Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (Penguin Classics) (56 page)

Baba Yaga was clearly not expected to be the same every time she appeared. Nevertheless, her various hypostases would have been present in the back of a listener’s mind even if a tale stressed another of her roles. If she were being pleasant and helpful, a listener would still feel some tension: what if she suddenly starts to sharpen her teeth?

Sometimes Baba Yaga is a helpful if off-putting old woman, who lives in a peculiar house and, when someone arrives from Rus’, comments on the smell with a ‘Foo, foo, foo!’ – resembling the western fairy-tale ogre’s ‘Fee, fie, fo, fum!’ A male hero gets the best treatment if he interrupts her questions and demands to be fed, given a drink and put to bed – and only then begins to tell her his news. She often asks, ‘Are you doing a deed or fleeing a deed?’ and she may give the hero a ball of string that will lead him on his journey, perhaps to the home of her own sister, another Baba Yaga. In this benign form, a trio of Baba Yaga sisters may be replaced by ordinary old women, but their ‘true identity’ is clear. The shift from Baba Yaga to helpful old woman may be the result of Orthodox Christianity displacing or ‘overwriting’ elements from Russia’s pagan past.

Sometimes Baba Yaga is a frightening witch who is nonetheless fair, a donor who rewards Vasilisa or the good (step)daughter, while punishing the evil stepmother and/or stepdaughter. She may give the good daughter dresses and other kinds of wealth; she may simply let her go and ‘reward’ her by destroying her stepmother and/or stepsister(s).
Sometimes she is a frightening witch who is not a donor, or who is an inadvertent donor; in ‘Marya Morevna’, she plans to eat Prince Ivan even though he has fulfilled his part of the bargain to earn a wonderful horse. Lastly, she can be a thief of children and apparently also a cannibal. In one group of tales, her bird or birds steal a baby, who must be rescued by a servant or an older sister. In others, a boy she has stolen tricks her into eating her own children.

Often Baba Yaga’s various roles blend into one another. There is always the threat that she will eat someone who fails her tests, and even when she is being fair or pleasant to a character, it is possible that she may change her mind. When she tears apart the bad stepsister, nothing remains but bones; the tale does not say where the flesh went, and perhaps it does not need to. At the same time, when we see her stealing babies (most often a little boy), the babies do not seem to be in immediate danger. The sister in ‘Geese and Swans’ discovers her brother playing with golden apples, which resonate with the apples of youth in other tales, and the brother in ‘The Brother’ is discovered sitting on a chair (not the cold, dirty floor) while the cat Yeremey tells him tales.

We see Baba Yaga travelling in her mortar, stealing children and wreaking havoc, but we also see her at the loom. Weaving, making the cloth for clothing, constitutes another link with the ‘women’s’ saint Paraskeva (and her Friday prohibitions), as well as with images of the Fates as spinners or weavers. Baba Yaga is sometimes alone in her hut; in other tales she has a variety of helpers or companions, the three pairs of disembodied hands Vasilisa sees but wisely does not ask about. These recall the hands that wait on Beauty in the palace of the Beast. In ‘Vasilisa the Beautiful’, Baba Yaga also commands three riders: a white rider on a white horse, who represents dawn (the idea that dawn would be distinct from sunrise reflects an archaic worldview: the sun was the ruler but not the cause of the blue daytime sky: the sky grew pale long before the sun appeared and remained pale after the sun set, especially in northern latitudes, and in Northern Russia in winter the sun might not rise at all), a red rider on a red horse representing the sun (the Russian word for ‘red’,
krasny
, comes from the same root as the word for ‘beautiful’ – so the sun is both red and beautiful), and a black rider on a black horse, for night.

In some tales Baba Yaga has armies, and servants who magically create soldiers for these armies. Finally, she often has a daughter or daughters. (Baba Yaga never seems to have a son, though she may have a grandson … ) The daughters can vary considerably: sometimes they are stupid girls, who obediently follow Yaga’s orders only
to be baked in her oven and eaten by their own mother. Even a mean, stupid Baba Yaga never wants to eat her own children, and she becomes extremely angry after being tricked into doing this. In other tales, Baba Yaga has a single daughter, a great beauty, who aids the hero or heroine and is rewarded by being allowed to escape into the ordinary world and marry a hero or a prince. Helping the hero or heroine, of course, greatly endangers the daughter. None of these daughters appears to have a father; some of the negative ones are called
Yagishna
, ‘daughter of Yaga,’ using the Russian patronymic form that is customarily based on the
father’s
name, never the mother’s, except here.

In some tales, Baba Yaga seems to be involved because the mother is missing, even if the tale is about a stepmother. In ‘Vasilisa the Beautiful’, the heroine’s doll, a deathbed gift from her mother, keeps her safe in Baba Yaga’s house. Baba Yaga tests Vasilisa and other girls not only by requesting impossible tasks but also by making them show that they are proficient at the essential feminine tasks: cooking, washing, stoking the fires in stove and bathhouse. Even when she plans to eat the girl, Baba Yaga tells her to sit down and weave while she herself goes off to sharpen her teeth. All this reflects traditional realities: a peasant girl who did not know how to weave or cook or stoke the bathhouse would not bring good fortune to her family. Baba Yaga is often kinder, or at least more fair, than the stepmother who sends her unloved stepdaughter to the witch in hopes that she will be eaten or destroyed.

It has indeed been suggested that tales of Baba Yaga helped young people accept and understand their place in a traditional culture, after earlier initiation rituals had been abandoned. For young women, marriage meant entering a new household and adapting to new household organization, under the authority of the mother-in-law. More generally, everyone could learn from how the heroes and heroines of the tales handle Baba Yaga – when to tell the truth and when to lie, when to be meek and when to be demanding.

So Baba Yaga appears as an initiatrix, a vestigial goddess, a forest power and a mistress of birds or animals. In a hunting culture, like that of old Russia, all this made her a very important figure. Baba Yaga’s link to death is less unsettling if we remember death’s constant presence in the peasant world.

In many of the tales, Baba Yaga asks the new arrivals whether they have come of their own will or by compulsion. The question could very well be part of an initiation ritual, though the correct answer varies from tale to tale. Propp and others consider that tales about Baba Yaga are remnants of initiation rituals for adolescents. This helps to
explain why so many of the stories end with marriage or with a separated couple being reunited. Marriage was a crucial moment in traditional society, marking the newlyweds as adults, producers of a new generation, and setting up or bolstering the economic unit of the family. Moreover, the tradition of wedding laments suggests that for a young woman marriage could be tantamount to death – even if many brides performed the ritual lamentation more as a way of keeping off the Evil Eye, to avoid tempting fate by seeming to be happy about the arrangements.

Given all this, it is perhaps no surprise that Jungian therapists still see Baba Yaga as an embodiment of occult knowledge, and her hut as a stage on a difficult path. One could argue that in the modern world people pass through many more roles and face many more tests than in the past. Modern encounters with Baba Yaga and what she represents still reaffirm our strength, cleverness and worthiness, teaching us how to win treasure or understanding out of loss, fear and pain.

I would argue, though, that the tales also show another important traditional role for Baba Yaga. Recall that Paraskeva, the saint whose day is celebrated just before the end of the old traditional autumn, is a protector of women in childbirth. Her precursor Baba Yaga, in her role as a thief and presumably devourer of children, may serve to address fears of infant and child mortality. There is no record of anything like an initiation ceremony for a woman in childbirth, perhaps because the event was already hedged round with a huge number of superstitions, spells and careful practices intended to keep the child (and, to a lesser extent, the mother) from harm. Russian peasant women traditionally gave birth in the bathhouse – a sensible place, since it was warm, relatively clean and private, but also a place associated with Baba Yaga. In times of high infant and child mortality, the goddess of the borders of death would necessarily play a part here, too. Indeed, Baba Yaga’s role in both types of tales, the ‘testing’ and the ‘devouring’, is formally similar. If adulthood meant the death of the child, and marriage meant the death of the maiden, then childbirth, too, carries an element of death – the death of the single human being and simultaneous birth of both child and mother.

In the stories where Baba Yaga kidnaps a child, the heroine passes through a series of ritual rebirths once she has recovered this child. In Khudyakov’s version of ‘The Brother’, Baba Yaga’s eagle notices that the stove protecting the maiden has become wider, and she asks the
apple tree, ‘Why have you, apple tree, become so curly, lowered your branches right down to the ground?’ The tree answers: ‘The time has come [ … ] I’m standing here all fluffy.’ The wording, as well as the position of the girl and baby inside and beneath the lowered branches, suggests that the tree is pregnant, that its ‘time has come’. Much as the testing tales lead into adulthood or marriage, the tales of girls who rescue babies stolen by Baba Yaga could serve to socialize young mothers in caring for new babies, and younger girls in caring for their own new younger siblings. The girl might be seen as representing the new generation of parents, while the mother of the stolen child is her own mother, an older woman nevertheless still young enough to have more children of her own, who knows how to keep a child alive in a dangerous world and now sends her daughter out to gain this knowledge. The various ‘pregnant’ pauses in the narrative, where girl and baby hide from pursuit, show the girl emerging each time reborn as someone better fit to care for a child. The fact that the stolen child seems happy and safe with Baba Yaga – playing with golden apples, or listening to a cat telling a story – suggests that infant mortality causes little pain for the infant, more for the mother and other relatives who survive.

Baba Yaga’s birds – geese, swans, eagles – are not just hunting birds. They are psychopomps who bear a dead soul or a living person to the other world. No matter where Baba Yaga’s house is located (forest, open field, seashore), it is always at the border of the other realm, over thrice-nine lands and near the thrice-tenth. The forest lies at the heart of Russian civilization, holding riches (the honey, wax and furs that early Slavs traded along routes from the Black Sea to Scandinavia) as well as terrors. The open field – or open steppe – appears in traditional Russian spells. These spells frequently begin with the words ‘I rise up, saying a blessing. I go out, crossing myself, and I go to an open field’. An empty place where no one can see or hear what one says is the proper locus for working magic. Russia’s traditional territory has a seacoast only in the far north, on the White Sea – but many cultures have imagined the afterlife as located beyond the sea, in the land where the sun sets.

Baba Yaga is strongly associated with fire; Vasilisa comes to her house asking for a light, and Yaga sends her back home with a fiery-eyed skull that incinerates her stepmother and stepsisters. In some folktales, Baba Yaga herself is killed, baked in an oven (though
sometimes she scratches her way out), or burned up after falling into a fiery river. But as Propp points out in
The Russian Folktale
, Baba Yaga is a recurring figure: if she burns up once, it only means that she no longer threatens the characters of
that
story. She will be back in the next one.

One might say that Andreas Johns ‘wrote
the
book’ on Baba Yaga –
Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale.
Summarizing and synthesizing the results of hundreds of tales, he provides a range of information about the image of Baba Yaga and the many variants of tales about her. His readings of the tales are clear and well-founded, and not limited by any single theoretical perspective.

The prominent Soviet folklorist Vladimir Propp (1895–1970) mentions Baba Yaga in several of his works. Most interestingly, she appears at length in
The Historical Roots of the Wonder Tale
, of which only fragments have been translated into English. Propp’s aim in this work is to trace each move of the wonder tale (or the magic tale,
volshebnaya skazka
in Russian) back to its origins in initiation rituals. He sees Baba Yaga as the guardian of the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead and sees her power over birds and animals as a trace of the primitive totemistic religion of a hunter/gatherer culture. Yaga is also, according to Propp, a link to the period in human society when the male role in reproduction was not understood – hence her daughters, or her many vermin-children, conceived with no man in sight.

Anthropologist Joanna Hubbs, in
Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture
, draws on work by a variety of scholars. Hubbs’s synthetic view of Baba Yaga connects her to other narratives or images of female divinity in Russian verbal and material culture, including the
rusalki
, the Goddess Mokosh, Moist Mother Earth, and the later female Christian figures, Mary the Mother of God and Saint Paraskeva. To Hubbs, Yaga is a figure of occulted female power connected to goddess worship, in which every mother was a priestess in her own house. Hubbs’s work refers often to the work of archeologist Marija Gimbutas. Cherry Gilchrist’s recent
Russian Magic: Living Folk Traditions of an Enchanted Landscape
(2009) gives a detailed and accessible introduction to the place of magic in Russia today.