Baba Yaga is a recurring figure in Russian
folklore. Probably derived from the Hag, the third member of the three-part
goddess (Virgin, Mother, and Hag), Baba Yaga is not
good, but is not entirely evil; she does eat people and decorate her fence with
their skulls, but she is known to help people that serve her. She also orders
the cycles of nature. She is often called Baba Yaga "the Bony-legged." Her hut stands on chicken legs, and must be
commanded to turn around so that one may enter. Baba Yaga flew through the air in a mortar, rowing with a pestle, and her house could run
after its victims.
Linda Ivanits, in her book Russian Folk Belief,
had the following to say on the topic of Baba Yaga and witches:
"There was probably no typical appearance for the witch of Russian folk
belief, though occasionally the image of Baba Yaga,
an ancient, bony, blue-nosed hag, seemed to cross over from the magic tale into
preconceptions of what a witch should look like. S. V. Maksimov,
for example, suggests that this was the usual image of the Northern Great
Russian witch, whereas the Southern Ukrainian witches tended to be beautiful
young widows. Such a division between northern and southern witches is too
neat, and it is significant that the memorates and fabulates to which Maksimov later
refers do not support it. They include young women as well as older ones among
the Great Russian practitioners, and they often contain no mention of the
witch's beauty or hideousness. Indeed, a survey of documents pertaining to
witchcraft and of village traditions of "real" witches, as opposed to
the descriptions of witches in the more fictionalized m magic tale, indicates
that witches may be of any age. In those accounts where age is a factor, what
seems to strike the popular imagination is not so much the resemblance to Baba Yaga as an unnatural longevity. The instance from the Kievan archives of the burning of the ancient woman
suspected of unleashing a plague illustrates this point. Here, one must
suppose, the popular attitude reflected the feeling that this woman should have
died much earlier. The peasants sought an explanation for her failure to do so
in the supernatural and saw in her an embodiment of sterility and enmity to the
earth and, hence, the cause of the plague.
"Peasants attributed unusual and fantastic means of locomotion to witches.
Sometimes they rode other people: numerous narratives relate how witches jump
on unsuspecting victims who then become airborne and how, conversely, a clever
person manages to bridle and ride the witch. Some reports tell of witches
moving about like animals on all fours with loose, uncovered hair, wearing only
a shift; other relate that they fly through the air using a broom, mortar, or
poker as a vehicle or transformed into magpies. Peasant claimed that witches
left home through the chimney and flew off to meetings or, more accurately,
orgies with other witches and demons.
"Though Baba Yaga was primarily a personage of
the magic tale, it appears that in a few places peasants believed such a witch
actually lived deep in the swampy forest in a hut on chicken legs with her
daughter Marinushka (Marina)."
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