It’s no surprise that I am enamored of the witch.  I have drawn her in all her incarnations, back to her most powerful mothers.  I have studied her, gorging myself on sociological studies of the ‘child stealers,’ and the female trinity.  Yet, I haven’t written much about her, so here is my first look at the witch.  As much as the internet is great, it is also not always the best place to get substantive information on ancient things.  There are plenty of sites regurgitating the same information and descriptions of Baba Yaga (Wikipedia) with reference to the folktales that originally sketched her visage and character.  I needed to be sure; I looked for those folktales, the most famous of which is Russian Fairy Tales from the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library, by Aleksandr Afanasev, translated by Norbert Guterman and illustrated b Alexander Alexeieff.  It just happened to live on the shelf of my personally library, a relic of my childhood (I spilled milk on it when I was six or so).

Baba Yaga the boney legged, or, in one story, the golden legged, is one of three sisters.   She has three daughters, sometimes beautiful and sometimes deformed.  She has claws and a nose that hits the ceiling of her ‘little hut’ where she often lies stretched from corner to corner.  She is sometimes helpful to youth on a quest, mostly devious towards young women, and often devising ways to eat her visitors.  She sharpens or ‘whets’ her teeth for these chow downs and can gnaw through whole forests.  Her ambiguous intentions to people make her stand out in folklore where characters are usually only evil or only good (Johns, 1998).

Baba Yaga has servants; sometimes these are youth who take on temporary servitude in order to get something from her, and sometimes these are maids who have been given to her for some other favor.  She commands oxen, eagles, and magical mares.  And her primary, if not only, mode of transportation is folded up in a mortar which she goads along though the sky with a pestle and sweeps her tracks away with a broom.  I have not yet figured out how she could fly in such a thing and still need to sweep her tracks away, though these tools also allude to other, older, things like the potions ancient wise women mixed up, winter winds, and a the sweeping of the oven after eating (Cooper, 1997).  Like many evil spirits, Baba Yaga is driven to count things and cannot cross a river or other running water.

Continue reading Baba Yaga and her izbushka