Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

Like many other mythical beings, witches have a talent for metamorphosis. (In contemporary popular culture they are ‘morphs’.) A witch can turn herself into a bird, a serpent, a fly, a butterfly, a frog or a cat.[17] Most often they turn into a black bird (raven, crow, black hen and magpie). There is also a popular belief that moths are really witches, so it is best to throw them on the fire or scorch their wings. The next day, you need to find out which ‘baba’ in the village ‘got burned in the fire’, ‘roasted right through like a roasted devil’ or simply passed away. That baba is – was – a witch. ‘A hen with scorched feathers, or any other bird that a witch turns into, can also give the witch away.’ There is a sort of moth that is actually called a witch. People believe that any woman who is touched by the wings of this ‘witch’ will be barren.

It was believed that when a witch falls asleep, a butterfly or bird flies out of her mouth, ‘and if she turns over, the butterfly or bird cannot return whence it came, so it will die, and so will the woman. It can happen that the bird or hen flies away, the sleeping woman’s husband turns his wife around so that her head is where her feet were, the hen cannot go back into the woman’s mouth and the woman dies. When the grieving husband puts his wife back in the position she had when she fell asleep, the hen can go back into the woman again, and the woman comes back to life.’[18]

Witches can be recognised by ‘the wart of some kind that every one of them has on her head, the same as the long cockscomb on a strutting cockerel’. Witches are cross-eyed, they are prone to vomiting (hence the saying ‘He threw up his guts like a witch’) and they don’t sink in water. A witch has the ability to change her physical size, ‘she can make herself absolutely small, so that she can pass through the narrowest crack, through a keyhole, and emerge on the other side.’ (T. R. Ðorđević)

In Herzegovina, a witch is a woman with a moustache ‘like a young man’s first whiskers’. Baba, a character in P. P. Njegoš’s epic poem The Mountain Wreath says: ‘It is an easy thing to recognise a witch: grey hair and a cross under her nose.’[19] Hence, a witch has ‘big whiskers and hairy thighs’; a witch is ‘plethoric, with a foul temper and a cross under her nose’; witches are always ill-humoured, they always wear an evil expression and they have ‘shaggy legs’. A witch is ‘whiskery, with bushy eyebrows, bent-backed, her eyes sunk deep in her head’. A witch has ‘thin little moustaches, bloodshot eyes and sharp teeth, but the moustache is the surest sign’. Hairiness is not such an issue in Bosnia. On the contrary, the Bosnians maintain that a witch is ‘a woman with no hair in her armpits or her lower body’.[20]

Mythical beings are distinguished from humans by their physical size: they are significantly smaller or larger than people. In Istria,[21] they believe that the plague is a gigantic woman. According to Serbian beliefs, the witch called karakondžula is a large fat creature. In Montenegro, they used to believe that Mother Wednesday was an enormous female, ‘wide as a haystack’, with great bosoms, grey hair and steel teeth.

Like other mythical beings, witches have some kind of physical defect, which may be expressed as a surplus, a deficiency or an imbalance. It is sometimes believed of witches that they have a rudimentary tail, or even rudimentary wings. Slovenian folklore mentions preglavica, a headless woman in white who only appears at midday. Her Russian counterpart is called poludnitsa. The Croats believed in faceless female demons: dead mothers coming back to give suck to their babies. Great dangling dugs are not reserved to Baba Yaga alone. The Serbs used to believe in the existence of the giant mother (divska majka) who would knead dough with her breasts. The kuga in Konavle[22] and the koljara in Montenegro have great dangling dugs that they can sling over their shoulders. The goddess Kshumai (worshipped by the Kaffirs of the Hindu Kush), the mythical peri (Farsi: pari) and the Arabic salauva – they all have the same traits. Alavardi (also Alabasti) is an immemorial mythical being familiar to many Asiatic peoples. She is a tall woman with pendulous breasts that she tosses over her shoulders.

Witches may have only one eye and no nostrils, or only one nostril. One of Baba Yaga’s legs is made of bone (or iron). Blindness or monocular vision is typical of mythical beings. Baba Yaga is blind (or grumbles that her eyes hurt). She identifies her ‘guests’ – random passing travellers – by their human scent, because, as far as we know, she cannot see them.