Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

Baba Yaga’s hut terrifies the passing traveller. The first things the hero or heroine sees are the skulls; beyond the hut itself there is most often nothing at all. (‘There stands the hut, the path no further runs. Only the darkling dark, nothing else to see.’) The hut looks highly unwelcoming. Often there isn’t so much as a window or a door; the hut stands on hen’s legs and turns eerily around on the spot.

If he wants to enter, the passing traveller has to know how. Heroes like Prince Ivan (Ivan Tsarevich) usually blow into the hut and call out: ‘Little hut! O little hut! Stay still, little hut, as you once did, with your front to me and your back to the forest.’ Or: ‘Little hut, o little hut! Turn your eyes to the forest and your door to me. I shan’t stop here long, just a single night. Let the lone traveller in.’

Girls, by contrast, are warned in advance what they must do to humour the dangerous hut: ‘There, my girl, a birch tree will whip your eyes, so tie it down with a ribbon; there the door will creak and thump, so oil the hinges well; the dogs will attack you, so throw them some bread; the cat will scratch your eyes, so give it some ham.’

Vladimir Propp argues that the myths of many tribal cultures contain two worlds: the world of the living and the world of the dead. A wild beast stands on the boundary (wild animals guard the entrance to Hades), or perhaps a hut with zoo morphic traits. In many tribal cultures a hut like Baba Yaga’s is involved in the initiation rites for young males when they enter the adult world. First they have to be devoured (by the hut itself, whose door puts us in mind of jaws) in order to be born again and join the adult world.

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Thus the hero stands before Baba Yaga’s hut and says: ‘Little hut, o little hut, turn your front to me and your back to the forest.’ The young man is afraid, many have died on this spot, which is proven by the skulls on the fence, but even so, he pleads to be let inside (‘Let me come in, to eat salted bread!’). Meanwhile Baba Yaga in her hut murmurs, satisfied: ‘All alone you came to me, like a lamb to the slaughter.’

When they gain entry to the hut, the heroes come face to face with a new terrifying sight: ‘On the stove, on the ninth brick, lies Baba Yaga with her bone leg, her nose touching the ceiling, her slobber seeping over the doorstep, her dugs dangling over the lug,[24] sharpening her teeth.’ The descriptions of Baba Yaga vary: stretching from one corner of the hovel to the other, in some accounts, she rests one leg on a shelf and the other on the stove; sometimes she tosses her breasts onto the stove or hangs them ‘over a pole’, or even ‘shuts the oven door with her breasts’, while snot trails out of her nose, and she ‘scoops up soot with her tongue’. Very occasionally the descriptions are unambiguously sexual: Baba Yaga leaps out of the hut with ‘sinewy rump’ and ‘polished cunt’. Baba Yaga has become so much a part of her hut, growing into it, that the hut dances up and down instead of her, or spins on its axis like a child’s top.

How do the heroes cope with their fear? Before their first meeting with Baba Yaga, they appear very impudent: ‘Come on, old girl, what’s all the fuss about? What’s all the racket for? I want food and drink, get the steam-bath ready, then I’ll tell you all the news.’ We recognise a stereotype in the tone and substance of these words: this is how men in patriarchal societies address their women. One does not expect such behaviour from a young man when he meets an old woman for the first time, but curiously enough, the magic formula does the trick. Hearing the tone and substance of his retort, Baba Yaga is tamed in a trice, and she does everything he asks straightaway. The young traveller’s uncouth familiarity is the key that unlocks her door.[25]

The hero comes face to face with vagina dentata, and behold! He lives to tell the tale.

Let me add at once that, while the obscenity of old women is nothing rare in the mythico-ritual world, it is rarely sexual. Obscenity has its ritual nature and its obvious purpose. Baubo is the famous old girl who pulled up her skirts and exposed her genitals to Demeter. By mocking the absurd role of wise consolatrix (which everybody expected her to play), Baubo managed to make Demeter laugh.[26] The Japanese goddess Ame-no-Uzume tempts the sun goddess Amaterasu out of her cave with an obscene dance, to drive away the darkness that had fallen on the earth. In some parts of Serbia and Bulgaria, there was a custom that the old women would lift their skirts and show their vulvas as a way of defending their village from hail, and thereby save the harvest. Old women in southern Serbia would even strip naked and run round the house to drive away the hail, imploring as they went:

Don’t you, dragon,
fight my monster,
it’s devoured lots like you!

or,