Introducing Baba Yaga

Baba Yaga illustated by Ivan Bilibin

At a reading a few days ago I was asked to introduce Baba Yaga more. Being Slavic in origin, Baba Yaga is not familiar to most people in Western Europe, but in Eastern Europe, particularly in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, she is well known.

Unlike the other characters in Something In Nothing, who tend to be associated with a particular story, Baba Yaga appears in hundreds of Slavic fairy tales. This means there are often inconsistences in how she is portrayed. But there are some constants.

Baba Yaga is portrayed as an old witch, who lives in the forest in a cottage which stands on chicken legs and turns around on the spot until you say the magic words to stop it. Around the cottage is a fence of human bones on top of which are skulls. These skulls can emit a fiery light to show the way or to burn to death those they look on.

Inside the cottage is a huge oven in which Baba Yaga cooks her victims before eating them (like the witch in Hansel and Gretel). Despite her voracious appetite for human flesh, Baba Yaga is always shown as thin and bony – she is sometimes called Baba Yaga Bone Leg.  She is ugly, with iron teeth and a huge beak-like nose that touches the ceiling when she lies down on the stove.

Unlike ordinary witches, she travels through the air in a giant mortar, using the pestle as a paddle, and sweeping the air behind her with a broom to hide her trail. The symbolism here is obvious: not only do the mortar and pestle symbolise female and male sexuality, but they are the means to grind things into dust.

Baba Yaga is more than your usual witch, far more. Something I will talk about in a future post (or two).