A nightmare old woman who lives behind a fence of human bones steals and eats children, but regularly takes the side of Good, supplying goodies with magical items and important advice. Traveling through the centuries, this archetype has changed and sometimes very much. So how many Yaginis are buried under the layers of history?
The etymology of the word "yaga" is very ambiguous. For example, from Czech, jeze is translated as "evil aunt." In Slovenian jeza means anger, in Serbo-Croatian jeza means “horror”. However, the Russian word "ulcer" puts all analogies in question.
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Any Soviet schoolchild of the 1980s has seen a cartoon where a harmful Yaga with the Serpent Gorynych and Koshchey the Immortal are trying to steal a torch with Olympic fire. The phrase "Baba Yaga is against" has become a real "meme".
It should be noted that the image of the cartoon Yaga, not very scary and not very dangerous, generally corresponds to the image of the undead that we all know from the fairy-tale adaptations read in childhood.
This Baba Yaga lives in a deep forest in a hut on chicken legs. From time to time she threatens to eat someone and seems to be even a cannibal, but the matter does not go further than promises. But it is worth a good fellow to demand a bathhouse and treats, the old woman quickly replaces anger with mercy and often gives the main character a sword-kladenets, a guiding ball, a bottle of living water, at worst, reveals the secret of Koscheeva's death. In fact, she is a negative heroine only conditionally.
We go further - we see the forest
Some researchers believe that the image of the mistress of the forest thicket, the maker of witchcraft potions, the mistress of animals and birds was inspired by the real personalities of herbalists who live collecting herbs and roots, capable of brewing both medicine and poisonous potion.
However, having plunged into Old Slavonic folklore several centuries deeper, under the layers of more modern fairy tales, we can see a truly terrible image of a forest sorceress. Here Yaga is represented in the form of a humpbacked monster with unkempt hair, fangs sticking out of his mouth and an excessively long hooked nose. "Baba Yaga is lying, a bone leg from corner to corner, his nose has grown into the ceiling." It happens that a bony leg and a nose hanging down to the floor appear to be iron. Sometimes in the texts of fairy tales, the one-eyed Baba Yaga is noted, and hypertrophied sexual characteristics are displayed as a constant feature of her appearance. "Baba Yaga is lying on the stove, a bone leg, his nose has grown into the ceiling, snot is hanging over the threshold, titties are wrapped around a hook."
To hunt for human meat, the Yaga flies out in an iron mortar, and the creepy old woman's hook is capable of turning the hero to stone. The dwelling of Baba Yaga is more than remarkable. It is a hut on chicken legs behind a back of human bones. Over time, the pronunciation of the term was distorted and chicken legs, that is, pillars, fumigated with smoke for better preservation, turned into chicken legs. But initially, Baba Yaga's hut was nothing more than a "house of the dead" - a burial log structure on pillars, in which the ashes of the deceased were placed. The custom was very common among our ancestors and existed in some regions of Russia right up to the 18th century.
But why would anyone, even Baba Yaga, live in a grave? The answer is quite simple: existence in the "house of the dead" is filled with deep meanings, because Baba Yaga is not just a nightmarish undead that kills travelers. Baba Yaga is the guardian of the border between the kingdom of the living and the kingdom of the dead. Hence its terrible appearance and temper, hence the cunning tricks with the hut, which you can get into only by turning the "house of the dead" back to the forest and in front of you. Hence the presence of a bone leg. After all, the guardian of the entrance to the underworld lives at once in two spaces, with one foot in the world of the living, the other in the afterlife. And good fellows go to the magical old woman not to take a steam bath, and then, that they need to get into the Far Away kingdom (according to one version, into the afterlife), and let in there someone who does not get cold feet, can only Yaga. Moreover, as a bonus,she supplies the brave hero with useful gadgets and good advice.
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Clever and beautiful
So, Baba Yaga is a terrible old woman, the guardian of the doors to the kingdom of the dead. But is this the real Yaga?
To answer the question asked, it is necessary to dig even deeper, and we, removing layer by layer, are approaching the mythology of the pre-Christian era. That's right: this is where the magic character's specialization comes from. Baba Yaga is really the guardian of the border between Java and Navu, only she is by no means an old woman who steals children. Yagaya or Yaginya is a young beauty with braids up to her feet, a skillful and invincible warrior.
There are several versions of the origin of Yaga-Yagini. According to one, she was the daughter of ordinary people, adopted after the death of her parents by the goddess Makosh, according to others - some of the incarnations of Makosha herself. Once Veles, the god of cattle breeding and wisdom, who occupies a prominent place in the Slavic pantheon, met a girl on the border of the worlds who had pledged to marry only the one who would defeat her. Having entered into a fight with his chosen one, Veles won the fight and made Yaginya his wife. However, the cow Zemun, the mother of the cattle god, disliked her daughter-in-law and decided to destroy her. Veles bargained his mother's life for his wife, but in payment he went back to the border of the worlds with his beloved. There, at the turn of Yavi and Navi, Veles and Yaginya settled. It is believed that all rivers flow from their house and the roots of all plants stretch.
The Slavs considered Yagin not only the guardian of the transition to the Other World, but also the patron saint of forest birds and animals, and in addition, the keeper of the hearth, as evidenced by attributes like a mortar and a broomstick. For her love for children and especially for orphans, she was called Mother, and the beauty and article of Yaginya-Yagaya was not inferior to the goddesses Lada and Lele. The hunchbacked ugly old woman appeared much later, at a time when the adherents of Christianity began to systematically eradicate the memory of the pagan Slavic gods from the public consciousness.
The technology for the destruction of pagan characters, by and large, came down to two forms: either the gods of the pre-Christian pantheon were associated and mixed with Orthodox saints, or demonized, turning into monsters and transferring them to the diocese of the devil. Thus, the old deities, as it were, remained in use, but at the same time they adapted to monotheism.
Great Mother
As a result of our excavations instead of a single Yagi we have three, disappeared in the stream of history: the living dead woman, stealing and devouring children, ugly witch who guarded the entrance to the realm of the dead, and a beautiful young woman, living at the crossroads of Navi and Reveal …
This seemed possible, and finish research, but there is another version of what the many-sided Baba Yaga is. This version takes us to the times of the Paleolithic and Neolithic. It is in the cultural layers dating back to the VIII-III millennium BC that archaeologists find many female figurines. These findings give every reason to believe that in those centuries, female deities were considered dominant. The supreme female deity is conventionally called the Great Goddess, or the Great Mother.
The oldest sculpture of the Great Goddess, whose age is 34 thousand years, was found in Eastern Siberia. She is a bird-headed woman giving birth. The image of the bird goddess, apparently, should be attributed to the most archaic incarnations of the Great Goddess. Supporters of the Neolithic version believe that Baba Yaga was the Great Goddess of our ancestors, the foremother of all living things. Humanoid images of the gods gradually replaced zoomorphic ones, but the replacement was not always complete. Perhaps the "bony leg" is actually a bird's leg, as is the long, beak-like nose.
The sorceress priestesses, serving the Great Goddess, were in charge of all areas of the tribe's life, including the initiation ceremony of young hunters, which included the kidnapping and symbolic death of a boy. The result was the entry into the status of a man. Apparently, the ceremony was very cruel and dangerous, which is why they were afraid of it, and as a result, the feeling of fear was transferred to the Great Goddess (Babu-Yaga).
Perhaps this version is controversial, but one of the arguments in favor of the globality of the figure of Baba Yaga can be considered the extraordinary vitality of this character. Not every adult will be able to answer who Kolyada and Morena are, for which Cosmas and Spiridon of Trimifuntsky were numbered, but every child knows Babu Yaga. Even if large-scale changes in cults and cultures have distorted the image of the mistress of life and death, the memory of Baba Yaga is alive and remains in our culture, despite the past millennia.
Magazine: Mysteries of History №40. Author: Victor Stern