Russia Archives - Bone and Sickle

#31 Baba Yaga

By boneandsickle | August 13, 2019

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:46 — 39.2MB)

This episode explores the Russian witch, the Baba Yaga, tales in which she appears, possible origins, and regional variations on the character.

We begin by retelling one of the skazi (folk tales) in which she’s particularly well-definined, “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” a version recorded in the mid-1800s by the folklorist Alexander Afanasyev, Russia’s answer to the Brothers Grimm, .

Vasilisa, illustration by Ivan Bilibin, 1899

Without spoiling the story, I can say that it bears some parallels to “Cinderella,” with a wicked stepmother and step-sisters grievously imposing on the young Vasilisa and sending her into an encounter with the Baba Yaga. She is aided in the tale by a magic doll bequeathed her by her dying mother.

Like nearly all Baba Yaga stories, this tale features the witch’s famous house perched atop two immense chicken legs on which it turns to reveal it’s entrance if the proper spell is spoken. Around the house, in this story as in most others, is a fence made of human bones and topped by skulls.

Child slaves of the witch and bone fence, illustration, 1916

The witch herself is not much described in the text of “Vasilisa,” but in the folklore of the Eastern Slavs, she is generally imagined as an hunchbacked old crone, usually large, and with a large nose, sometimes said to be of iron, as are her teeth sometimes. She’s also occasionally described as an ogress because of her nasty habit of eating visitors, especially children, or those who fail her when she puts them to work (what she often does with visitors).

“Vasilisa” like nearly every other tale featuring the character, describes the witch flying through the skies in mortar, which she steers with the pestle, an instrument sometimes also used as a club or magic wand. Like western witches, she is often depicted with a cat, but the Baba Yaga may also command a pack of dogs, flock of geese or swans, or even be served by pairs of disembodied hands.

“Baba Yaga” is not quite a proper noun, i.e., her “name,” at least not quite. It’s a class or type of character, and certain stories feature multiple Baba Yagas. For this reason too, she may be killed off in a particular story — and often is — only to reappear as presumably different witch in another.

Though she’s most often portrayed as malevolent and dangerous, some tales make her more ambivalent, or occasionally even helpful. We have a look at the best known examples of this, “The Frog Tzarina” (a story offering a sort of reversal on the “Frog Prince” theme) .

"Baba Yaga" book, 1915 — “Baba Yaga” book, 1915

Of the tales that feature the Baba Yaga in a more menacing role, one of the better known is called “Princess Marya” or “The Death of Koschei the Deathless,” and it features the witch as a character somewhat peripheral to another important character of Russian folklore, Koschei. He’s a sorcerer, usually represented as a crowned skeletal figure and known for hiding his soul in the form of a needle within an egg within a duck. We also hear a bit of another tale featuring a malevolent Baba Yaga, “Little Bear’s-Son,” in which the witch lives in an underworld and battles the titlular character and a trio of giants.

Our quick look at a few examples of the Baba Yaga in music and films includes a piece from Modest Mussorgsky’s 1874 suite Pictures at an Exhibition called “The Baba yaga” or “The Hut on Fowl’s Legs” (Here is the Baba Yaga inspired clock design by Victor Hartmann that inspired the piece.) We hear a bit from that and a snippet of “Baba Yaga,” a 1965 garage-rock number by a Minnesota band called The Pagans. Speaking of music, our show, opened with a clip from a 1997 track “Baba Yaga” by the Australian singer, Judy Small. Also used in this episode are two other traditional pieces of music, “Doina Oltului” (instrumental) and “Khorovod,” an example of ancient pagan round dance music of the Slavs.

Probably the greatest modern popularizer of the figure and huge influence upon how the Baba Yaga is imagined in Russia today is work of filmmaker, Alexander Rou featuring the actor Georgy Millyar. Beginning in 1939, with a version of “The Frog Tsarina,” and running up to 1972, the year before he died, Rou made over a dozen film inspired by Russian fairy tales.The Baba Yaga appearing in many of these was always portrayed by the cross-dressed Millyar, whose comic performances are one of many reasons to seek out Rou’s films on YouTube.

While the first mention of the Baba Yaga in print only appears in a 1755 book called Russian Grammar, it’s presumed the figure comes from much older mythology. In fact, while the reference in question, though vague, includes her in a list of Slavic deities. References to the witch’s control over horsemen representing the sun in “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” for instance, have suggested a possible origin in a solar deity. More likely, given her association with bones and her menacing nature, would be a connection with Marena, the Eastern Slavic goddess of death and winter. The witch’s flights in her mortar, always accompanied by terrible winds, have also suggested connections to the aerial phantoms of what’s called The Wild Hunt in Europe. Similarly her presence in the sky has suggested a connections with the Fiery Serpent, a figure of Eastern Slavic folklore, often represented by aerial phenomena such as lightning or meteors. All ideas to chew on. Nothing definitive, though the strongest association would seem to be with Marena.

We close the show with two tales from our own times, in which the Baba Yaga’s namesake or likeness is responsible for some dreadful deeds.

Elevated mortuary huts, a source of the witch's hut? — Elevated mortuary huts, an inspiration for the witch’s hut?

Bone and Sickle is happy to welcome Sarah Chavez as a new voice in the show this week.

#26 Lullabies and Nightmares

By boneandsickle | May 20, 2019

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:50 — 35.6MB)

This episode examines the terrors that come by night, not-so-soothing lullabies, prayers and charms against the nightmare.

We open with the grim Icelandic lulluby “Móðir mín í kví kví,” which tells the story of a newborn’s ghost haunting the mother who abandoned it. Another lovely, yet menacing Icelandic lullaby follows. “Bíum, bíum, Bambaló” alludes to an unnamed horror drawing nearer and nearer.

We learn that our word “nightmare,” originally designated a nighttime visit by a supernatural creature that pinned down and menaced the sleeper, ie, the “mare,” a word that arrived in English via the Saxons, and was derived from the Germanic “mara.” Recently, we’ve seen versions of this creature popping up in a number of horror films, snippets of which appear in a montage. These are: the 2018 film Mara and the 2011 Swedish film Marianne, both of which allude to the creature in their titles, and 2016’s Dead Awake and Before I Wake, as well as 2017’s Slumber and Don’t Sleep. And of course we include a nod to Nightmare on Elm Street, the film that started it all.

Still from the film "Mara" — Still from the film “Mara”

Stripped of its supernatural interpretation, the sleeper’s sensation of being pinned down and experiencing the sense of a malevolent presence is recognized by medical community as “sleep paralysis.” But researches of the last century are not the first to attempt to describe the phenomenon in physiological terms. We hear such a physiological take on the subject from 1584, drawn from The Discoverie of Witchcraft, a somewhat skeptical book on witchcraft.

The equation of the mare and the witch in English and Germanic culture is longstanding. The other term sometimes used by the scientific community to describe this phenomenon, “Night Hag Syndrome,” points to this, as the word “hag” is traceable to an ancient German term for witches, “Hagazussa,” which also happens to be the title of an excellent new folk-horror film from Germany. A snippet of the dark and droney soundtrack from that film is included.

Digging in a bit more on the topic of the mare, we learn that how the creature assumed a number of nocturnal forms while appearing in the day as either a witch or an unwitting human cursed by a witch, and hear a 13th-century account of an attack by a mare from the old Norse Norse Ynglinga Saga read by Wilkinson.

Next, we listen to a bit of another lullaby, this one from Russia, “Bayu Bayushki Bayu,” which tells of wolves ready to drag the sleeping child into the forest.

Whereas the “mara” (mare) is the preferred term for this creature in Great Britain (and English-speaking countries), Scandinavia, and northern Germany, further south in Germany, we hear of the “Alp,” a largely identical creature, with an etymological tie to our English word “elf.” The Alp exhibits a wider range of mischievous, elfin traits not common to the mare.

19th-century illustration of the nightmare, artist unknown

This same region is also haunted by the nocturnal “Drude” or “Trute,” which likewise presses and torments sleepers, but is more strongly connected to witches than elves. The word “Drude” is often combined with other words in German to describe witchy concepts, like the “Drudenfuss,” a word for “pentagram.” In the sometimes confusing world of folk-magic, the five-pointed star can be used as a form of white magic to combat darker magic and for this reason was often used on infants’ cradles to repel the Drude as in the illustration here. We also hear of a connection of the Drude to the recently released folk-horror anthology film A Field Guide to Evil.

Austrian cradle with pentagram against the Drude

There follows perhaps the most explicitly terrifying lullaby in tonight’s collection, the Russian song “Tili-tili-bom.”

A number of folk practices against the nightmare are described including methods of trapping the creature. Wilkinson reads us a story from Germany’s Black Forest in which the creature is trapped in a particularly peculiar way. Counting charms, such as those used against vampires are also discussed.

Our show ends with a discussion of traditional bedtime prayers, including “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” which we learn can be traced to prayers used in 16th-century witchcraft, ancient Jewish “devil trap bowls,” Babylonian incantations, and a rite created by the 19th-century British occult gropu, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Along the way, we also hear a traditional southern-German nighttime prayer (Abendsegen) as featured in the 1893 opera Hansel and Gretel.