is a woman’s belly, Baba Yaga’s mortar also symbolises her womb, though at the same time it could be her mother, Baba Yagishna’s womb. Baba Yaga sometimes chatters away to her mortar and calls it her little mortar-mother (stupushka-matushka).

  * * *

  Baba Yaga’s reactions to women are misogynistic, and she is prone to excessive rivalry with young heroines. Generally she treats the heroines as her servants, finding barely possible tasks for them to perform around the hut.23 Yet, more often, she appears as a helpmeet and liberator of maidens in misfortune. Even when by mishap she loses her own daughter (or daughters), Baba Yaga seems preoccupied less by despair over her loss than by anger and desire for revenge. She is evil to boys, she’ll eat them up, but she is kind to young men, virtually submissive: she’ll give them food and drink, chat with them, give them magic objects that save them from misfortune and help them in their relationships with beloved maidens. And if the heroes are nice and polite, Baba Yaga and her sisters turn into love- able, generous grannies.24

  Although she is surrounded by hypertrophied female symbols (big breasts, the mortar, the hut, the oven), Baba Yaga has certain male characteristics as well. She speaks in a basso profundo voice, she has a long nose, a bone or iron leg, long iron teeth and – she can’t cook! She often serves inedible stuff to her guests: iron bread, salty cakes, soup with children’s fingers or spittle swimming around in it. And Baba Yaga often talks ‘like a man’. In the tale Go there – I know not where – and bring me back a thing I lack, Baba Yaga says: ‘He is an ordinary fellow; we could deal with him easily – like taking snuff.’ In other words, Baba Yaga knows about taking snuff.

  Baba Yaga’s one and only rival among men is Koshchey the Deathless. While she respects him, Baba Yaga won’t hesitate to give away the secret of his strength to the young hero. Koshchey the Deathless expresses the same kind of respect for and rivalry with Baba Yaga.25

  By combining such (potentially) female and male symbols, Baba Yaga is, psychoanalytically speaking, what’s called a phallic mother. Some interpreters (such as Geza Roheim) see Baba Yaga’s hut as an image of heterosexual coitus. The image of Baba Yaga – sprawling in her hut with legs spread wide, breasts dangling over a pole, nose poking the ceiling – is really (from a child’s point of view) a matter of the child confronting its parents’ coitus. Other details can be explained in a similar way, for example Baba Yaga’s cannibalism may be a projection of a child’s aggressive hunger. A hungry child wants to eat its mother. Conversely, the mother is a cannibal who wants to eat her own child.

  * * *

  Vladimir Propp explains Baba Yaga’s masculine attributes as a travesty (disguising a man as an old woman) of tribal rituals for the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. The tribal mother acts the part of a man dressed as a woman, hence a man with a phallus and women’s breasts. There is an interesting detail in Andreas Johns’s book about Baba Yaga. One of the folktales describes how the hero strikes Baba Yaga with a magical wand, and she turns into a woman (!). If Baba Yaga has the ability to turn into different things, to become an intermediary between worlds, the non-human (fantastical, forested, subterranean or unconscious) and the human, then her androgynous nature – or her role of mediating between genders – becomes understandable.26

  Remarks

  Your author’s heroes are mostly women. The female characters chop and change their roles around, or, more precisely, they assimilate and overlap each other. The daughter in the first part of the diptych takes over the role of the mother: she is not only her nurse but at one moment she becomes her surrogate, her bedel. Kukla has no children. In the web of psychoanalytic meanings, Kukla could be a man, as for that matter all the heroines could be. Beba has a homosexual son, but he is more mature than she, taking over the role of the mother which she herself, a
llegedly, has not been able to fulfil, and leaving her his adopted daughter. Overall, your author’s diptych could be an interesting field for reading-in and reading-out gender meanings.

  THE BATH

  ‘The archer returned from the stable; that same moment, the servants grabbed him and shoved him in the cauldron. He roused himself, jumped out of the cauldron – and turned into such a handsome fellow that he cannot be described by mouth or pen.’(From The Firebird and the Empress Vassilisa.)

  In all cosmogonic myths, including the Slavic ones, water means primeval chaos, the original principle and creation of the world. In Slavic beliefs, water flows through the earth’s veins like blood through the human body. Many Slavic beliefs, customs, rituals, demons (vodjanoj, vodjanika, vodnik, vodjanik, vodovik, rusalka) and saints (the pre-Christian goddess Mokosh and her Christian descendant St Paraskeva, also known as St Petka) are linked with water. For water is an ambivalent principle: it brings evil (Gde voda tam beda / Where there’s water, there’s misery), but also cleansing and renewal.