Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

There is an interesting detail about combs and combing in the first part of your author’s diptych, where the daughter is worried about the mother’s wig and ‘ritually’ washes it while her mother is in hospital. I don’t suppose this detail has much to do with ritualistic thinking, but let me mention in passing that care over hair has great ritual importance among primitive tribes. The Eskimo goddess Nerrivik is an old hag who lives under the sea and guards the spirits of the dead. She refuses to defend the walrus hunters until the shaman has ritually combed her hair!

As for the towel, there is an affecting moment in your author’s text: the image of the mother’s father, going into the house with a towel folded under his arm. Who knows, maybe the mother’s subconscious added this image – which had stirred feelings of guilt in her for years – this little salutary detail: the towel that will, as in a fairytale, protect her aged father from adversity.

And one more detail: the author’s mother keeps old embroidery, made by her relatives, in a cupboard. Although her memory is playing up, she knows exactly whose hand made which bit of embroidery. The character of the mother merges on a symbolic level into unarticulated, ‘female’, pre-feminist and pre-literate history. The mother, in short, can ‘read’ embroidery like Braille.

BROOM AND RUBBISH

The broom was witchery’s helpmate: witches fly on broomsticks, they steal milk with their brooms and lay waste crops by dragging their brooms across a field. Baba Yaga covers her tracks with a broom.

Many beliefs and superstitions in the Slavic world are connected to the broom. For example, a house may not be swept when one of the household dies, in order not to chase wealth out of the house, or to offend the soul of the deceased. When they move house, Russians take an old broom with them, for the domovye (brownies) live under the broom. Because it was believed that brooms provoke quarrels, sickness and misfortune, a broom would be tossed down next to the house (or over the roof) of people that you wanted to harm. Envious people hid a broom in the newlyweds’ wagon in order to bring them hurt. Stepping over a broom brought bad luck.

House-cleaning is a sort of test that a maiden must pass when she finds herself in Baba Yaga’s power.[45] Baba Yaga has magical servants in the form of three pairs of hands that perform all her tasks, so she does not need any real help, but she enjoys testing the maidens’ maturity, diligence and character. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, in her book Women Who Run with Wolves, falls back on psychoanalysis to explain this detail as cleansing the soul, purging it, bringing it to order, an educational process of separating the essential from the inessential. Baba Yaga uses the word rubbish figuratively, too, and she thanks the maiden for not showing any undue curiosity.[46]

In Mexico, they have broom festivals to honour the earth goddess Teteo-Innan, with the aim of clearing away all illnesses and troubles. In Christian iconography, a broom is associated with St Martha and St Petronila, who protect all housewives and everyone employed in the household. There is an interesting tale involving a familiar figure from Italian folklore, La Befana, the best and tidiest housewife in the city, who was so absorbed in her domestic duties that she not only failed to recognise the Three Kings among her guests, she even missed joining in their search for Jesus. La Befana appears with a broom, enters the house down the chimney and leaves presents for the children. Even today she survives as a sort of female Father Christmas (she appears at the Epiphany, twelve days after Christmas), yet she also incorporates some elements of the ancient tradition of burning the old year so that the new year can come forward and take its place.

Many beliefs in the Slavic world are linked to ‘rubbish’ and ‘cleansing’. Particular attention was paid to rubbish in the funeral rites. In Moravia, the room where the deceased had lain would be swept clean and the sweepings thrown in the fire. In Serbia and Russia it was forbidden to sweep the house as long as the deceased was there, so as to be sure not to sweep away the living at the same time.

Rubbish was even used for prophesying. In Bohemia and Moravia, the girls would take the rubbish to the crossroads or the midden, and predict who would be their beloved. They would say: ‘Out with the rubbish, young men, widows, whoever wants can come, from east, from west, ahead, behind, through the orchard and into the barn.’ In Siberia, before Christmas, girls used to put the rubbish in the corner of the house, to ‘spend the night’ there, and in the morning they would take it to the crossroads and ask the name of the first man they met. They believed that their future husband would have the same name.