BabaYaga

Baba Yaga
In a number of East European myths, a Baba Yaga (one of three same-named sisters) is a cannibalistic witch who lives in a hut on the edge of the forest. The hut (izbushka) stands on chicken legs and will only lower for a specific incantation. A picket fence surrounds the hut and she places the skulls of her victims on it. For transportation Baba Yaga uses a giant mortar which she drives at high speed across the forest floor by steering the pestle with her right hand and sweeping away all traces of her passage with a broom in her left hand. A host of spirits often follows her, serving her in her home as disembodied hands.

Baba Yaga is often represented as a little, ugly, old woman with a huge and distorted nose and long teeth. She is also called Jezi-Baba or Baba Yaga Kostianaya Noga ("bone-legs"), referring to the fact that she is rather skinny. She is regarded as the devil's own grandmother.

Baba Yaga rules over the elements. Her faithful servants are the White Horseman, the Red Horseman and the Black Horseman. When Vasilissa asks her who these mysterious horsemen are, she replies: 'My Bright Dawn, my Red Sun and my Dark Midnight.'

Andreas Johns identifies Baba Yaga as "one of the most memorable and distinctive figures in eastern European folklore," and observes that she is "enigmatic" and often exhibits "striking ambiguity." Johns summarizes Baba Yaga as a "a many-faceted figure, capable of inspiring researchers to see her as a Cloud, Moon, Death, Winter, Snake, Bird, Pelican or Earth Goddess, totemic matriarchal ancestress, female initiator, phallic mother, or archetypal image".



Baba Yaga as depicted by Ivan Bilibin (1902)