Ancient goddess spotlight: Baba Yaga

   Baba Yaga by Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin

~The Wild Woman~

Baba Yaga (pronounced bah-bye yegg-ah) is known as the Slavic "wild woman," a sacred old hag who is otherwise considered a goddess of birth and death. Although many goddesses cross-culturally seem to have some sort of reign over the beginnings and endings of life, this one has a unique image all her own.

Rather distinctive and a little kooky, Baba Yaga is believed to use a mortar as a kind of boat, propelling herself with a pestle as an oar. Associated with these iconic tools of food refinement (which are used to grind nuts, grain, etc.) the fierce goddess is also thought to grind away at extraneous things. Moreover, she cleans up with a broom, sweeping away every trace of herself as she moves along.

With the primal intensity of a love goddess, Baba Yaga is an unorthodox beacon of frenzied living. Yet, she chooses to funnel her energy elsewhere, namely by unveiling the explosiveness of creation. Indeed, there is nothing subtle about her.

How could there be if her very house is said to stand on chicken legs and dance around for the fun of it? An extension of her own nature to be sure, her home is indicative of her joyful expressiveness, brimming with unabashed personality.

Although she is an unsual force to be reckoned with, Baba Yaga still has a time for rest, as Autumn is her symbolic time of death. As the divine life force in harvested grain and other fruits of the earth, she appears to be linked with the seasons and cycles of nature, not unlike several other goddesses of antiquity such as the Greek Persephone, to name one.

With so much blatant power and earthly divinity surrounding her image, we may not be too surprised to find that patriarchal cultures eventually denigrated the divine crone into a lowly witch. In Russia for example, she became the wicked witch of various folklore, with tales about how she lived in the forest and ate children -- similar to the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. But she did not eat children exclusively: she was also known to devour anyone who was unfortunate enough to wander too close!

Alas, Baba Yaga is not the only goddess stripped of her regal purpose, as she is also linked to another slavic witch called Vyed'ma, who had been a 'good' old wise woman, a mistress of herbal magic. But she too was eventually demoted and came to be known as a fiendish old lady in Slavic folk tales.

Sources:
The Goddess Oracle by Amy Sophia Marashinsky (2002)
Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book by Miriam Robbins Dexter (1990)

Other articles of interest:

Juliette Frette