Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
Baba Yaga is fearsome, for she represents the power of annihilation and the power of the life force at the same time. To gaze into her face is to see
vagina dentate,
eyes of blood, the perfect newborn child and the wings of angels all at once.
And Vasalisa stands there and accepts this wild Mother divinity, wisdom, warts, and all. One of the most remarkable facets of the Yaga portrayed in this tale is that though she threatens, she is just. She does not hurt Vasalisa as long as Vasalisa affords her respect. Respect in the face of great power is a crucial lesson. A woman must be able to stand in the face of power, because ultimately some part of that power will become hers. Vasalisa faces Baba Yaga
not
obsequiously, not boastfully or filled with braggadocio, neither running away nor hiding. She presents herself honestly and just as herself.
Many women are in recovery from their “Nice-Nice” complexes, wherein, no matter how they felt, no matter who assailed them, they responded so sweetly as to be practically fattening. Though they might have smiled kindly during the day, at night they gnashed their teeth like brutes—the Yaga in their psyches was fighting for expression.
This too-nice over-adaptation in women often occurs when they are desperately afeared of being disenfranchised or found “unnecessary.” Two of the most poignant dreams I’ve ever heard concerned a young woman who definitely needed to be less tame. The first dream was that she inherited a photo album—a special one with pictures of the “Wild Mother ” How happy she was, until the next week when she dreamt she opened a similar album and there was a horrid old woman looking out at her. The hag was possessed of mossy teeth and had black betel juice running down her chin.
Her dream is typical of women who are recovering from being too sweet. The first dream demonstrates one side of the wild nature—the benign and bountiful, and all that is well with her
world. But when the mossy Wild Woman is presented to her, well, ah, uh, er... could we put this off for a while? The answer is no.
The unconscious in its brilliant way is offering this dreamer an idea about a new way of living that is not just the two-toothed frontal smile of the too-nice woman. To face this wild and creative power in ourselves is to gain access to the myriad faces of the sub- terrene feminine. These belong to us innately, and we may choose to inhabit whichever ones serve us best at whichever time.
In this initiation drama. Baba Yaga is instinctive nature in the guise of the witch. Like the word
wild
, the word
witch
has come to be understood as a pejorative, but long ago it was an appellation given to both old and young women healers, the word
witch
deriving from the word
wit
, meaning wise. This was before cultures carrying the one-God-only religious image began to overwhelm the older pantheistic cultures which understood the Deity through multiple religious images of the universe and all its phenomena. But regardless, the ogress, the witch, the wild nature, and whatever other
criaturas
and integral aspects the culture finds awful in the psyches of women are the very blessed things which women often need most to retrieve and bring to the surface.
A good deal of literature on the subject of women’s power states that men are afraid of women's power. I always want to exclaim, “Mother of God! So many women themselves are afraid of women’s power.” For the old feminine attributes and forces are vast, and they
are
formidable. It is understandable that the first time they come face-to-face with the Old Wild Powers, both men and women take one anxious look and make tracks; all you see of them is flying paw-pads and frightened tails.
If men are going to ever learn to stand it, then without a doubt women have to learn to stand it. If men are ever going to understand women, women are going to have to teach the configurations of the wild feminine to them. To this end, the dream-making function of the psyche carries the Yaga and all her cohorts right into women’s bedrooms at night through the dreamtime. If we are lucky, the Yaga will leave her big broad footprints in the carpet at our bedsides. She will come to peer at those who do not know her. If we are late to our initiations, she wonders why we do not come to visit her, and comes to visit us in night dreams instead.
One woman I worked with dreamed of women in long ragged nightgowns happily eating things you would never find on a restaurant menu. Another woman dreamed of an old woman in the shape of an old clawfoot bathtub that rattled its pipes and threatened to burst them unless the dreamer knocked out a wall so the tub could “see.” A third woman dreamt that she was one of three blind old women, except she kept losing her driver’s license and had to keep leaving her group in order to search for it—in a sense it could be said that she had difficu
lty remaining identified with th
e three Fates—the powers which guide life and death in the psyche. But in time, she too learned to stand it, learned to stay close to what she once feared—her own wildish nature.
All these creatures in dreams remind the woman dreamer of her elemental self: the Yaga Self, the enigmatic and intense power of the Life/Death/Life Mother. Yes, we are saying that to be Yaga- ish is good, and that we must be able to stand it. To be strong does not mean to sprout muscles and flex. It means meeting one’s own numinosity without fleeing, actively living with the wild nature in one’s own way. It means to be able to learn, to be able to stand what we know. It means to stand and live.
The Fifth Task—Serving the Non-Rational
In this part of the tale, Vasalisa has asked Baba Yaga for fire, and the Yaga agrees—but only if Vasalisa will do some household chores for her in exchange. The psychic tasks of this time of learning are these:
Staying with the Hag; acclimating to the great wildish powers of the feminine psyche. Coming to recognize her (your) power and the powers of inner purifications; unsoiling, sorting, nourishing, building energy and ideas (washing the Yaga's clothes, cooking for her, cleaning her house, and sorting out the elements).
Not so long ago, women were deeply involved in the rhythms of life and death. They inhaled the pungent odor of iron from the fresh blood of childbirth. They washed the cooling bodies of the dead as well. The psyches of modem women, especially those from industrial and technological cultures, are often deprived of these close-up and hands-on blessed and basic experiences. But
there is a way for the novice to fully participate in the sensitive aspects of the life and death cycles.
Baba Yaga, the Wild Mother, is the teacher whom we can consult in these matters. She instructs the ordering of the house of the soul. She imbues an alternate order to the ego, one where magic can happen, joy can be done, appetite is intact, things are accomplished with gusto. Baba Yaga is the model for being true to the Self. She teaches both death and renewal.
In the tale, she teaches Vasalisa how to care for the psychic house of the wild feminine. Laundering the Baba Yaga’s clothes is a fabulous symbol. In the old countries, and still today, in order to launder one’s clothes one descends to the river, and there makes the ritualistic ablutions that people have made since the beginning of time in order to renew the cloth. This is a very fine symbol for a cleansing and purification of the entire bearing of the psyche.
In mythology, the woven cloth is the work of the Life/ Death/Life mothers. For instance, in the East there are the Three Fates:
Clotho
,
Lache
sis,
and
Atropos.
In the West there is
Na’ashjé'ii Asdzáá
, the Spider Woman, who gave the gift erf weaving to the
Diñé
(Navajo). These Life/Death/Life mothers teach women sensitivity to what must die and what shall live, to what shall be carded out, to what shall be woven in. In the tale, Baba Yaga charges Vasalisa do the laundiy to bring this weaving, these patterns known to the Life/Death/Life Goddess, out into the open, to consciousness; handling them, washing them, renewing them.
To wash something is a timeless purification ritual. It not only means to purify, it also means—like baptism from the Latin
baptiza
—to drench, to permeate with a spiritual
numen
and mystery. In the tale the washing is the first task. It means to make taut again that which has become slackened from the wearing. The clothes are like us, worn and worn until our ideas and values are slackened by the passing of time. The renewal, the revivifying, takes place in the water, in the re-discovering of what we really hold to be true, what we really hold sacred.
In archetypal symbolism, clothing represents
persona
, the first view the public gains of us. Persona is a kind of camouflage which lets others know only what we wish them to know about us, and
nothing more. But there is an older meaning to
persona
, one found in all the
Mezo
American rites, one well known to
cantadoras
y
cuentistas y curanderas
, healers. The persona is not simply a mask to hide behind, but rather a presence which eclipses the mundane personality. In this sense, persona or mask is a signal of rank, virtue, character, and authority. It is the outward significator, the outward display of mastery.
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I like very much this initiatoiy task which requires a woman to cleanse the personae, the clothing of authority of the great Yaga of the forest. By washing the Yaga’s clothes, the initiate herself will see how the seams of persona are sewn, what patterns the gowns take. Soon she herself will have some measure of these personae to place in her closet amidst others she has fashioned throughout her life.
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It is easy to imagine that the Yaga's marks of power and authority—her clothes—are made as she herself is fashioned psychologically: strong, enduring. To wash her laundry is a metaphor through which we learn to witness, examine, and take on this combination of qualities. We learn how to sort, mend, and renew the instinctive psyche through a
purification
the washing of the fibers of being.
Vasalisa’s next task is to sweep the hut and the yard. In Eastern European fairy tales, brooms are often made of sticks from trees and bushes, and sometimes the roots of wiry plants. Vasalisa’s work is to sweep this object made of plant matter over the floors and the yard to keep the place clear of debris. A wise woman keeps her psychic environ uncluttered. She accomplishes such by keeping a clear head, keeping a clear place for her work, working at completing her ideas and projects.
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For many women, this task requires that they clear a time each day for contemplation, for a space to live in that is clearly their own with paper, pens, paints, tools, conversations, time, freedoms that are for this work only. For many, psychoanalysis, contemplation, mediation, the taking of solitude, and other experiences of descent and transformation provide this special time and place for the work. Each woman has her own preferences, her own way.
If this work can take place in Baba Yaga's hut, so much the better. Even near the hut is better than far away. In any event,
one's wild life has to be kept ordered on a regular basis. It is not good enough to go to it for one day, or a few, once a year.
But because it is Baba Yaga’s hut that Vasalisa sweeps, because it is Baba Yaga’s yard, we are also speaking of keeping unusual ideas clear and ordered. These ideas include those which are uncommon, mystical, soulful, and uncanny.
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To
sweep the premises means not only to begin to value
the
nonsuperficial life but to care for its orderliness. Sometimes
women
become confused about soulful work, and neglect its ar
chitecture
till it is taken back by the forest. Gradually the struc
tures
of the psyche are overgrown until they finally are but a
hidden
archeologic ruin in the psyche’s unconscious. A cyclical
and critical
sweeping will prevent this from occurring. When
women
have cleared space, the wild nature will better thrive.
To cook
for Baba Yaga, we ask literally, how does one feed
the Baba
Yaga of the psyche, what does one feed so wild a God
dess?
Firstly, to cook for the Yaga, one lays a fire—a woman
must be
willing to bum hot, bum with passion, bum with
words,
with ideas, with desire for whatever it is that she truly
loves. It
is actually this passion which causes the cooking, and a
woman's
original ideas of substance are what is cooked. To cook
for the
Yaga, one must arrange that one’s creative life has a con
sistent
fire under it
Most
of us would do better if we became more adept at
watching
the fire under our work, if we watched more closely the
cooking
process for nourishing the wild Self. Too often we turn
away
from the pot, from the oven. We forget to watch, forget to
add fuel,
forget to stir. We mistakenly think the fire and the
cooking
are like one of those feisty houseplants that can go
without
water for eight months before the poor thing keels over. It
is not so.
The fire bears,
requires
watching, for it is easy to let the
flame go
out. The Yaga must be fed. There’s hell to pay if she goes
hungry.
So, it is
the cooking
up
of new and completely original things,
of new
directions, of commitments to one’s art and work that con
tinuously
nourishes the wild soul. These same things nourish the
Old Wild
Mother and give her sustenance in our psyches. Without
the fire, our
great ideas, our original thoughts, our yearnings and