The people on some Croatian islands believe that ‘witches like best to pluck out the hearts of their own kin, a bit less to pluck out their friends’ hearts, and if a witch is not satisfied with her husband, she plucks out his heart as soon as she can.’ In Herzegovina and Montenegro, they believe that witches only eat children that are ‘dear and kindred to them, even if they are not their own’(!). The common folk suppose that a woman cannot become a witch until she eats her own child. In Konavle, they think a witch ‘has no strength at all until she kills her own child’. And the Montenegrins think that ‘a woman who wants to be a witch must eat up her own child first, only then can she eat other children too.’ (T. R. Ðorđević)
Slavs think that what witches like best is drinking the blood of children and others with sweet blood. A witch ‘sups the blood with a little spoon and very soon the child withers and dies’. It is believed that witches sometimes kill older people too: ‘they drink a young boy’s or girl’s heart dry, and whosoever they drink up, is no more: they fade away and die in the flower of their youth.’
Blood is very rarely found on Baba Yaga’s menu. There is a rare motif in a Siberian fairytale, of Baba Yaga drinking blood from the breast of Princess Marfita. The principal hero cuts off Baba Yaga’s head, but the head uses Marfita’s legs to run away.
It can happen that human fingers are found floating in Baba Yaga’s soup, but her basic diet is ordinary enough. What is not ordinary is Baba Yaga’s phenomenal appetite.[33]
The scale of Baba Yaga’s cannibalism is modest by comparison with ordinary witches, or with the Maenads, the Bacchae, who in their trance rend the flesh of living creatures with their bare teeth, and once (according to Euripides) led by Agave, mother of Pentheus, tore Pentheus himself to pieces.
Allow me to draw your attention to the camouflaged details in your author’s fiction which could be linked with Baba Yaga. In the first part, the author’s mother barely allows her daughter to have access to her space. The mother identifies herself with her house, or more precisely she is the house, and she experiences her daughter’s presence, like the things that she brings into the house, as a territorial violation. Although it is trivial at first glance, the incident with the little cupboard has a symbolic value: the cupboard becomes acceptable to the mother precisely when it has been painted, when it has undergone this transformation, when it is symbolically ‘chewed up’ and ‘devoured’. Although these relationships are only hinted at, Pupa and Beba have traumatic relations with their own children, something which can easily be explained as symbolic cannibalism. In one place, Beba admits that she is her own son’s ‘killer’.
MOTHER, SISTER, WIFE
Baba Yaga’s family status is contradictory. She is a woman without a husband – a spinster. In the Czech version, Ježibaba has a husband, Ježibabel, and his mere name says everything about the power relations between that couple. It is Baba Yaga’s status as mother that causes the most confusion: sometimes a daughter, Marinushka, is mentioned, and occasionally the number of daughters grows to forty-one. Sometimes Baba Yaga appears as a mother of dragons. In one fairytale, tricked into gobbling salt and flour, Baba Yaga drinks seawater to slake her thirst, until she bursts and gives violent birth to frogs, mice, snakes, worms and spiders. Some tales mention Baba Yaga’s sisters (they are identical except in age; they are even called Baba Yaga). ‘Blue-eye’, Sineglazka, a young warrior woman from Russian fairytales, is Baba Yaga’s niece. Even so, the predominant version has Baba Yaga as an old woman who lives alone.
Baba Yaga represents the dark side of motherhood. She appears as the wicked stepmother, the fateful midwife and false mother (in one tale, she even mimics the voice of the hero’s mother in order to lure him closer and gobble him up). Motifs of perversity crop up here and there, though rarely; in one place, she sucks the young heroine’s breasts, in another she asks her to sing her a lullaby and rock her to sleep. Baba Yaga is surrounded by (potential) symbols of female sexuality: her oven is a womb, the hut on hen’s legs is a woman’s belly, Baba Yaga’s mortar also symbolises her womb, though at the same time it could be her mother, Baba Yagishna’s womb. Baba Yaga sometimes chatters away to her mortar and calls it her little mortar-mother (stupushka-matushka).
Baba Yaga’s reactions to women are misogynistic, and she is prone to excessive rivalry with young heroines. Generally she treats the heroines as her servants, finding barely possible tasks for them to perform around the hut.[34] Yet, more often, she appears as a helpmeet and liberator of maidens in misfortune. Even when by mishap she loses her own daughter (or daughters), Baba Yaga seems preoccupied less by despair over her loss than by anger and desire for revenge. She is evil to boys, she’ll eat them up, but she is kind to young men, virtually submissive: she’ll give them food and drink, chat with them, give them magic objects that save them from misfortune and help them in their relationships with beloved maidens. And if the heroes are nice and polite, Baba Yaga and her sisters turn into love-able, generous grannies.[35]
Although she is surrounded by hypertrophied female symbols (big breasts, the mortar, the hut, the oven), Baba Yaga has certain male characteristics as well. She speaks in a basso profundo voice, she has a long nose, a bone or iron leg, long iron teeth and – she can’t cook! She often serves inedible stuff to her guests: iron bread, salty cakes, soup with children’s fingers or spittle swimming around in it. And Baba Yaga often talks ‘like a man’. In the tale Go there – I know not where – and bring me back a thing I lack, Baba Yaga says: ‘He is an ordinary fellow; we could deal with him easily – like taking snuff.’ In other words, Baba Yaga knows about taking snuff.
Baba Yaga’s one and only rival among men is Koshchey the Deathless. While she respects him, Baba Yaga won’t hesitate to give away the secret of his strength to the young hero. Koshchey the Deathless expresses the same kind of respect for and rivalry with Baba Yaga.[36]
By combining such (potentially) female and male symbols, Baba Yaga is, psychoanalytically speaking, what’s called a phallic mother. Some interpreters (such as Geza Roheim) see Baba Yaga’s hut as an image of heterosexual coitus. The image of Baba Yaga – sprawling in her hut with legs spread wide, breasts dangling over a pole, nose poking the ceiling – is really (from a child’s point of view) a matter of the child confronting its parents’ coitus. Other details can be explained in a similar way, for example Baba Yaga’s cannibalism may be a projection of a child’s aggressive hunger. A hungry child wants to eat its mother. Conversely, the mother is a cannibal who wants to eat her own child.
Vladimir Propp explains Baba Yaga’s masculine attributes as a travesty (disguising a man as an old woman) of tribal rituals for the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. The tribal mother acts the part of a man dressed as a woman, hence a man with a phallus and women’s breasts. There is an interesting detail in Andreas Johns’s book about Baba Yaga. One of the folktales describes how the hero strikes Baba Yaga with a magical wand, and she turns into a woman (!). If Baba Yaga has the ability to turn into different things, to become an intermediary between worlds, the non-human (fantastical, forested, subterranean or unconscious) and the human, then her androgynous nature – or her role of mediating between genders – becomes understandable.[37]
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‘Vassilisa lights the kindling in the skulls along the fence-posts, goes to the stove and takes out the food and sets it before Baba Yaga, and there is enough for ten. She fetches kvass, honey, beer and wine from the cellar. The old woman eats it all up, drinks everything to the last drop, and leaves Vassilisa only a little broth, a breadcrust and a morsel of pork.’ (From
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Baba Yaga drives away Vassilisa, who, on completing Baba Yaga’s tasks, helps the mother’s spirit that is embodied in a dolclass="underline" ‘You know what, blessed daughter, be off with you! I don’t need blessed ones!’ (From
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– ‘And you, granny, rest your old head on my strong shoulder, and tell me what to do.’
– ‘Many’s the young man that has passed this way, but very few that spared a kind word for me. Take my horse, child. It is faster than your own, it will carry you to my middle sister, she will advise you what you should do next.’ (From About the Apples that Restore Youth and the Living Water)
36
‘I know it very well!’ says Baba Yaga. ‘She is with Koshchey the Deathless. It will be difficult to reach her; it is no simple matter to deal with Koshchey the Deathless: his death rests on the point of a needle, that needle lies inside an egg, the egg is inside a duck, the duck is inside a rabbit, the rabbit is inside a trunk, the trunk is at the top of a tall oak tree and Koshchey guards that tree as if it were his own eye.’ (From
– ‘Beyond thirty lands, even the thirtieth kingdom, beyond the fiery river, lives Baba Yaga. She has a mare that can circle the earth every day. She has many other fine mares besides. I was her shepherd for three days together, I did not lose a single mare, and afterwards Baba Yaga gave me a foal for my pains.’ (From
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The most interesting tale from the transsexual point of view comes from Bulgaria: The Old Woman’s Maiden (Babinoto devojče). Several times, the old woman’s maiden puts on a man’s clothes and saves the emperor’s daughter. The emperor offers her his daughter’s hand in marriage, but the false young man thrice refuses to become the emperor’s son-in-law. In truth, the maiden is more interested in the dragon, whose prisoner she was for some time, but the dragon is angry with her because she accidentally burned him with candle wax (castrated him?), and the wound won’t heal. She tries to return to the dragon several times, but the dragon harshly spurns her, sending her to one of the lower kingdoms. These kingdoms are, amazingly, arranged like the floors in a high-rise building: three above, six below. In the end, the maiden is forced to change gender when she is turned, magically and forever, into a young man, who then marries the emperor’s daughter.