Lessons from Baba Yaga
By Julie Peters
Posted on September 24, 2024
Both feared and revered, the Slavic Baba Yaga has lessons for us all on the power of nature and the potential for a woman outside of the patriarchy.
Baba Yaga is the classic crone, the Witch of the Forest. She is old and ugly, often riding around in a mortar without a pestle or on a broom. She lives in a little magical hut that has sentient chicken legs to carry her wherever she wants to go, making her exceedingly hard to find. In some of her stories, she cooks and eats children in her giant stove. In others, she gives them magic, helping them survive and thrive if they are willing to work on her terms.
Baba Yaga’s Slavic Origin Story
Baba Yaga shows up in countless tales from the Slavic region, but she is most famously featured in the story Vasilisa the Beautiful. In this tale, a little girl named Vasilisa is forced to live with her cruel stepmother and stepsisters after her father dies—and yes, it’s likely that this story influenced the modern Cinderella story most of us know today.
Vasilisa is tasked by her stepmother with finding Baba Yaga in the forest and bringing back an ember to restart her family’s fire. Her stepmother likely hopes Baba Yaga will eat the child, but instead, Vasilisa learns strange lessons about separating poppy seeds from dirt and identifying mildewed corn from good. She is helped along the way by a magical doll her mother made her who helps nudge her in the right direction so that she understands Baba Yaga’s lessons and doesn’t get the wrong side of her oven.
Vasilisa successfully returns to her stepmother’s house with the ember. Some versions of this story end with the house going up in flames, taking the evil stepfamily with it, feeding Baba Yaga’s oven after all. Sometimes Vasilisa grows up and is chosen by the Tsar, becoming a princess.
The Influence of the Ancient Mistress of the Forest
While Baba Yaga appears in writing for the first time in a collection of folk tales in 1750, it’s likely her archetype is much older than that. In fact, she may actually represent the Mistress of the Forest, a kind of spirit or goddess of the woods.
Like many ancient goddesses who reigned before the patriarchal gods took over, this Mistress of the Forest could have been benevolent or cruel, depending on the weather. That was much like nature itself, providing food and shelter in some cases or murderous storms in others. Baba Yaga was the wildness of nature itself, and one must tread carefully when dealing with the untamed reality of nature and the Forest.
There’s something particularly feminine about Baba Yaga too. She is always an old woman, never a man. She’s indisputably ugly, but perhaps that’s part of her charm—she manages to completely escape the male gaze. She doesn’t live with a man or need a man to do anything for her. In some stories she has three horse riders who are coded as male knights, but they are referred to by Baba Yaga as “My Sun,” “My Night,” and “My Day,” which again places her in a kind of goddess light, in charge of the cycles of time.
The Power of Women Outside of the Patriarchy
During the centuries of witch hunts throughout Europe and North America, many women were targeted for being witches, and those “witches” were accused and convicted of particularly feminine crimes. Women were accused of sexualized crimes like making love with the Devil or having demon babies. They would often be accused of stealing and eating babies, which Baba Yaga was certainly accused of too.
In reality, these women were often perfectly ordinary Christian women, but they had some quality that made them threatening to the male authorities of the Church at the time. Sometimes a woman would refuse a man’s advances, so she would be called a witch. Sometimes a woman who had medical or herbal knowledge that undermined the men’s power would also be accused of being a witch. Or she was a widow that had no interest in remarrying, or a woman who was needy and placed pressure on society. Occasionally, it was the men who threatened these powers that be.
And then there’s Baba Yaga, brewing her potions, stoking her giant oven, living quite gleefully without the need of a man’s power, ready to steal the community’s children.
The Wildness of Nature and the Crone
Baba Yaga may have provided a kind of scapegoat as well, especially during those difficult times when children died so often of mysterious illnesses before modern medicine could save them. Blaming Baba Yaga for stealing them was a way of giving the grieving community someone to blame.
But she could also represent the wildness and wisdom of women, especially women who wanted some power within themselves that didn’t rely on the presence of a man. She may be seen as ugly and scary, but she still holds the value and magic of the Crone archetype: the wise woman who is an aspect of the Goddess. She reminds us that the Goddess was once the supreme power of the universe, and one of her realms was the forest. We’d better listen to Baba Yaga’s wisdom. Or else we might be shoved in her oven.
Julie Peters
