Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

I realise that this attack of textual claustrophobia was brought on by repetitious rituals from the world of folklore. Don’t touch this, do touch that; don’t cross the threshold – step over it. Throw that tooth over the roof, no no, good grief, over the fence. Spit over your right shoulder, wait, stop! Over the left! You only have to go home to the next village and the signal code changes. In the fucking village of Small Baba, the locals spit over their left shoulder, against spells, while in fucking Big Baba, they do it over their right shoulder. And how lucky you are, you’re thinking, to live in a de-ritualised and de-mythologised world where a person can relax, kick off his shoes, put his feet on the table and twiddle his thumbs without fear of baleful consequences. But perhaps there’s something else on your mind? Fear of the existence of parallel worlds, for example?

In the Serbian fairytale called The Speechless Language, a shepherd goes into a wood, on his way to his sheep. All at once the woods catch fire, and a snake is trapped by the blaze. The shepherd takes pity on the snake and saves it. The snake winds itself around the shepherd’s neck and orders him to take him to his father, the snake-emperor. He warns him that the snake-emperor will offer him immense riches, but he says no, all he’d want from the snake-emperor is to know the animal language. So that is what he asks for. At first the snake-emperor refuses, but the shepherd is stubborn and eventually the snake-emperor gives in.

‘Stop! Come closer, if that is what you want. Open your mouth!’

The shepherd opens his mouth, and the snake-emperor spits in his mouth and says: ‘Now you spit in my mouth!’ The shepherd spits in his mouth.

They spit in each other’s mouths three times, and then the snake-emperor says: ‘Now you possess the animal language. Go, and tell no one what you know, for if you tell a living soul, you will die that same moment.’

And this shepherd with the newly acquired skill – of understanding speechless language, the language of animals and plants – became a wise man.

Language serves the process of mutual understanding. We enter effortfully, we gesticulate, we wring our hands, we explain, we translate our thoughts, we interpret, we break into a sweat, we furrow our brows, we act as if we have understood, we are convinced that we have understood, we are convinced that we know what we are talking about, we are convinced that they understand us, we translate other languages into our own. And all our endeavours boil down to this: we miss the meaning. For if we were truly to understand one another, speaker and listener, writer and reader, you and I, we would have had to spit into each other’s mouths, entwining our tongues and mixing our spittle. You and I, editor, we speak different languages: yours is only human, whereas mine is both human and serpentine.

Are you frowning now? Thanks a lot, you’re thinking, it’s too much already. Don’t forget that what you have found out, struggling through to reach the end of my text, is only a smattering, a trivial fraction of the whole ‘babayagology’. And what were you thinking of? That the entire history of Baba Yagas (sic!) can fit into a few dozen pages? And that you have solved the problem with a bit of help from Aba Bagay, an obscure Slavic scholar from eastern Europe who is only too pleased to shed a bit of light on these matters?

I opened the door just a crack, and let you scratch the tip of this enormous iceberg. And the iceberg is formed of the millions and millions of women who have always kept the world going and still keep it going. (I’m speaking your language now, that’s enough of the picturesque stuff.) I am sure that in reading my ‘Baba Yaga For Beginners’ you did not notice one particular detail: in many tales, Baba Yaga sleeps with a sword beneath her head. We have found all manner of things in your author’s fictional dyptich, but not a single mention of a sword!