Baba Yaga

The bone-legged witch of Slavic fairy tale — the initiatory figure who presides over Vasalisa’s katabasis in the forest. In Estés’s reading, the Yaga is not the demonic mother but the instinctual initiator: the figure who tests the young feminine psyche and, if the doll of intuition has been brought along, grants the fire. Her land “is the underworld of the psyche. The too-good mother’s land is that of” the daylight and the civilized (Estés 2017).

Estés places the Yaga in a wider cross-cultural lineage of triple-headed goddesses: “During those times people worshipped a triple-headed Goddess. The triple-headed Goddesses are represented in various systems by Hekate, the Baba Yaga, Mother Holle, Berchta, Artemis, and others” (Estés 2017). The Yaga is not an isolated Slavic oddity; she is one face of the old goddess who presides over the feminine initiation across Indo-European traditions.

Her characteristic gifts in the Vasalisa tale are the fiery eyes of the skull — “all the psychic processes which have to do with discrimination” (Estés 2017) — and the instruction to recast the too-sweet stepfamily to cinders. The initiation produces a woman “walking with her power preceding her.”

Relationships

• neumann-great-mother
• wild-woman
• katabasis
• intuition

Primary sources

• estes-women-who-run-with-wolves (Estés 1992)