Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

The house could not be swept during certain holidays (Christmas, weddings, Ivan Kupala and so forth),[47] because the souls of ancestors would appear on those days. In Belarus, the householder brandished a little broom around the house after a holiday, saying: ‘Shoo, shoo, little spirits! The older, bigger ones – out through the door, and the smaller ones – use the window.’ (Kish, kish, dushechki! Ktora starsha, i bol’sha, ta dver’mi, a ktora mensha oknami.) The holiday rubbish was burned along with the straw in the courtyard or the orchard, and this custom was called ‘warming the dead’ (gret pokojnikov, or diduha paliti). The ashes were thrown in the river; it was believed this would protect the fields from weeds and wolves. On occasion, they simply ‘swept’ the Christmas holidays. The Bulgarians forbade children to go near the midden, and housewives were not allowed to throw away rubbish when they were facing east. (It was believed that this would make the cattle barren.) The Belarusians and Slovaks used rubbish as a specific against bewitchment. They would secretly collect rubbish from three adjoining houses, burn it and fumigate the suspected victim with the smoke.

Remarks

It is hard to say if the author’s mother’s manic obsession with cleaning has anything to do with the heritage of Slavic folklore. Yet, it won’t do any harm if I bring this aspect to your attention. The description of the author’s mother asleep in her armchair, with a duster in her hand, could be connected to the Italian legend of La Befana, that devoted housewife, whose sense of domestic duty leads her to neglect what matters so much more in a ‘historic’ perspective: the quest for Jesus. Cleaning is, it would seem, the mother’s strategy for forgetting. She cleans the house of ‘the ancestors’ souls’, and the whole text is a sort of anamnesis of amnesia.

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The most inspiring interpretation of the clean–dirty antithesis is Mary Douglas’s classic study Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. The coordinate system of ‘clean– dirty’ structures practically every primitive social community, where thinking about the world, behaviour and customs has been organised via an elaborate system of taboos. Purity, however, which is not a symbol but rather a part of our emotional make-up, can be a way to petrification. Purity is the pledge of our security, it is the enemy of change, ambiguity and compromise.

Interestingly, then, our de-tabooed age, an age of ‘leaving home’ for a space of chaos, is obsessed with cleanliness. Most television adverts, for example, advertise cleaning materials (for our homes, bodies or clothes) and are forever warning us with the formula ‘clean: positive, dirty: negative’. Even the ‘dirty’ has become the ‘cleansed’. Thanks to the media (the Internet and television), in fact, we can indirectly take part in ‘dirty’ things (pornography, sex, war, misery, natural disasters, murders, collective misery, poverty and so forth) while staying clean!

EGG

According to the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Slavic Mythology, the egg is the beginning of all beginnings, the symbol of fertility, vitality, the renewal of life and resurrection. In the cosmogonic myths of the South Slavs, the egg is a protoimage of the cosmos. In South Slavic children’s riddles, ‘God’s egg’ is the sun and ‘a sieve full of eggs’ is a starry sky. Slavs believed that the whole world was a gigantic egg: the heavens were the shell, the water was the white, the clouds were the membrane and the earth was the yolk. There is a riddle: ‘The living gives birth to the dead, and the dead gives birth to the living’, which contains the old scholastic inquiry: ‘Which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ – and the answer that Silesius gave: ‘The egg is in the chicken, and the chicken is in the egg.’[48]