Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
longings remain uncooked, and everyone is unfulfilled. On the other hand, anything we do which has fire will please her and nourish us all.
In the development of women, all these motions of “homekeeping,” the cooking, the washing, the sweeping, quantify something beyond the ordinary. All these metaphors offer ways to think about, to measure, feed, nourish, straighten, cleanse, order the soul-life.
In all these things Vasalisa is initiated, and her intuition helps her accomplish the tasks. The intuitive nature carries the ability to measure things at a glance, to weigh in an instant, to clear off the debris around an idea, and to name the essence of the thing, to fire it with vitality, to cook raw ideas, to make food for the psyche. Vasalisa, through the doll of intuition, is learning to sort, understand, keep in order, and clear and clean the psychic premises.
Additionally, she learns that the Wild Mother requires much nourishment in order to do her work. Baba Yaga cannot be put on a lettuce leaf and black coffee diet. If one wishes to be close to her, one has to realize that she has appetite for certain things. If one is to have a relationship with the ancient feminine, one must cook up much.
Through these chores, Baba Yaga teaches, and Vasalisa learns not to cringe away from the big, the mighty, the cyclical, the unforeseen, the unexpected, the vast and grand scale which is the size of Nature, the odd, the strange, and the unusual.
Women’s cycles according to Vasalisa’s tasks are these: To cleanse one’s thinking, renewing one’s values, on a regular basis. To clear one’s psyche of trivia, sweep one’s self, clean up one’s thinking and feeling states on a regular basis. To build an enduring fire beneath the creative life, and cook up ideas on a systematic basis, means especially to cook, and with originality, a lot of unprecedented life in order to feed the relationship between oneself and the wildish nature.
Vasalisa, via her time with the Yaga, will eventually integrate some of the manner and style of the Yaga. And we too; it is our job, in our own limited human way, to pattern ourselves after her. And this we learn to do, yet we are awed at the same time, for in Baba Yagar-land there are things that fly in the night and are arisen
again at daybreak, all summoned and bidden by the wild instinctual nature. There are the bones of the dead which still speak, and there are winds and fates and suns, moon, and sky which all live in her great trunk. But she keeps order. Day follows night, season follows season. She is not haphazard. She is both Rhyme and Reason.
In the story, the Yaga finds Vasalisa has completed all the tasks set before her and the Yaga is pleased, but also a little disappointed that she cannot rail against the girl. And so, just to make sure Vasalisa doesn’t take anything for granted, Baba Yaga lets her know: “Though you managed to do my work once doesn’t mean you can do it again. So here, here’s another day of tasks. Let’s see how you do, dearie... or else.”
Vasalisa again, via the aegis of intuitive guidance, accomplishes the work, and the Yaga gives her the grumpy and begrudging stamp of approval ... the kind that always comes from old women who have lived a long time and who have seen much, and somewhat wish they hadn’t, and are rather proud they have.
The Sixth Task—Separating This from That
In this part of the tale, Baba Yaga requires two very demanding tasks of Vasalisa. A woman’s psychic tasks are these:
Learning fine discrimination, separating one thing from the other with finest discernment, learning to make fine distinctions in judgment (sorting the mildewed com from the good com, and sorting the poppy seeds from a pile of dirt). Observing the power of the unconscious and how it works even when the ego is not aware (the pairs of hands which appear in the air). More learning about life (com) and death (poppy seeds).
Vasalisa is asked to separate four substances, mildewed com from whole com, and poppy seed from dirt. The intuitive doll completes the sorting of one from the other. Sometimes this sorting process occurs at such a deep level it is barely conscious to us, until one
day...
The sorting spoken of in the tale is the kind which occurs when we face a dilemma or question, but not much is forthcoming to
help us solve it. But leave it alone and come back to it later and there may be a good answer waiting for us where there was nothing before. Or “go to sleep, see what you dream,”
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perhaps the two-million-year-old woman will come visit you from the night land. Perhaps she will be bearing the solution, or will show you that the answer is under your bed, or in your pocket, in a book, or behind your ear. It is an observable phenomenon that a question asked before bedtime, with practice, often elicits an answer upon awakening. There is something in the psyche, something of the intuitive doll, something under, over, or in the collective unconscious which sorts the materials while we sleep and dream.
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And reliance on this attribute is also part of the wild nature.
Symbolically, the mildewed com carries a dual meaning. As a liquor, mildewed com may be used both as an inebriative and as a medication. There is a fungal condition called corn-smut—a rather fuzzy black fungus which is found in mildewed com—this being reputed to be hallucinogenic.
It is hypothesized by various scholars that hallucinogens from wheat, barley, poppies, or maize were used in the old Eleusinian Goddess rites in Greece. Additionally, the sorting of the com that the Yaga bids Vasalisa do is also related to the gathering of medicines by
curanderas
, the old woman-healers one Can still observe at this work throughout North, Central, and South America today. We see the woman-healer’s ancient remedies and treatments also in the poppy seed, which is a soporific and barbiturate, as well as in the dirt, which has been used since ancient times and is still used today in poultices and as packs, in baths, and even for ingestion under certain circumstances.
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This is one of the loveliest phrasings in the story. The fresh com, mildewed com, poppy seed, and dirt are all remnants of an ancient healing apothecary. These substances are used as balms, salves, infusions, and poultices to hold other medicines on the body. As metaphors, they are also medicines for the mind; some nourish, others put to rest, some cause languor, others, stimulation. They are facets of the Life/Death/Life cycles. Baba Yaga is not only asking Vasalisa to separate this from that, to determine the difference between things of like kind—such as real love from
false love, or nourishing life from spoiled life—but she is also asking her to distinguish one medicine from another.
Like dreams, which can be understood on the objective level but still retain a subjective reality, these elements of food/medicines also have symbolic guidance for us. Like Vasalisa, we have to sort out our psychic healing agents, to sort and sort and sort to understand that food for the psyche is also medicine for the psyche, and to wring the truth, the essence, out of these elements for our own nourishment.
All these elements and tasks arc teaching Vasalisa about the Life/Death/Life nature, the give-and-take of caring for the wild nature. Sometimes, in order to bring a woman closer to this nature, I ask her to keep a garden. Let this be a psychic one or one with mud, dirt, green, and all the things that surround and help and assail. Let it represent the wild psyche. The garden is a concrete connection to life and death. You could even say there is a religion of garden, for it teaches profound psychological and spiritual lessons. Whatever can happen to a garden can happen to soul and psyche—too much water, too little water, infestations, heat, storm, flood, invasion, miracles, dying back, coming back, boon, healing, blossoming, bounty, beauty.
During the life of the garden, women keep a diary, recording the signs of life-giving and life-taking. Each entry cooks up a psychic soup. In the garden we practice letting thoughts, ideas, preferences, desires, even loves, both live and die. We plant, we pull, we bury. We dry seed, sow it, moisten it, support it, harvest.
The garden is a meditation practice, that of seeing when it is time for something to die. In the garden one can see the time coming for both fruition and for dying back. In the garden one is moving with rather than against the inhalations and the exhalations of greater wild Nature.
Through this meditation, we acknowledge that the Life/Death/ Life cycle is a natural one. Both life-giving and death-dealing natures are waiting to be befriended, forever loved. In this process, we become like the cyclical wild. We have the ability to infuse energy and strengthen life, and to stand out of the way of what dies.
The Seventh Task—Asking the Mysteries
Afrer the successful completion of her tasks, Vasalisa asks the Yaga some good questions. The tasks of this time are these: Questioning and trying to learn more about the Life/Death/Life nature and how it functions (Vasalisa asks about the horsemen). Learning the truth about being able to understand all the elements of the wild nature (“to know too much can make one old too soon).
Wc all begin with the question “What am I, really? What is my work here?’ The Yaga teaches us that we are Life/Death/Life, that this is our cycle, this is our special insight into the deep feminine. When I was a child one of my aunts told me our family’s legend of ‘The Watery Women.” She said that at the edge of every lake there lived a young woman with old hands. Her first job was to put 'tiiz'—what I can only describe to you as souls or “soul-fire”—into dozens of beautiful porcelain ducks
. Her second job was to wind
the wooden keys
in the ducks’ backs. When the winding-keys ran
out, and the ducks
fell over, their bodies shattered, she was to flap
her apron at the souls
as they were released and shoo them up into
the dry. Her fourth
job was to put
tiiz
into more beautiful porcelain
(kicks, wind their
keys, and release them to their lives....
The
tiiz
story is
one of the clearest about exactly what it is the
Life/Death/Life
Mother does with her time. Psychically, Mother
Nyx, Baba Yaga,
the Watery Women,
La Que Sabe
, and Wild
Woman represent
different pictures, different ages, moods, and
aspects of the Wild
Mother
God.
The infusion of
tiiz
into our own
ideas, our own lives,
the lives of those we touch, that is our work.
The shooing of the soul
to its home, that is our work. The releasing
of a shower of
sparks to fill the day, and creating a light so we can
find our way through
the night, that is our
work.
Vasalisa asks about the men on horseback she has seen while finding her way to Baba Yaga’s hut; the white man on the white horse, the red man on the red horse, the black man on the black horse The Yaga, like Demeter, is an old horse-mot
her Goddess, as vitiated with th
e power of the mare, and fecundity as well. Baba Yaga's hut is a stable for the many colored horses and their riders.
These pairs pull the sun up and across the sky by day, and pull the cover of darkness over the sky at night. But there is more.
The Mack, red, and white horsemen symbolize the ancient colors connoting birth, life, and death. These colors also represent old ideas of descent, death, and rebirth—the black for dissolving of one's old values, the red for the sacrifice of one’s preciously held illusions, and the white as the new light, the new knowing that comes from having experienced the first two.
The old words used in medieval times are
nigredo
, black;
rubedo
, red;
albedo
, white. These describe an alchemy
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which follows the circuit of the Wild Woman, the work of the Life/ Death/Life Mother. Without the symbols of daybreak, rising light, and mysterious dark, she would not be who she is. Without the rising of hope in our hearts, without the steady light—no matter if a candle or a sun—to tell us this from that in our lives, without a night from which all things can be soothed,
from which all things can be born
, we too would not benefit from our wildish natures.
The colors in the tale are extremely precious, for each has its death nature and its life nature. Black is the color of mud, the fertile, the basic stuff into which ideas are sown. Yet black is the color also of death, the blackening of the light. And black has even a third aspect. It is also the color associated with that world between the worlds which
La Loba
stands upon—for black is the color of descent. Black is a promise that you will soon know something you did not know before.
Red is the color of sacrifice, of rage, of murder, of being tormented and killed. Yet red is also the color of vibrant life, dynamic emotion, arousal,
eros,
and desire. It is a color that is considered strong medicine for psychic malaise, a color which rouses appetite. There is throughout the world a figure known as the red mother.
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She is not as well known as the black mother or black madonna but she is the watcher of “things coming through.” She is especially propitiated by those who are about to give birth, for whosoever leaves this world or comes into this world has to pass through her red river. Red is a promise that a rising up or a homing is soon to come.
White is the color of the new, the pure, the pristine. It is also the
color of soul free of the body» of spirit unencumbered by the physical. It is the color of the essential nourishment» mother’s milk. Conversely» it is the color of the dead, of things which have lost their rosiness, their flush of vitality. When there is white, everything is, for the moment,
tabula rasa
, unwritten upon. White is a promise that there is nourishment enough for things to begin anew, that the emptiness or the void would be filled.
Besides the horsemen, both Vasalisa and her doll are dressed in red, white, and black as well. Vasalisa and her doll are the alchemical
anlagen.
Together they cause Vasalisa to be a little Life/Death/Life Mother in-the-becoming. There are two epiphanies or life-givings in the story. Vasalisa’s life is revivified by the doll and by her meeting with Baba Yaga, and thereby through all the tasks she masters. There are also two deaths in the story: that of the original too-good mother and also that of the stepfamily. Yet we see easily that the deaths are proper, and that they ultimately cause the young psyche a much fuller life:
So this letting live, letting die, is very important. It is the basic and natural rhythm which women are meant to understand... and live. Grasping this rhythm lessens fear, for we anticipate the future,
ano
the ground swells and the emptyings out it will hold. The doll and the Yaga are the wild mothers of all women; they provide the penetrating intuitive gifts from the personal level as well as the divine. This is the extreme paradox and teaching of the instinctual nature. It is a sort of Wolf Buddhism. What is one, is both. What is two, makes three. What lives shall die. What dies shall live.
This is what Baba Yaga means when she says, “to know too much can make one old too soon.” There is a certain amount we all should know at each age and each stage of our lives. In the tale, to know the meaning of the hands that appear and wring out the oil from the com and the poppy seed, both life-giving and deathdealing medicines in and of themselves, is to ask to know too much. Vasalisa asks about the horses, but not about the hands.
When I was a young adult, I asked my friend Bulgana Robnovich, an elderly teller from the Caucasus who lived in a tiny Russian farm community in Minnesota, about the Baba Yaga. How did she see this part of the tale where Vasalisa “just knows”
to stop asking questions? She looked at me with the lashless eyes of an old dog and said, “Dere are simply tings vich cannot be known.” She smiled bewitchingly, crossed her thick ankles, and that was that.
To try to understand the mystery of the appearing and disappearing servants who come in the form of disembodied hands is akin to trying to absolutely comprehend the core of the numinosum. By warning Vasalisa away from the question, the doll and the Yaga caution Vasalisa about calling upon too much of the numinosity of the underworld all at once, and this is right and proper, for though we visit there, we do not want to become enraptured and thereby trapped there.
It is another set of cycles the Yaga alludes to here, cycles of a woman’s life. As a woman lives them, she will understand more and more of these interior feminine rhythms, among them the rhythms of creativity, of birthing psychic babies and perhaps also human ones, the rhythms of solitude, of play, of rest, of sexuality, and of the hunt. One need not push it, the understanding will come. Some things must be accepted as being out of our reach, even though they act upon us, and we are enriched by them. There is a saying in my family: “Some things are God’s business.”
So, by the end of these tasks, “the legacy of the wild mothers” is deepened and intuitive powers emanate from both the human and soulful sides of the psyche. Now we have the doll as teacher on one side, and the Baba Yaga on the other.
The Eighth Task—Standing on All Fours
Baba Yaga is repelled by Vasalisa’s blessing from her deceased mother, and gives Vasalisa light—a fiery skull on a stick—and tells her to go. The tasks of this part of the tale are these:
Taking on immense power to see and affect others (receiving the skull). Looking at one's life situations in this new light (finding the way back to the old stepfamily).
Is Baba Yaga repelled because Vasalisa has received her mother’s blessing, or rather is she just repelled by blessedness in general? Actually, not quite either. Considering the later monotheistic overlays to this story, it would also appear that here the story
has been shifted to make the Yaga seem afeared of Vasalisa’s having been blessed, thereby demonizing this Old Wild Mother (from perhaps as far back in time as the Neolithic era) with an eye to elevating the newer Christian religion and discouraging the older one.
The original word in the story might have, beeii changed to
blessing
to encourage conversion, but I think the essence of original and archetypal meaning is still present. The issue of the mother’s blessing can be interpreted this way: The Yaga is not repelled by the fact of the blessing, but is rather put off by the fact that the blessing is from the too-good mother; the nice, the sweet, the darling of the psyche. If the Yaga is true to form, she would not care to be too close to, nor for too long near, the too conforming, the too demure side of the feminine nature.
Although the Yaga could blow life’s breath into a mouse-child with infinite tenderness, she could be said to know well enough to stay in her own land. Her land is the underworld of the psyche. The too-good mother’s land is that of the topside world. Although sweetness can fit into the wild, the wild cannot long fit into sweetness.
When women integrate this aspect of the Yaga, they change from accepting without question every tinker, every barb, every dadoo, every everything that comes their way. To gain a little distance from the sweet blessing of the too-good mother, a woman gradually learns to not just look, but to squint and to peer, and then, more and more, to suffer no fools.
Having now, through serving the Yaga, created a capacity within herself which she did not have before, Vasalisa receives a portion of the wild Hag’s power. Some women are afraid this deep knowing via instinct and intuition will cause them to be reckless or thoughtless, but this is an unfounded fear.
Quite the contrary; lack of intuition, lack of sensitivity to cycles, or not following one’s knowing, causes choices which turn out poorly, even disastrously. More often this Yagaian kind of knowledge moves women by small increments, and most often gives direction by conveying clear pictures of “what lies beneath or behind” the motives, ideas, actions, and words of others.
If the instinctive psyche warns “Beware!” then the woman must
pay heed. If the deep intuition says “Do this, do that, go this way, stop here, go forward,” the woman must make corrections to her plan as needed. Intuition is not to be consulted once and then forgotten. It is not disposable. It is to be consulted at all steps along the way, whether the woman’s work be clashing with a demon in the interior, or completing a task in the outer world. It does not matter whether a woman’s concerns and.aspirations are personal or global. Before all else, every action begins with strengthening the spirit.
Now let us consider the skull with fiery light. It is a symbol associated with what some old-style archeologists called “ancestral worship.”
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In later archeo-religious versions of the story, the skulls on sticks are said to be those of humans whom the Yaga has killed and eaten. But in the older religious rites which practiced ancestral kinship, bones were recognized as the agents for calling the spirits, the skulls being the most salient part.
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In ancestral kinship, it is believed that the special and timeless knowledge of the old ones of the community lives on in their very bones after death. The skull is thought to be the dome which houses a powerful remnant of the departed soul... one which, if asked, can call the entire spirit of the dead person back for a time in order to be consulted. It is easy to imagine that the soul-Self lives right in the bony cathedral of the forehead, with the eyes as windows, mouth as door, and ears as the winds.
So when the Yaga gives Vasalisa a lighted skull, she is giving her an old-woman icon, an “ancestral knower,” to carry with her for life. She is initiating her into a matrilineal legacy of knowing, one which, in the caves and canyons of the psyche, remains whole and thriving.
So, off goes Vasalisa into the dark forest with the fiery skull. She wandered about to find the Yaga, now she returns to home more sure, more certain, hips aimed straight ahead. This is the ascent from the initiation of deep intuition. Intuition has been set into Vasalisa like a center jewel in a crown. When a woman has come this far, she has managed to leave the protection of her own inner too-good mother, learned to expect and deal with adversity in the outer world in a powerful rather than complicit manner. She
has become aware of her own shadowy and inhibitory stepmother and stepsisters and the destruction they mean to do to her.
She has negotiated through the dark while listening to her inner voice, and has been able to stand the face of the Hag, which is a side of her own nature, but also the powerful wild nature. Thus she is enabled to understand awesome and conscious power, her own and that of others. No more “But I’m afraid of him/her/it.”
She has served the Hag Goddess of the psyche, fed the relationship, purified the personae, kept clear thinking. She has gotten to know this wild feminine force and its habits. She has learned to differentiate, to separate thought from feelings. She has learned to recognize the great wild power in her own psyche.
She has learned about Life/Death/Life, and women’s gift about it all. With these newly acquired Yaga skills, she need not lack in confidence or potency anymore. Having been given the legacy of the mothers—intuition from the human side of her nature, and a wild knowing from the
La Que Sabe
side of the psyche—she is well enabled. She goes forward in life, feet placed surely, one after the other, womanly. She has coalesced all her power and sees the world now and her life through this new light. Let us see what happens when a woman behaves thusly.
The Ninth Task—Recasting the Shadow
Vasalisa journeys toward home with the fiery skull on the stick. She almost throws it away but the skull reassures her. Once back home, the skull watches the stepsisters and stepmother, and bums them to ashes. Vasalisa lives well and for a long time afterward.
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These are the psychic tasks of this time:
Using one's acute vision (fiery eyes) to recognize and react to the negative shadow of one *s own psyche and/or negative aspects of persons and events in the outer world. Recasting the negative shadows in one's psyche with hag-fire (the wicked stepfamily which formerly tortured Vasalisa is turned to cinders).