Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Myths S.)
Page 25
Allow me to mention here that a stupid girl, one who spends the whole day picking her nose and lazing on the stove, and eventually becomes a princess or a queen, is completely unthinkable in fairytales! The imagination of folktale-tellers created an equiva lent of male heroism in the characters of Slavic Amazons (the Russian Sineglazka, or the ‘Giant Girls’, Div-devojke, in Serbian folksongs), but grubby, idle, stupid girls are usually punished with death. Wealth, a throne and love are only conceivable as rewards for grubby, idle, stupid guys!
DOLLS
There is an interesting motif in the fairytale Vassilisa the Beautiful. As the mother lies dying, she calls for her daughter and gives her a doll that will help her in life. The doll can only be asked for advice after it has been given food and drink.28 Vassilisa keeps the doll in her pocket as long as she lives. A doll as the abode of ancestral spirits (the mother’s, in this case) is something that features among the most ancient tribal beliefs of many peoples around the world.
The doll symbolically replaces the dead member of the family, it is the tomb of that person’s soul. Some African tribes have a custom that a widower who remarries makes a little statuette of his dead wife and keeps it in his hut in a place of honour. Respect is shown to the statue, to prevent the deceased from being jealous of the new wife. In New Guinea, after a death, members of the family make a little doll that protects the soul of the deceased. The dead person who is incarnated in the doll only offers to help if the rest of the household looks after it, feeds it, tucks it up in bed and so forth.29
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Among the tribes of northern Siberia, dolls’ heads are made from birds’ beaks. The doll is a pledge of fertility, so newlyweds take it into the bedroom on their wedding night. The evil spirit Kikimora can also pass into the doll. Then it has to be burned. In Kursk, for example, the doll’s face is left blank, without eyes, mouth or nose, for fear that an evil spirit will pass into the doll and harm the child that plays with it. Dolls which possess protective power are hereditary: mothers bequeath them to their daughters.
The Hantis, Mansis, Nenets and other peoples of northeastern Siberia made a special doll, called the itarm. They dressed it up and put it in a deceased person’s bed. At mealtimes, they would bring it morsels of food and make a show of deferring to it, for the doll served as the dead person’s double. This ritual passed into Russian fairytales. In the tale Teryoshechka, an old childless couple dress a little log in babies’ clouts and put it in a cradle. The log turns into a boy – a motif that endured long enough to reach Carlo Collodi and his famous Pinocchio. The well-known Russian wooden dolls, the matryoshka, emerged from the same typology of mythico-ritual thought.
Hunters in the forests of north-eastern Siberia build little wooden cabins that they call labaz or chamja. A labaz is erected on top of high wooden stilts (like the hen’s legs under Baba Yaga’s hut!) and it serves as a hunters’ storehouse, to keep dried food and other supplies safe. The back of the labaz is turned towards the woods, and the front towards the passing traveller. On ritual sites called urah, similar cult cabins were built, without windows or doors. Itarm dolls were placed in these cabins, dressed in furs. The itarm dolls occupied the whole interior – whence the description of Baba Yaga’s body filling her hut. For that matter, yaga or yagushka is the name of the furry ‘dressing gown’, a garment worn by women in north-eastern Siberia. Arkadij Zelenin insists on this interpretation, and very convincingly; he develops a theory that the Golden Baba or Sorni-nai was a shamanistic divinity of the northern Siberian peoples, who were resisting conversion to Christianity. Later, the legend of the Golden Baba spread – thanks to soldiers, travellers and missionaries – and was revived in fairytales as Baba Yaga.
Remarks
Although Beba, Pupa and Kukla are female nicknames, it is difficult to believe that the choice of these particular monikers is just coincidence. Beba is a common female nickname in urban Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia, while Pupa is found in northern Croatia, where it derived from the German, and in Dalmatia, where it derived from the Italian. Beba (a doll, but also a newborn baby!), Pupa (Latin: pupa; German: die Puppe; Italian: pupa; French: poupée; English: puppet; Dutch: pop),30 Kukla (Russian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Turkish, etc.) and finally Wawa (Chinese): they are all polyglot synonyms for ‘doll’.
There are several possible explanations of why your author uses nicknames. The first is connected with the author’s principle, which is to say the simple idea that the heroines are just dolls that come to life in the author’s hands. Perhaps the nicknames serve a ritual–protective function, insofar as your author has respected the taboo against mentioning any witches’ names. One of the reasons could be linked to Baba Yaga, who has sisters, also called Baba Yaga (like the Irish girl Brigid, whose two sisters are both called Brigid). The reason could also lie in the culture of male domination, where women’s names do not matter much anyhow (for a name is a symbol of individuation and identity), in other words where one woman is all women.
In the language of our contemporary culture, a discriminatory gender linkage between women and dolls is stubbornly persistent. People often coo over little girls: ‘My little doll!’ or ‘You’re as sweet as a doll!’ Young girls are ‘as pretty as a doll’; they are ‘Barbies’, ‘babes’ or even ‘dolly birds’. People don’t see anything odd when grown-ups carry their childish nicknames around.
As for Pupa, Beba and Kukla, that trio has its roots in old Indo- European mythology, where goddesses appear in threesomes: as three different goddesses (like the Greek Moirai, the Roman Parcae and the Nordic Norns), then as a single goddess with three functions, or a triad that represents the life cycle: maiden–mother– crone.
Slavic mythology, too, is familiar with the Fates, the goddesses that ordain human fate. In Bulgaria, for example, they are called orisnici (or narachnici), or sudički in the Czech language, or rođenice, suđenice or suđeje in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia. Rodenice are invisible; they turn up when a child is born; they can only be seen by the mother of a newborn child or by a beggar if one happens to come along. What rođenice assign to people is called good luck or destiny, and it cannot be changed. In one short fragment, the author’s mother remembers the story that her own mother told her about her own birth, about seeing three women, two arrayed in white and the third in black.
I would draw your attention to one further detail. The author’s mother, in the little flat that is ‘tidy as a box’, with a wig on her head and a lipsticked mouth, is reminiscent of a doll in a labaz.
In one place, the author compares her mother, not without a certain cruelty, to ‘a traffic warden’. The labaz were also used to mark out the forest. The mother, too, stubbornly keeps a souvenir doll in Bulgarian national costume in a prominent place, completely unaware of its deeper meaning. ‘It’s to remind me of Bulgaria,’ she says simply.
COMB AND TOWEL
A comb and a towel are magical objects that often appear in fairytales. A comb can be turned into a dense forest, a towel can be turned into a river or a sea and either can thus defend the hero or heroine from their pursuer. This pursuer is most often Baba Yaga herself.31
The comb is an important object in all mythologies. It occurs in Slavic mythologies as a deadly object, a female symbol, a means of healing and a magical means of liberation. Precisely because of the magical properties that have been given to it, the comb is associated with rules and taboos. For example, a comb must not be exposed to the gaze of the household, left out on the table or other such places, otherwise ‘the angel won’t come’ (angel ne sjadet). Combs have medicinal and protective effects: if somebody was losing his hair, people would comb his scalp with a comb for carding yarn. The comb (and bobbin) were kept in cradles so that the infants would sleep soundly. The South Slavs had a habit of wedging one comb into another, which – in an era without antibiotics! – served as a defence against sickness.
In ceremonies linked with childbirth, a comb served as a symbol of women’s destiny. A newborn
boy’s umbilical cord was cut with an axe, but with girls, it was cut with a comb. At christenings, the midwife would hand a male infant to its godfather across the threshold, and a girl across a comb.
Combs were used for prophesying. Girls would place a comb under their pillow when they went to bed with the words ‘Destined one, come here and comb my hair!’ (Suzhenyi, ryazhenyi, prihodi golovu chesat!). If the maiden then dreamed of a young man, it was believed that he would be her chosen one. This is why young girls were given the gift of a comb at weddings.
A comb that was used to comb the hair of a deceased person was held to be ‘unclean’; it would be thrown away in a river, so that death disappeared from the house as soon as possible (chtoby, poskorej uplyla smert), or it would be put in the coffin with the deceased, along with whatever remained of his or her hair.
The towel, linen, kerchief, napkin, shirt, embroidery – all these things are of the highest importance. Vassilisa the Wise, for example, has three crucial possessions which make her strong: a napkin, a comb and a brush.
Sometimes we come across Baba Yaga in fairytales with a bobbin in her hand, and she often gives the heroine of the tale a weaver’s task to do.32 What is more, if Baba Yaga is well disposed, she will give the heroines gifts beyond price: a golden ring, bobbin and embroidery frame.33 The bobbins, the hanks of yarn and the yarn itself connect Baba Yaga with ancient Ananka, who rules the world and every single destiny in it. The yarn also connects Baba Yaga with the Moirai, who spin human destiny: black thread for black destinies and white or gold thread for the lucky ones. Baba Yaga’s balls of thread, which help the heroes to reach their goal, are like the ball that Ariadne gave to Theseus so that he could find his way out of the labyrinth when he had killed the Minotaur. Those weaver’s threads connect Baba Yaga with all those powerful old women who oversee the weaving work that women do.
The weaving, spinning, embroidering and sewing that women do have a ritual-magical significance in many cultures. A specially woven piece of linen has protective powers. During plague or cholera epidemics, old women and widows wove linen and sewed towels from the linen. The towels would be placed in the church, hung up on icons or laid in a ring around the house. The aim of these rituals was to protect the place from sickness.
In Serbia and Romania, old women – usually nine of them – would gather at midnight and weave linen in total silence. They would stitch the linen into a shirt, which the young men would take turns to wear before they went off to war. Donning the shirt was meant to protect them from death. There is a magic shirt in Russian fairytales that makes the hero invulnerable.
Weaving and embroidering are the most important skills in the heroine’s repertoire of accomplishments. Linen, embroidery and embroidered kerchiefs serve as a young girl’s fingerprint, her identity card. Vassilisa the Beautiful weaves linen so fine that it can pass through the eye of a needle. She turns it into shirts for the emperor, who is so delighted by her skill that he has the unknown seamstress brought to him. Then he falls in love with her and marries her.
Weaving is a metaphor for the human lifespan: each of us has as much thread and yarn as has been given to us. In the Russian fairytale called The Witch and the Sun’s Sister, Prince Ivan encounters two old seamstresses on his path, with two wooden chests, and they say: ‘Prince Ivan, we don’t have much time left in this world. When we break all the needles in this chest and use up all the yarn in that chest, death will come for us.’
Remarks
There is an interesting detail about combs and combing in the first part of your author’s diptych, where the daughter is worried about the mother’s wig and ‘ritually’ washes it while her mother is in hospital. I don’t suppose this detail has much to do with ritualistic thinking, but let me mention in passing that care over hair has great ritual importance among primitive tribes. The Eskimo goddess Nerrivik is an old hag who lives under the sea and guards the spirits of the dead. She refuses to defend the walrus hunters until the shaman has ritually combed her hair!
As for the towel, there is an affecting moment in your author’s text: the image of the mother’s father, going into the house with a towel folded under his arm. Who knows, maybe the mother’s subconscious added this image – which had stirred feelings of guilt in her for years – this little salutary detail: the towel that will, as in a fairytale, protect her aged father from adversity.
And one more detail: the author’s mother keeps old embroidery, made by her relatives, in a cupboard. Although her memory is playing up, she knows exactly whose hand made which bit of embroidery. The character of the mother merges on a symbolic level into unarticulated, ‘female’, pre-feminist and pre-literate history. The mother, in short, can ‘read’ embroidery like Braille.
BROOM AND RUBBISH
The broom was witchery’s helpmate: witches fly on broomsticks, they steal milk with their brooms and lay waste crops by dragging their brooms across a field. Baba Yaga covers her tracks with a broom.
Many beliefs and superstitions in the Slavic world are connected to the broom. For example, a house may not be swept when one of the household dies, in order not to chase wealth out of the house, or to offend the soul of the deceased. When they move house, Russians take an old broom with them, for the domovye (brownies) live under the broom. Because it was believed that brooms provoke quarrels, sickness and misfortune, a broom would be tossed down next to the house (or over the roof) of people that you wanted to harm. Envious people hid a broom in the newlyweds’ wagon in order to bring them hurt. Stepping over a broom brought bad luck.
House-cleaning is a sort of test that a maiden must pass when she finds herself in Baba Yaga’s power.34 Baba Yaga has magical servants in the form of three pairs of hands that perform all her tasks, so she does not need any real help, but she enjoys testing the maidens’ maturity, diligence and character. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, in her book Women Who Run with Wolves, falls back on psychoanalysis to explain this detail as cleansing the soul, purging it, bringing it to order, an educational process of separating the essential from the inessential. Baba Yaga uses the word rubbish figuratively, too, and she thanks the maiden for not showing any undue curiosity.35
In Mexico, they have broom festivals to honour the earth goddess Teteo-Innan, with the aim of clearing away all illnesses and troubles. In Christian iconography, a broom is associated with St Martha and St Petronila, who protect all housewives and everyone employed in the household. There is an interesting tale involving a familiar figure from Italian folklore, La Befana, the best and tidiest housewife in the city, who was so absorbed in her domestic duties that she not only failed to recognise the Three Kings among her guests, she even missed joining in their search for Jesus. La Befana appears with a broom, enters the house down the chimney and leaves presents for the children. Even today she survives as a sort of female Father Christmas (she appears at the Epiphany, twelve days after Christmas), yet she also incorporates some elements of the ancient tradition of burning the old year so that the new year can come forward and take its place.
Many beliefs in the Slavic world are linked to ‘rubbish’ and ‘cleansing’. Particular attention was paid to rubbish in the funeral rites. In Moravia, the room where the deceased had lain would be swept clean and the sweepings thrown in the fire. In Serbia and Russia it was forbidden to sweep the house as long as the deceased was there, so as to be sure not to sweep away the living at the same time.
Rubbish was even used for prophesying. In Bohemia and Moravia, the girls would take the rubbish to the crossroads or the midden, and predict who would be their beloved. They would say: ‘Out with the rubbish, young men, widows, whoever wants can come, from east, from west, ahead, behind, through the orchard and into the barn.’ In Siberia, before Christmas, girls used to put the rubbish in the corner of the house, to ‘spend the night’ there, and in the morning they would take it to the crossroads and ask the name of the first man they met. They believed that their future husband would have the same name.