In Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga is a witch who lives inside a magical hut in the forest and helps, locks up, or eats the people she meets. She is famous person from Slavic folktales, and people still like her because they think she shows how women can be strong and independent. People often think that her name, Yaga, means “Grandmother Witch,” but this is disputed, and no one can agree on what it means. She was written about in a book about Russian grammar for the first time in 1755, but she is assumed to have been told orally in Slavic folktales far earlier. Even if she is typically the wrong person in the stories she is in, she can also help and is seen more as a trickster who encourages change than as a standard evil witch.
Baba Yaga is the most commonly known form of the narrative Vasilissa the Beautiful, in which she accidentally frees the main character from the control of her stepmother & stepsisters. She also plays a similar role in well-known stories, like The Frog Princess & Baba Yaga and the Kind-Hearted Girl. Some of her stories are like the Cinderella story in that she plays the role of the Fairy Godmother but with a very dark twist. She doesn’t follow the rules of society and does things her way. Because of this, she has become a modern-day symbol of the power and freedom of women. Books, movies, and TV shows still discuss her this way. Even though she is still scary, she is seen more and more as a source of knowledge and power than an evil personification.
Baba Yaga is usually pictured as a vast, ugly older woman who lives inside a hut on four tall chicken legs that she can move or turn around when she wants to. She is frequently seen stretched out over her cooker or lying down in her hut so that her big nose touches the ceiling. When she departs her house, she gets to ride in a mortar pushed by a pestle to ensure no one sees her. She probably leaves her cottage early and returns in the evening. She oversees a flock of blackbirds that search the sky for children. In the story, Baba Yaga’s Black Geese, Olga and Sergei sneak out of their residence while one‘s mother is in the market, even though she tells them not to leave when the geese are flying. Sergei is caught and taken back to Baba Yaga’s house to be her dinner. Olga uses magical items to save her brother, and both learn that they should have listened to their mother.
She is usually shown this way, even if her actions lead to good things. Disease, illness, tragedy, chill, vicious wood creature, witch, lousy woman, anger, fury, torture, pain, and feeling worried, serpent, snake, uncle’s wife, stepmother, aunt, mother, and mother’s stepdaughter are all possibilities. Johns quotes scholar Brian Cooper, who says the name “suggests a figurative language of suffocating oppression” and says that “despite its mysterious origins, Baba Yaga’s name is well recognized throughout Russia.” Villagers used the word “iaga” in the same way they used the word “witch” to describe “old, squabbling, and ugly women.” Most people think the name means “Grandmother Witch,” even though that’s not the correct equivalent.
Baba Yaga takes children and eats them, and it seems like she hunts for them all day to eat them for dinner, but she also helps things change. She helps the leading lady or hero become more self-aware and finish their quest in several stories. Baba Yaga is the perfect example of the trickster archetype, both in these stories and in the ones where she is the bad guy. The trickster is a part of the legends of various cultures worldwide, but it’s important to remember that these “mythologies” were once seen as real religions, just like any other. The trickster was seen as a god or an aspect of a supreme god who messed with the lives of those other gods, humans, and the natural world, for some reason or no reason, to encourage change. No matter how bad the encounter with the trickster was, it forced you out of your comfort zone and into a new, often more aware, state of yourself and the world.
Baba Yaga’s role as a trickster is best shown in her most well-known story, “Vasilissa the Beautiful.” Vasilissa finds happiness with her father and mom until she is eight. When her mother gets sick, she calls a woman to her deathbed and gives her a mystical doll to assist her through life. She should always keep this same doll with her and keep it a secret from others. Whenever she needs help, she must feed and water the doll. After Vasilisa’s mother dies, her dad marries a woman with two daughters. The new wife is jealous of Vasilissa’s beauty and mistreats her, giving her complex jobs while her father is on business trips. Vasilissa can only do these things with the assistance of her doll.
In the story, Baba Yaga and the Kind-Hearted Little Girl, a young girl & her young widow father enjoy their time together until he remarries. His new wife ends their time together and abuses the child without the father knowing. As in the Vasilissa story, the stepmother has sent the girl into the woods so Baba Yaga can kill her. As she goes, the girl is kind to different things in the forest, which helps her get away when she gets to the hut in which Baba Yaga wants to eat her. Once she gets back home and her father makes her tell him where she’s been, the stepmother has been kicked out, and the father and child go back to how they used to live.
Inside The Frog Princess, Baba Yaga and her sisters help Prince Ivan find his runaway princess after he betrayed her trust. In Maria Morevna, it’s indeed Baba Yaga who, against her will, gives Prince Alexei the horse he needs to free his real love, Maria, from captivity. She is never shown to be kind, loving, or welcoming, except when she likes to think she is meeting her dinner, but she always causes the main character or characters’ lives to change and gives them what they need to grow and be free.
Like the other stories, this one shows Baba Yaga as the one who brings about change. Even though Baba Yaga is usually depicted as a figure linked to darkness, evil, human sacrifice, and death, she is a change agent. Her rejection of social norms allows her to act on her desires without thinking about them. As she does this, she alters the lives of those she interacts with. Suppose you agree with Jung’s idea that the trickster is a personification of your shadow. In that case, Baba Yaga represents the parts of yourself that you don’t like, like selfishness, violence, spite, and greed, which can be balanced out by the better parts of yourself, like kindness, forethought, gratitude, and helpfulness, which are usually shown by the main character of the story.
The idea that Baba Yaga lives in a “cabin of chicken legs with no windows and doors” is pure fantasy. In reality, this is just one way of looking at a typical construction used by hunter-gatherer nomads of Siberia from the Uralic Finno-Ugric and Tungusic families to keep food safe from animals while they were away for long periods. A log cabin is made from the middle stump of two to three trees cut down when they were between eight and ten feet tall. The spread-out roots of the stumps make them look like “chicken legs.” A trap door inside the centre of the floor is the only way to get into the cabin.
Pagans in Siberia put statues of their gods in something similar, but smaller, to hold them. A typical picture of Baba Yaga is a bone-carved doll dressed in rags sitting in a small cabin on the pinnacle of a tree stump. This picture is a reminder of the time when the Siberian people were led by their mothers. Baba Yaga barely fits in her house, with her legs inside one corner, her head in another, and her nose growing into the ceiling. There are signs that ancient Slavs used these kinds of huts for funerals where the dead were burned.