Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

‘The archer returned from the stable; that same moment, the servants grabbed him and shoved him in the cauldron. He roused himself, jumped out of the cauldron – and turned into such a handsome fellow that he cannot be described by mouth or pen.’

(From The Firebird and the Empress Vassilisa

.)

In all cosmogonic myths, including the Slavic ones, water means primeval chaos, the original principle and creation of the world. In Slavic beliefs, water flows through the earth’s veins like blood through the human body. Many Slavic beliefs, customs, rituals, demons (vodjanoj, vodjanika, vodnik, vodjanik, vodovik, rusalka) and saints (the pre-Christian goddess Mokosh and her Christian descendant St Paraskeva, also known as St Petka) are linked with water. For water is an ambivalent principle: it brings evil (Gde voda tam beda / Where there’s water, there’s misery), but also cleansing and renewal.

The banya (bath, spa, sauna) has a special place in Slavic folklore, for the Russians above all. The bath is in principle a dirty place, but also a site of purification: you soak in the hot water, letting it chase away illnesses, spells, the thoughts of evil people and so forth. The spirit called Bannik lives there (also known as Bajnik, Bajennik, Bajnushko, Laz’nik). He is either invisible or takes the appearance of a naked, dirty, long-haired old man whose body is caked with mud and leaves. A female spirit lives in the baths as well: Obderiha is a frightful hairy old woman who appears naked or in the shape of a cat, and lives under a little wooden bench. Shishiga is a female demon that takes the shape of a relative or acquaintance, luring people into the baths where they suffocate in the steam.

A proportion of nuptial, birth and funerary rites belong to the bath. Pre-nuptial rituals involving the bride are very similar to those for funerals, for the bride’s departure from the home where she grew up marks her ritual death to her family.

Sensing that a passing traveller is before her, Baba Yaga furiously threatens to eat him up. The hero, as we have already mentioned, tames Baba Yaga with his insolence, and asks her to heat his bath, to begin with, and to prepare him something to eat, and only then will he tell her where he is going and what he seeks.

I. P. Davidov argues that the steam-bath in Baba Yaga’s household is equivalent to the funerary rite that is linked to the site of the bath.[38] The bath is a place of transformation, of ritual ‘deadening’. The principal hero gets ready to travel to the world of the dead, and the ritual steam-bath and the meal are necessary preparations for this journey. The half-blind Baba Yaga recognises the hero by his scent: he smells of ‘living human’ (russkim duhom pahnet, russkoj koskoj), and as a living man he cannot survive in the world of the dead. Baba Yaga herself lives on the frontier between the worlds of the living and the dead. She is the ‘customs officer’, and her hut is the ‘customs house’. It follows that Baba Yaga is ‘bilingual’, fluent in the language of the dead and that of the living. This is why she alone can give the hero his symbolic visa to enter the world of the dead. The ritual steaming is intended to ‘deaden’ the hero (so they won’t recognise him by smell in the world of the dead), to modify or adapt him (so that he can see and talk in the kingdom of the dead). Vladimir Propp argues that ritual food serves the purpose of releasing a dead man’s mouth in the other world. If he is to descend into the kingdom of the dead, the principal hero of the tale must learn a number of other tricks as well: how not to fall asleep there, how not to laugh, how to talk and see like a dead man. Baba Yaga will give the hero a horse for the road to the kingdom of the dead and a ball of thread that will lead him where he wants to go. Baba Yaga herself only rarely leaves her (sentry) post.

The hero’s return to the world of the living is accompanied by new rituals in which water once again plays a key part: dead and alive. Dead water heals wounds and amputated parts of the body, while living water restores the soul to the body.

Remarks