Who Is Baba Yaga?

When my grandmother was a little girl and took a shortcut through the woods, she kept her head down. The pine needle path before her feet held her full attention. Birdsong tittered and warbled in the branches overhead. The shadows of horse chestnut and silver birch leaves fell in patches, then blankets, then shrouds. But nothing tempted her attention away from her path until she returned to the sunshine. Baba Yaga, the witch of the Eastern European forests, was real to my grandmother. As a child, she knew without a doubt in her mind that Baba Yaga preyed upon the young, especially those who didn’t listen, those who broke the rules, those who lived by their own internal compass. What was an imperfect girl to do?

My mother was born across the ocean from Baba Yaga’s woods but not her influence. The old witch’s presence lingered in threats about straying into the darkness, in sharp words about manners and obedience.

As for me, I always considered the familiar Slavic witch a good tale, an echo of my Ukrainian roots not so different from kolomyka circle dances and traditions of pysanky eggs at Easter. She was simply there, on the periphery.

However, Baba Yaga has remained a presence in my mind. The old woman, with her legs as skinny as bones, lives deep in the woods in a hut that stands on chicken feet. The structure turns and moves as it likes, but especially away from those who seek to find her. Baba Yaga’s broom isn’t for flying but for sweeping away her tracks. She is rumored to eat her victims for supper if she thinks they deserve it, but she also features in tales of reluctant kindness, of mentorship, and of fairy godmother-like grace. Isn’t it time we all knew her for who she is?

Folktale traditions can be difficult to explore, because how does one capture the whispers at bedtime or recollections told back and forth among family and friends, all of which have been built upon centuries and centuries of tellers? There is good; there is evil. Then there is Baba Yaga.

Baba Yaga’s identity drifts one direction then another between places and times, but by traveling back into history and crossing her many inhabited lands, we can gather a better understanding of who she may have been, at least to some tellers of her tales.

From John Wick to Catherine the Great

In contemporary popular culture, her name and character appear more frequently than we realize. The codename of Keanu Reeves’s titular character in the John Wick series is “Baba Yaga” within the dark organization where he operates. Hellboy comics and Dreamworks’ Puss in Boots introduce her as a character. Malware has been named after her.

In a 1979 hand-drawn cartoon created by a Soviet-owned film studio, Baba Yaga and her accomplices tried to block the Olympic mascot, Misha the Bear, from playing in the Games. Because the 1980 Moscow Olympics were boycotted by 66 countries, led by the United States, Baba Yaga’s role as interfering nuisance is considered a metaphor for the moment, her bumbling, destructive behaviors a parallel to Soviet impressions of the U.S.

Of course, Baba Yaga was a common figure in Soviet-era cartoons from the 1930s onward, often serving the morality tale trope to her young audiences: Be good and follow the rules of a well-organized society or else Baba Yaga will eat you!

Baba Yaga was known by the Czech version of her name, Ježibaba, in Antonín Dvořák’s opera Rusalka, which was first performed in Prague in 1901. She has one of the best-known witch arias in operatic history, luring in the listener as she offers aid true to her dark forest roots.

Slavic fairy tale collector Vasilii Levshin (1746-1826) is considered the first to capture Baba Yaga stories in writing. And we cannot ignore the 1788 comedic opera, “Baba Yaga,” by Prince Dmitry Gorchakov and Mathias Stabingher. Designed for Catherine the Great’s royal court, the ancient witch’s complex portrayal on stage makes me long to see this performance as it once was. Before the final curtain, Baba Yaga remains the sole character in the spotlight. Was she hunched, clenching a giant pestle? Was she dressed in rags or a gown as black as the dark forests of Russia? So many details are lost to history, even as we do know Baba Yaga closed the show with a solo about a better world that could come to be.

Terror. Hideousness. Hope. Possibility. Yes, this is Baba Yaga, the witch, the motivational sorceress, sharing a lesson and a hint of optimism for audiences to take home. But like someone journeying deeper into the woods, weaving between peeling birch trunks and thorns reaching out to pierce us, we must creep beyond the easily accessible written records of history and published creativity.

We must track her to places where the forest’s onyx shadows are no different from the raven-inspired hues of night, where owls call no matter the hour, reminding us not to approach with demands but with the respect such an ancient elder surely deserves.

Without Comparison Among the Gods

In her earliest known written record, Mikhail W. Lomonosov’s 1755 Russian Grammar, Baba Yaga was noted in a table where gods, goddesses, and other deities of the world were connected with notes on their geography. The ancient Slavic god Perun, for example, was related with the Roman god Jupiter. Yet in this first textual documentation, Baba Yaga stood unaccompanied, with no comparisons the world over. She might have won me over in this detail alone, but let’s pause here for a moment.

This Russian grammar book is the beginning of her written legacy, but she’s clearly known to the population that may have encountered her there. Her first known written record is hardly an introduction. She’s named among the pantheons of gods and goddesses, no insignificant reputation.

Earlier still, woodblock prints known as lubki, popular in the 1600s and 1700s, are our earliest known confirmed representations of her. These decorations, originally fashioned from the carveable layer of wood under the bark of linden trees, hung in the households of those who could not afford more expensive icons. Commonly sold for only a kopek or two, these simple prints were inked with a mixture of soot and burnt sienna boiled in linseed oil. They told stories, even to those who could not read. Lubki captured biblical tales, historical events, and yes, folktales well known and well treasured.

According to this artistic record, Baba Yaga was already a familiar character in this time period as well, able to stand on her own pictorially and be clearly identifiable, a familiar presence in the lives and memories of Slavic people across the regions of present-day Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Belarus, and beyond.

Was she connected with the Siberian bird goddess, known as a midwife? Her beak-like nose and her hut’s chicken legs may pay their own subtle homage.

Was she linked with another ancient Slavic goddess, tied to the underworld and known to be seated in an iron mortar like a throne, iron pestle in her hands? The relationship is far too palpable to ignore.

Do her roots lie in tales of Ježibaba, associated not with the collection of children’s bones after eating them but with the collection of baby teeth?

Or should we examine the connection with the ancient being that carried the wisdom of time? She was believed to partner with Death as souls transitioned to the opposite side. Sure, “partner with death” sounds a touch macabre, but when wrapping our minds around the persona who guides souls as they enter life and as they leave it, this last role is among the most profound of all, no?

These goddesses, terrors, and traditions are all likely connections, fragments that rebuild and reshatter to create the disjointed and bewildering existence Baba Yaga has held in minds for centuries. Some scholars even trace Baba Yaga’s roots to the pre-Indo-European matrilinear pantheon, and logic exists in these foundations.

Is her broom made of birch because birch trees are known as “the mother tree,” associated with fertility for centuries? Does this association arise from the tale of how birches were the first saplings that grew after the Ice Age, bringing life back after a frozen, desolate existence? Is it true? I don’t know, but wow is that a good story.

One of my favorite approaches to classic tales is in the tradition of the Ukrainian literary master, Lesya Ukrainka, who reimagined well known tales with new parallels and purposes. I mill Baba Yaga tales with a modern eye, as if I had a mortar and pestle of my own, grinding wheat berries down to bran and flour, crushing freshly picked herbs to release their oils and essence.

Recipes, medicines, and cocktails are known to transform with muddling. Stories do, too. How did Baba Yaga become Baba Yaga, and what does the old woman still have to say to us? Let’s find out.

The Birth of Baba Yaga

The devil determined the essence of evil must walk the earth. So he set out to find his ingredients. In a foreign market, a shriek of rage snared his attention. A woman berated a man twice her size as she stepped in front of her children. The devil swept up the woman for his bag.

Across the globe in a schoolhouse surrounded by fields of swaying wheat, a classroom bully stood up to challenge the teacher. Yet the teacher’s eyes narrowed and pierced the self-assured gaze of her pupil, sending him back to his desk. The devil liked what he saw and swept the teacher up.

He swept up a woman, the smartest in a room of arguing voices, who didn’t speak up to share the answers she knew; a woman who punched hard when a stranger pressed a hand to her skin; and another who screamed when a man told her to smile. A woman clutching wolfsbane, a wife steeping oleander tea, a green-thumbed gardener who nurtured her bougainvillea full of thorns, a widow who ran her fingers through her gray-rooted hair until it stood up on end, and another who unabashedly cursed and swore and raised her glass again with no shame. A woman who followed her gut, ignoring the advice given. A grandmother that cackled with joy as she slammed her door on the modern world, preferring her mortar and pestle, her woodfire stove, and the blissful silence that came when technology and its constant interruptions disappeared.

The devil dumped his bag of 12 women into a massive cauldron, muddling them in water from an iced-over stream. The fire underneath crackled. The water bubbled then boiled. A clamminess filled the air of the little hut where he did his work, a hut that began to lurch and pull like it wanted to flee.

Then the devil took a giant breath and filled his lungs with the women’s steam, a taste like beets or onions or garlic or fire. He took in as much as his immortal body could hold. He held it in for scarcely a second, enough to feel its fury and fight. Then he spit it out. And there before him stood Baba Yaga, the essence of malevolence, from the most evil beings on earth. Or so supposed he. And who would dare correct the devil?

While “The Tale of the 12 Nasty Women,” as this narrative is commonly referred to, speaks of Baba Yaga’s own creation, the original doesn’t share any details of the women captured within the devil’s bag. These additions are my own. Still, the mere existence of this story is worth a moment more of our attention. The idea that 12 women combined could potentially be evil itself is at once intriguing and disturbing. However, almost all stories have secrets hiding within, and this one has three.

“Baba Yaga, the Bony Leg” was the name of the full poem by Nikolay Alexandrovich Nekrasov that was among the first to include this devil spit story. While Nekrasov’s version could be based on older traditions, few records or hints of this tale are known before his time. Thus, its late addition into the Baba Yaga canon in 1840 doesn’t add any historical weight to this conversation. Nekrasov wasn’t a folklorist doing deep academic research in the area. He was a storyteller. He had a really good story—one that caught on like skull-lantern fire—but when considering Baba Yaga’s lifetime, 1840 was practically last week. So secret number one: Origin stories don’t always come first, and later storytellers don’t always realize the discrepancy.

So why start here if the story of the 12 women is clearly late in Baba Yaga’s own character timeline? Well, two more revelations hide in this story’s subtext.

Did you notice the existence of the devil in this story? Of course you did. He was right there boiling the women and spitting them out, wasn’t he? The devil’s mere presence speaks to Christianity’s entrance into a region filled with folk practices and different belief systems. The devil had never been a part of Baba Yaga’s stories in their earliest tellings.

As Slavic gods, goddesses, and rituals were confronted with a different religion that dared to extricate ancient beliefs and replace them, stories clashed as much as people. The divine feminine was recast as the personification of evil because a patriarchal lens shifted the narrative.

Baba Yaga was never originally in cahoots with the devil—the devil is a Christian character.

Slavic populations began to encounter Christian priests and monks in approximately the seventh century, and between these first encounters and the 12th century, many aspects of the Christian faith were indeed embraced by great numbers of people. But that didn’t mean that ancient rituals ceased. The faiths intermingled. Inherited traditions lingered over time, even when gods, goddesses, and the original mythology itself disappeared with the memories of passing generations. Vestiges of the past transformed into demonized relics or were absorbed into new mythologies.

Let’s return to the secrets of the 12 evil women. Their existence as an origin story is murky. Their plot reminds us that Christianity’s entrance into Baba Yaga’s world recast everything.

Rumors linger that young Nikolay Alexandrovich Nekrasov was once asked to leave school early in his education for writing satires of his teachers. Oh little, Nikolay. Did you really? And was this the beginning of it all?

All grown up and ready to take on the world with his pen, Nekrasov wrote collections of folktales in verse early in his career—hello, Baba Yaga—but the poetry that is widely considered his greatest literary achievement holds reverberations of his early efforts mocking authority. Nekrasov’s 1879 narrative poem “Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia?” had the same fighting, kicking, devil’s-spit-filled spirit of Baba Yaga in its own way. Thus, perhaps we shouldn’t condemn him for his creation of the vat of 12 evil women at all. My own retelling might seize upon one more secret: his original sardonic purpose. Who’s to say a storyteller’s true intention? Baba Yaga’s ever-evolving existence certainly has us asking this question time after time.