Becoming baba yaga, p.16
Becoming Baba Yaga, page 16
Thus, as long as they respect her likewise, Baba Yaga treats each child the same, and time moves on. She ages from newly formed feminist to mother to crone. The full moon begins to wane. She and her house shift and bend but never break. Over her many years, she understands the value of having a house and a temperament that reposition as they have to, all while the world around her calls her a terror—she who is known to have human children but also offspring in the forms of bears and worms and wolves and maggots.
Wrinkles and scraggly white hairs indeed happen, but so does wisdom with all that time, and let us remember who likely first told so many of these tales. Would it not have been the grandmothers, the babas themselves, who helped raise the next generations? Mothers told their tales for sure, but mothers are—and always have been—torn between their myriad duties and responsibilities. Grandmothers, great aunts, and old neighbors had the time to sit and weave the stories for the children, as they sat with their mortars, pestles in hand, undertaking the time-consuming task of grinding flour from grain. From these female lips likely fell the first tales and their earliest evolutions. Thus, forest goddesses lingered in ogresses, and revered matriarchal societies hid within the astonishment of a chicken-legged house deep in the woods. By the time that printing presses established standard versions of these tales, the stories snagged and pulled in quite different directions, but the feminist, mother, and crone linger when we search for them. Fairytales capture the history of who we are and who we have been in the most magnificent of ways.
What is more, Perrault's entrance into this conversation is not merely connected with Mother Goose. One of his other famous narratives is the story of “Blue Beard,” which might feel familiar amid our most recent Baba Yaga tale. In his popular fairytale, a young wife doesn't listen to her new husband's request to stay away from a dungeon door when he travels. The young woman, driven wild by curiosity, finally flings open the door, accidentally freeing a beast. We hear echoes across lands and time once again. Maria Morevna's tale is not an unfamiliar one, but the warrior queen's lead role is a twist all its own. As for which came first, we can only guess the history of oral traditions.
The first time I heard the story of Maria Morevna, I fell in love with the tale as if the women in my Slavic bloodline continued to whisper their knowledge of leadership, confidence, wisdom, strength, and steadfast resolution in the somehow already familiar words. My mother reminded me as often as she could how these aspects of female strength were and are a part of our Ukrainian heritage. When I grew and began to pay more attention, I realized Baba Yaga too was among these whisperers—for she is a feminist, a mother, and a crone, and in each of these capacities, she reminds her audiences of what women have been for millennia and what we may yet still be.
14
“BÁBA YAGÁ & ZAMORÝSHEK”
he weight of something absent can drag down your very soul. Insides sunken with invisible but ever-present swallowed rocks, the old man knew such a feeling. He sank his ax into a long-ago chopped down tree, content to feel the solidity of at least something as his blade sliced into the wood that hadn't yet decayed.
Stretching his back, he let go of the handle. He could leave it for tomorrow, for who would steal an ax left in a forgotten tree? A passing stranger's whispered advice echoing in his ear, he strode away, a glimmer of hope allowing him to stand taller than he had in years.
Forty-one eggs he gathered together, one from every house in the village. He whispered the plan to his wife as their chicken roosted upon the tallest nest they'd ever seen, settling its feathers and its nerves. Settling the old man's and his wife's. By the next morning, the first cracks had begun, until forty-one shells had shattered and the old man and his wife had forty-one sons.
They put a hand to every head, giving each a powerful name, but by the time they reached the last, the smallest of them all, they had run out of ideas. They puzzled over this child, so different from the others, until they decided to call him Zamorýshek.
The forty-one boys grew by the minute and by the hour until they were young adults by afternoon. Their father called them to the field, forgetting his tiresome ax and picking up his pitchfork. His many sons used their many bare hands, and a month's work was done before supper.
“Wives,” their mother called. “You need wives now that you're grown.”
The boys nodded but turned at a clatter out in the fields to see Zamorýshek atop a sea green horse, a stampede of breathtaking steeds following behind him.
“One for each brother,” Zamorýshek declared as he swung his leg off his mount. His horse's mane swayed like the far-off push and pull of the ocean's waves. He patted the creature's neck, and the handsome sea green horse nuzzled at his ear. “Wives?” he repeated, hearing his brothers' whispers. “We can leave to find them at dawn.”
Thus, forty-one handsome brothers rode away on the most handsome forty-one horses the villagers had ever seen. They rode into lands their parents had never seen, across flat rocky steppes, across arid sandy foothills, and into forests as thick with foliage as haystacks with hay. In the midst of one such wood, amid the hornbeam, oak, and ash, a great gray stone castle emerged before them. The front door turned at their approach, or it could have been a trick of the eye, a trick of the shadows tugging against their tired attentions.
Forty-one pillars held iron loops to tie up forty-one horses, so the brothers decided the castle would be their perfect resting place for the night. When the last of the young men, Zamorýshek himself, touched his feet to the ground, Baba Yaga emerged from the heavy wooden door, framed with carvings of wolves and worms, maggots and bears.
“Are you here to do deeds,” she called out, her voice scratchy with age or disuse, “or to run from them?”
“To do deeds!” the brothers answered as one.
“To find wives,” Zamorýshek added.
“Why are you not inviting us inside for food and rest, old witch?” called out another, a brother Zamorýshek had recently started to despise.
Baba Yaga turned from Zamorýshek to the other who had spoken. Her elongated nose cast its own shadow. Her eyes were so dark they almost disappeared.
“Of course,” she said. “Come in. Have a bath and rest yourselves. I will introduce you to my forty-one daughters, and we will feast.”
The young men cheered, all but one, for Zamorýshek's horse, which he had pulled from the sea and once harnessed with a chain forged from the strongest blacksmith, nudged his ear. His brothers stampeded into the castle, bold and brash, their muddy boots flinging their journey's remains across the threshold. But the horse neighed and shook its sea green head, looking deep into Zamorýshek's eyes. And the young man suddenly knew. They would all die here.
But what was he to do but enter, wiping his feet, as his brothers had not done. He bathed and was introduced to the most beautiful daughter, her braids wrapped about the crown of her head as a diadem. When they dined, her movements were like a cat's, lithe and graceful, distrusting too, keeping her distance, ear tilted toward his words as if not daring to turn any more of herself toward him.
The brothers were all soon betrothed, but before they took to bed, Zamorýshek begged them each to end the night by going away with him, leaving their affianced behind dressed in the young men's clothes as a distraction and delay.
“You want to flee our wives?” said the one brother Zamorýshek despised.
“I want to flee with our lives,” he answered as calmly as he could.
And in the end, his forty brothers begrudgingly listened, for they always knew Zamorýshek had more wiles and wisdom than them all. They whispered to their new beloveds where to find them, but none of them ever came—for in the same night, Baba Yaga ordered her servants to slay the forty-one brothers as they slept, handing them an ax to pass between them, beheading all who dared to disrespect her. Dressed in the brothers' clothes, Baba Yaga's daughters lost their lives one by one. And in the darkness, the servants placed their cloaked heads upon stakes to present to their mistress proudly the next morning.
Shortly after dawn, a wail swept through the forest like a gale, sweeping some brothers from their horses, forcing others to hang on for their lives as their steeds raced into sharp-leaved willow thickets around them.
At the lead was Zamorýshek, ready to part the sea so they could all escape the old witch he knew would soon be coming—for he understood what his father had once told him, how the weight of absence drags down your very soul, but he drew up short. At the edge of the forest was a familiar ax plunged into a tree. Its handle was worn with the grip of his own father. Zamorýshek guided his horse closer. Drips of sap were fresh from its placement. But not only sap, red smears tarnished the blade. Maple leaves rustled overhead, but Zamorýshek couldn't turn away. Closer now, he saw something familiar fastened at its end, a golden braid that had once designed itself as a diadem.
Another gust of wind howled. The sea wasn't near. Half his brothers had fallen.
Zamorýshek patted the ocean foam mane before him and tightened his grip on the reins. Great beings were born of eggs. Eagles. Dragons. The secret of Koscheii's immortality. Houses too, they say. Zamorýshek himself had emerged from a shell. If only he still had it for protection.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Horror & Escapism
Where the darkness stretches out its claws, there we find the essence of Baba Yaga. Or at least, that's the common understanding for those naïve to the old Slavic witch's world. To be fair, this assessment is absolutely true. She can be brutal and apathetic, ready to pinch a life away and use the leftover remnants of bones for her fence. She's stolen a bite out of the flesh of the disrespectful, and she's ripped young girls from the streets as they went about their day. Noir genres of books, television, and film allow us to explore the darkness within ourselves and the world around us. Then again, the pure horror of many Baba Yaga stories draws us to the final piece of our exploration.
Darkness exists, we know, but true horror is haunting, going beyond anxieties and into visceral revulsion and abhorrence. Jump scares and the absurdly unexpected allow for adrenaline rushes that many audiences find deeply satisfying. We all have our preferences. Not everyone is drawn to fictional media that raises neck hairs and such dramatic stakes. Moreover, psychological horror stories are different from those dripping with blood and gore. But escapism appears in many forms, and Baba Yaga habitually dips her bone-tipped toe into these chilly waters.
To be fair, the twist at the end of my telling of Zamorýshek's story was inspired from another tale, where a beheaded Baba Yaga, very much alive, escapes the scene by stretching out the long braids that had been woven over the crown of her head. The braids then transform into nonsensical legs that run her detached head away into the night. In a modern horror flick, this is likely the moment when audiences would argue the story went too far, but how can we ignore such a plot twist? Personally, I can't shake it from my mind, although I gave the braids less active participation. Cast across our sleeping eyes, the idea may very well jolt us awake at night, heart pounding, sweat upon our foreheads. Nightmares, we know, are never as simple as they seem. Yet again and again, people choose horror stories. Frankenstein. Dracula. The Telltale Heart. The Haunting of Hill House. Psycho. The Exorcist. The Shining. They are touchpoints in modern life as Baba Yaga also appears to be, even if the latter isn't always recognized as such.
Her existence has shifted and transformed over thousands of years in Eastern Europe, and the horror of that existence now crosses farther lands and seas, inspiring pen scratches and flurries of typed keys. Like anything that goes viral, the comprehensive backstory of the situation is hardly a necessity for the entertainment value. All the same, her absent-eyed stare and her relationship with the dead have come to life once again for new generations. Horror stories have their many appeals, and Baba Yaga checks each of these boxes, one by one.
To begin our list, we must face the truth that contemporary life can be predictable. Our alarm clocks are set. We have routines to our dayscommon breakfasts, regular commutes, standard errands, the same people crossing our paths amid their own cycles and grinds. But you know what I haven't seen? A house on chicken legs settling into its place and swinging open its door to release an old crone with a blacksmith-forged voice and bite. I've never seen a witch's tongue dangling from her perch in the air, snatching up anything that might satiate her hunger. These images are at once ridiculous and disconcerting, but isn't that a trademark of horror itself?
Our brains and bodily reactions are wired for threats. Flexing our survival instincts draws us closer to the core of who we as a human species have been before. Therefore, when Baba Yaga emerges, such ludicrous originality creates stimulation amid the monotony. The unexpected evokes an allure. Framed around modern media that separates true terror and our own safe spaces, boredom isn't a possibility.
Furthermore, Sigmund Freud suggested that people feel a catharsis after the buildup of extreme emotions and their sudden release, specifically, for example, through the experience of a false fear. The appeal of horror genres and extreme thrill-seeking alike relate to this idea. We are wound tighter and tighter. Stakes elevate our apprehensions. Situations become dire. Deadly. Ghastly. Then, as the resolution comes to be, our brains release endorphins that relax us, making us feel more comfortable in our surroundings and refreshed in a more profound capacity than we were before. The firebird saves Ivan the merchant's son from the youngest of the three baba yaga sisters who lunged, jaws spread. The captured boy once made of sticks squeezes out from the cage where he'd been confined, sprinkled with onions and dill. We triumph over dire circumstances, while safely distanced in our imaginations. A trick of the light, a trick of the brain.
This same concept leads to another draw of horror: facing dismay and distress together is known to forge deep bonds—no blacksmith needed. We know this is true for companions in war or amid unimaginable disasters. This reality simultaneously makes haunted houses and scary movies perfect for first dates. Similarly, Dmitri, the once-hedgehog boy, and Marusia will be a pair forevermore. Princess Katerina and Baba Yaga's daughter—the one that kept her head upon her shoulders—shall surely be inseparable for the rest of their lives. Prince Ivan, who sought the firebird for the tsar, will keep the hand of his Helena for together they faced Koscheii the Deathless and Baba Yaga herself.
Harnessing the ancient tradition of storytelling taps into communal bonding in the same way. Scary stories around a campfire or in the firelight of the hearth bring us closer through the act of listening together, not only for education or entertainment but also to live the shared experience. The caveat is that we must remain vigilant concerning fearmongering for manipulation.
World leaders and media empires use horror tactics on a daily basis. This strategy is not at all a contemporary invention, but all around us, we feel it in play. Groups feel newly bonded, newly spurred into action, after listening to a captivating narrative meticulously crafted to deceive and to stir up emotions. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote The Revolt of the Masses in 1930, bringing awareness to such a situation, not in a context of horror but in the danger of a populace driven by emotion rather than thoughtful deliberation. That story does not end well, and the populist uprisings of today are not so different. The challenge of life and politics alike is and always has been knowing the difference when panic strikes our brains. The ability to press the pause button for attentive reflection is key.
In folktales, though, the horror is much simpler, albeit at times, more absurd. Thus, true horror enables a break from our ostensibly humdrum lives. It can evoke an emotional catharsis and establish greater bonds in our own relationships or between characters we empathize with as we consume their stories. The straightforward or subtle calls to action within are worth our attention. All the same, another hidden benefit of horror genres hides in a piece that Ortega's conclusions deem essential: someone listening to the story, reading the book, or watching the video can always create an intermission to take a breath. The break from the story is vital before jumping into action, but the pause also allows us to look around and recognize we are indeed okay in this moment.
Awareness that we can voluntarily enter and easily flee the scary environment furthers the escapist pleasure of frightening experiences. A first-date couple walking through a haunted house can stop and laugh, fingers touching, sparks flying to extreme levels because of the instinctual reactions firing in their brains. A flinch or gasp in a movie theater seat creates a psychological connectivity separate but not unrelated to that of comrades who have faced battle together. Alone in your house with the lights out, you can grab the remote and pause the Baba Yaga storyline. You can close your Hellboy comic or your book by Patricia McKillip or Gregory Maguire. Horror's appeals vary in intensity for audiences of different ages, after all. And this ability to walk away if you choose creates the illusion of mastery over anxiety-producing events. Who wouldn't want such command over any such stress or terror they meet in life? Is it a true command? Of course not, but your brain and its releasing endorphins don't care about that. Self-attained safety feels good.
Still, we know safety isn't forever. We know tranquility comes and goes. We build up walls around that which scares us, even restricting thoughts of our human fragility to hospices and hospitals. Medical advances have almost allowed us to forget about the everyday nature of death and dying. We forget about our own mortality. Respect for a once-goddess who guided souls into this world or out of it is such a strange idea to us, because such a being would never walk the halls of sterilized, fluorescent-lit medical buildings.
Stories have always sought to explain that which we cannot comprehend—especially that which terrifies us. Nevertheless, our collective memory doesn't always hold on to the original intentions. We don't sing, “ring around the rosy, pocket full of posies,” thinking about the smell of flowers to cover up the smell of the dead. We consider it a playful nonsense rhyme. We ignore the horrors of babies rocking in cradles on treetops with boughs breaking and thus cradles falling. We don't overthink the man who sleeps, snoring, while it's raining and pouring, even after he hits his head and doesn't wake up again.
Wrinkles and scraggly white hairs indeed happen, but so does wisdom with all that time, and let us remember who likely first told so many of these tales. Would it not have been the grandmothers, the babas themselves, who helped raise the next generations? Mothers told their tales for sure, but mothers are—and always have been—torn between their myriad duties and responsibilities. Grandmothers, great aunts, and old neighbors had the time to sit and weave the stories for the children, as they sat with their mortars, pestles in hand, undertaking the time-consuming task of grinding flour from grain. From these female lips likely fell the first tales and their earliest evolutions. Thus, forest goddesses lingered in ogresses, and revered matriarchal societies hid within the astonishment of a chicken-legged house deep in the woods. By the time that printing presses established standard versions of these tales, the stories snagged and pulled in quite different directions, but the feminist, mother, and crone linger when we search for them. Fairytales capture the history of who we are and who we have been in the most magnificent of ways.
What is more, Perrault's entrance into this conversation is not merely connected with Mother Goose. One of his other famous narratives is the story of “Blue Beard,” which might feel familiar amid our most recent Baba Yaga tale. In his popular fairytale, a young wife doesn't listen to her new husband's request to stay away from a dungeon door when he travels. The young woman, driven wild by curiosity, finally flings open the door, accidentally freeing a beast. We hear echoes across lands and time once again. Maria Morevna's tale is not an unfamiliar one, but the warrior queen's lead role is a twist all its own. As for which came first, we can only guess the history of oral traditions.
The first time I heard the story of Maria Morevna, I fell in love with the tale as if the women in my Slavic bloodline continued to whisper their knowledge of leadership, confidence, wisdom, strength, and steadfast resolution in the somehow already familiar words. My mother reminded me as often as she could how these aspects of female strength were and are a part of our Ukrainian heritage. When I grew and began to pay more attention, I realized Baba Yaga too was among these whisperers—for she is a feminist, a mother, and a crone, and in each of these capacities, she reminds her audiences of what women have been for millennia and what we may yet still be.
14
“BÁBA YAGÁ & ZAMORÝSHEK”
he weight of something absent can drag down your very soul. Insides sunken with invisible but ever-present swallowed rocks, the old man knew such a feeling. He sank his ax into a long-ago chopped down tree, content to feel the solidity of at least something as his blade sliced into the wood that hadn't yet decayed.
Stretching his back, he let go of the handle. He could leave it for tomorrow, for who would steal an ax left in a forgotten tree? A passing stranger's whispered advice echoing in his ear, he strode away, a glimmer of hope allowing him to stand taller than he had in years.
Forty-one eggs he gathered together, one from every house in the village. He whispered the plan to his wife as their chicken roosted upon the tallest nest they'd ever seen, settling its feathers and its nerves. Settling the old man's and his wife's. By the next morning, the first cracks had begun, until forty-one shells had shattered and the old man and his wife had forty-one sons.
They put a hand to every head, giving each a powerful name, but by the time they reached the last, the smallest of them all, they had run out of ideas. They puzzled over this child, so different from the others, until they decided to call him Zamorýshek.
The forty-one boys grew by the minute and by the hour until they were young adults by afternoon. Their father called them to the field, forgetting his tiresome ax and picking up his pitchfork. His many sons used their many bare hands, and a month's work was done before supper.
“Wives,” their mother called. “You need wives now that you're grown.”
The boys nodded but turned at a clatter out in the fields to see Zamorýshek atop a sea green horse, a stampede of breathtaking steeds following behind him.
“One for each brother,” Zamorýshek declared as he swung his leg off his mount. His horse's mane swayed like the far-off push and pull of the ocean's waves. He patted the creature's neck, and the handsome sea green horse nuzzled at his ear. “Wives?” he repeated, hearing his brothers' whispers. “We can leave to find them at dawn.”
Thus, forty-one handsome brothers rode away on the most handsome forty-one horses the villagers had ever seen. They rode into lands their parents had never seen, across flat rocky steppes, across arid sandy foothills, and into forests as thick with foliage as haystacks with hay. In the midst of one such wood, amid the hornbeam, oak, and ash, a great gray stone castle emerged before them. The front door turned at their approach, or it could have been a trick of the eye, a trick of the shadows tugging against their tired attentions.
Forty-one pillars held iron loops to tie up forty-one horses, so the brothers decided the castle would be their perfect resting place for the night. When the last of the young men, Zamorýshek himself, touched his feet to the ground, Baba Yaga emerged from the heavy wooden door, framed with carvings of wolves and worms, maggots and bears.
“Are you here to do deeds,” she called out, her voice scratchy with age or disuse, “or to run from them?”
“To do deeds!” the brothers answered as one.
“To find wives,” Zamorýshek added.
“Why are you not inviting us inside for food and rest, old witch?” called out another, a brother Zamorýshek had recently started to despise.
Baba Yaga turned from Zamorýshek to the other who had spoken. Her elongated nose cast its own shadow. Her eyes were so dark they almost disappeared.
“Of course,” she said. “Come in. Have a bath and rest yourselves. I will introduce you to my forty-one daughters, and we will feast.”
The young men cheered, all but one, for Zamorýshek's horse, which he had pulled from the sea and once harnessed with a chain forged from the strongest blacksmith, nudged his ear. His brothers stampeded into the castle, bold and brash, their muddy boots flinging their journey's remains across the threshold. But the horse neighed and shook its sea green head, looking deep into Zamorýshek's eyes. And the young man suddenly knew. They would all die here.
But what was he to do but enter, wiping his feet, as his brothers had not done. He bathed and was introduced to the most beautiful daughter, her braids wrapped about the crown of her head as a diadem. When they dined, her movements were like a cat's, lithe and graceful, distrusting too, keeping her distance, ear tilted toward his words as if not daring to turn any more of herself toward him.
The brothers were all soon betrothed, but before they took to bed, Zamorýshek begged them each to end the night by going away with him, leaving their affianced behind dressed in the young men's clothes as a distraction and delay.
“You want to flee our wives?” said the one brother Zamorýshek despised.
“I want to flee with our lives,” he answered as calmly as he could.
And in the end, his forty brothers begrudgingly listened, for they always knew Zamorýshek had more wiles and wisdom than them all. They whispered to their new beloveds where to find them, but none of them ever came—for in the same night, Baba Yaga ordered her servants to slay the forty-one brothers as they slept, handing them an ax to pass between them, beheading all who dared to disrespect her. Dressed in the brothers' clothes, Baba Yaga's daughters lost their lives one by one. And in the darkness, the servants placed their cloaked heads upon stakes to present to their mistress proudly the next morning.
Shortly after dawn, a wail swept through the forest like a gale, sweeping some brothers from their horses, forcing others to hang on for their lives as their steeds raced into sharp-leaved willow thickets around them.
At the lead was Zamorýshek, ready to part the sea so they could all escape the old witch he knew would soon be coming—for he understood what his father had once told him, how the weight of absence drags down your very soul, but he drew up short. At the edge of the forest was a familiar ax plunged into a tree. Its handle was worn with the grip of his own father. Zamorýshek guided his horse closer. Drips of sap were fresh from its placement. But not only sap, red smears tarnished the blade. Maple leaves rustled overhead, but Zamorýshek couldn't turn away. Closer now, he saw something familiar fastened at its end, a golden braid that had once designed itself as a diadem.
Another gust of wind howled. The sea wasn't near. Half his brothers had fallen.
Zamorýshek patted the ocean foam mane before him and tightened his grip on the reins. Great beings were born of eggs. Eagles. Dragons. The secret of Koscheii's immortality. Houses too, they say. Zamorýshek himself had emerged from a shell. If only he still had it for protection.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Horror & Escapism
Where the darkness stretches out its claws, there we find the essence of Baba Yaga. Or at least, that's the common understanding for those naïve to the old Slavic witch's world. To be fair, this assessment is absolutely true. She can be brutal and apathetic, ready to pinch a life away and use the leftover remnants of bones for her fence. She's stolen a bite out of the flesh of the disrespectful, and she's ripped young girls from the streets as they went about their day. Noir genres of books, television, and film allow us to explore the darkness within ourselves and the world around us. Then again, the pure horror of many Baba Yaga stories draws us to the final piece of our exploration.
Darkness exists, we know, but true horror is haunting, going beyond anxieties and into visceral revulsion and abhorrence. Jump scares and the absurdly unexpected allow for adrenaline rushes that many audiences find deeply satisfying. We all have our preferences. Not everyone is drawn to fictional media that raises neck hairs and such dramatic stakes. Moreover, psychological horror stories are different from those dripping with blood and gore. But escapism appears in many forms, and Baba Yaga habitually dips her bone-tipped toe into these chilly waters.
To be fair, the twist at the end of my telling of Zamorýshek's story was inspired from another tale, where a beheaded Baba Yaga, very much alive, escapes the scene by stretching out the long braids that had been woven over the crown of her head. The braids then transform into nonsensical legs that run her detached head away into the night. In a modern horror flick, this is likely the moment when audiences would argue the story went too far, but how can we ignore such a plot twist? Personally, I can't shake it from my mind, although I gave the braids less active participation. Cast across our sleeping eyes, the idea may very well jolt us awake at night, heart pounding, sweat upon our foreheads. Nightmares, we know, are never as simple as they seem. Yet again and again, people choose horror stories. Frankenstein. Dracula. The Telltale Heart. The Haunting of Hill House. Psycho. The Exorcist. The Shining. They are touchpoints in modern life as Baba Yaga also appears to be, even if the latter isn't always recognized as such.
Her existence has shifted and transformed over thousands of years in Eastern Europe, and the horror of that existence now crosses farther lands and seas, inspiring pen scratches and flurries of typed keys. Like anything that goes viral, the comprehensive backstory of the situation is hardly a necessity for the entertainment value. All the same, her absent-eyed stare and her relationship with the dead have come to life once again for new generations. Horror stories have their many appeals, and Baba Yaga checks each of these boxes, one by one.
To begin our list, we must face the truth that contemporary life can be predictable. Our alarm clocks are set. We have routines to our dayscommon breakfasts, regular commutes, standard errands, the same people crossing our paths amid their own cycles and grinds. But you know what I haven't seen? A house on chicken legs settling into its place and swinging open its door to release an old crone with a blacksmith-forged voice and bite. I've never seen a witch's tongue dangling from her perch in the air, snatching up anything that might satiate her hunger. These images are at once ridiculous and disconcerting, but isn't that a trademark of horror itself?
Our brains and bodily reactions are wired for threats. Flexing our survival instincts draws us closer to the core of who we as a human species have been before. Therefore, when Baba Yaga emerges, such ludicrous originality creates stimulation amid the monotony. The unexpected evokes an allure. Framed around modern media that separates true terror and our own safe spaces, boredom isn't a possibility.
Furthermore, Sigmund Freud suggested that people feel a catharsis after the buildup of extreme emotions and their sudden release, specifically, for example, through the experience of a false fear. The appeal of horror genres and extreme thrill-seeking alike relate to this idea. We are wound tighter and tighter. Stakes elevate our apprehensions. Situations become dire. Deadly. Ghastly. Then, as the resolution comes to be, our brains release endorphins that relax us, making us feel more comfortable in our surroundings and refreshed in a more profound capacity than we were before. The firebird saves Ivan the merchant's son from the youngest of the three baba yaga sisters who lunged, jaws spread. The captured boy once made of sticks squeezes out from the cage where he'd been confined, sprinkled with onions and dill. We triumph over dire circumstances, while safely distanced in our imaginations. A trick of the light, a trick of the brain.
This same concept leads to another draw of horror: facing dismay and distress together is known to forge deep bonds—no blacksmith needed. We know this is true for companions in war or amid unimaginable disasters. This reality simultaneously makes haunted houses and scary movies perfect for first dates. Similarly, Dmitri, the once-hedgehog boy, and Marusia will be a pair forevermore. Princess Katerina and Baba Yaga's daughter—the one that kept her head upon her shoulders—shall surely be inseparable for the rest of their lives. Prince Ivan, who sought the firebird for the tsar, will keep the hand of his Helena for together they faced Koscheii the Deathless and Baba Yaga herself.
Harnessing the ancient tradition of storytelling taps into communal bonding in the same way. Scary stories around a campfire or in the firelight of the hearth bring us closer through the act of listening together, not only for education or entertainment but also to live the shared experience. The caveat is that we must remain vigilant concerning fearmongering for manipulation.
World leaders and media empires use horror tactics on a daily basis. This strategy is not at all a contemporary invention, but all around us, we feel it in play. Groups feel newly bonded, newly spurred into action, after listening to a captivating narrative meticulously crafted to deceive and to stir up emotions. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote The Revolt of the Masses in 1930, bringing awareness to such a situation, not in a context of horror but in the danger of a populace driven by emotion rather than thoughtful deliberation. That story does not end well, and the populist uprisings of today are not so different. The challenge of life and politics alike is and always has been knowing the difference when panic strikes our brains. The ability to press the pause button for attentive reflection is key.
In folktales, though, the horror is much simpler, albeit at times, more absurd. Thus, true horror enables a break from our ostensibly humdrum lives. It can evoke an emotional catharsis and establish greater bonds in our own relationships or between characters we empathize with as we consume their stories. The straightforward or subtle calls to action within are worth our attention. All the same, another hidden benefit of horror genres hides in a piece that Ortega's conclusions deem essential: someone listening to the story, reading the book, or watching the video can always create an intermission to take a breath. The break from the story is vital before jumping into action, but the pause also allows us to look around and recognize we are indeed okay in this moment.
Awareness that we can voluntarily enter and easily flee the scary environment furthers the escapist pleasure of frightening experiences. A first-date couple walking through a haunted house can stop and laugh, fingers touching, sparks flying to extreme levels because of the instinctual reactions firing in their brains. A flinch or gasp in a movie theater seat creates a psychological connectivity separate but not unrelated to that of comrades who have faced battle together. Alone in your house with the lights out, you can grab the remote and pause the Baba Yaga storyline. You can close your Hellboy comic or your book by Patricia McKillip or Gregory Maguire. Horror's appeals vary in intensity for audiences of different ages, after all. And this ability to walk away if you choose creates the illusion of mastery over anxiety-producing events. Who wouldn't want such command over any such stress or terror they meet in life? Is it a true command? Of course not, but your brain and its releasing endorphins don't care about that. Self-attained safety feels good.
Still, we know safety isn't forever. We know tranquility comes and goes. We build up walls around that which scares us, even restricting thoughts of our human fragility to hospices and hospitals. Medical advances have almost allowed us to forget about the everyday nature of death and dying. We forget about our own mortality. Respect for a once-goddess who guided souls into this world or out of it is such a strange idea to us, because such a being would never walk the halls of sterilized, fluorescent-lit medical buildings.
Stories have always sought to explain that which we cannot comprehend—especially that which terrifies us. Nevertheless, our collective memory doesn't always hold on to the original intentions. We don't sing, “ring around the rosy, pocket full of posies,” thinking about the smell of flowers to cover up the smell of the dead. We consider it a playful nonsense rhyme. We ignore the horrors of babies rocking in cradles on treetops with boughs breaking and thus cradles falling. We don't overthink the man who sleeps, snoring, while it's raining and pouring, even after he hits his head and doesn't wake up again.
