Baba Yaga legends and myths. Baba Yaga. What do you know about Baba Yaga

Many of us met Baba Yaga in the cradle, when Afanasiev's Russian Tales were read to us. The evil, big-nosed old woman in rags is known to us from children's cartoons and movies. In adult life, Baba Yaga has not gone away from us, she just powdered herself, dressed up and put glasses on her nose. Let's figure out why she is in our life, why she has a bone leg and what she wants when she screams and saws us.

1. Baba Yaga

“Near this house there was a dense forest, and in the forest in a clearing there was a hut, and Baba Yaga lived in the hut; she didn’t let anyone near her and ate people like chickens ”

Baba Yaga still lives on the outskirts of the forest in a hut on chicken legs, which is sometimes also “backed up with a pie” and “covered with a pancake”. The house stands surrounded by centuries-old trees near a forest lake, surrounded by a fence made of human bones. In her yard live guides of souls to the afterlife, dogs, and prophetic bird-foretellers, crows. Baba Yaga is always busy with something, constantly cooking something in her alchemical oven. And if it goes out into the world, it appears out of nowhere and does not go anywhere without witchcraft. In one of the fairy tales, her appearance in front of the heroes looks like this: “Suddenly she swirled, became muddied, greenery appeared in her eyes - the earth becomes a navel, a stone comes out of the ground, a Baba Yaga comes out of a stone, a bone leg, rides on an iron mortar, an iron pusher urges, the dog chirps behind. Baba Yaga herself makes up a kind of couple of Koshchei the Immortal - they are either an elderly divorced couple, or a brother and sister, or just bosom friends. The name Yaga is related to the Polish jedza and the Czech jezinka - "forest woman": something like the female incarnation of Leshy with the function of controlling snakes. There is an opinion that this woman was the wife of the Serpent from under the Kalinov Bridge, with whom the heroes fought endlessly. And in the Turkic languages there is a consonant with Yaga spirit of the ancestors "babai aga" (translated as "old grandfather"). Baba Yaga is the deity of our chthonic ancestors.

First conclusion. Do not be surprised when an old witch or goblin looks at you from the mirror in the morning: this ancient creature calls you from the depths of the collective unconscious into adventures towards your own integrity.

2. Chthonic creature

Baba Yaga is invariably associated with the forest. The forest, like the ocean, personifies the unconscious of man, the inner lunar kingdom. The forest is boundless in relation to a person, you can get lost in it, you can live in it, or you can die. The Greek goddess of the moon, Diana, lived in the forests, away from the eyes of mortals, where she indulged in unrestrained hunting. One day, a hunter saw Diana and her maiden hunting retinue swimming in a forest lake. This sight is not intended for the eyes of mortals, so Diana, noticing the hunter, set his own dogs on him and they tore him apart. The secret of the forest is hidden from people, and the meeting of a person with the bearer of this secret is usually fraught with death. The same idea is expressed in the first part of "Faust" by Goethe: having called the chthonic spirit of the Earth, the scientist cannot even look in his direction. The embodied nature turns out to be terrible and causes panic in a mere mortal. The trees in the forest do not calm down for a minute, they constantly whisper something and communicate with each other - only an ordinary person cannot understand the whisper of the unconscious, so the hero who decides to go into the thick of dark side, magic helpers will be issued at the checkpoint of the grandmother's hut. But when she does not help young heroes to wade through another world, Baba Yaga steals and eats children and good fellows.

Second conclusion. When you see an evil fury in front of you, splashing with poisonous saliva, remember: this is her pagan nature speaking. Do not try to shout down the demoniac one: the whole other world is on her side. If you have something to look for in her, be patient, smile and praise her house, outfit and social skills. You will get yours. If just like that, they passed by - run, because otherwise you will die in a senseless fight with a chthon.

3. The dual nature of Baba Yaga

Living on the border with the unconscious (or the afterlife), Yaga herself belongs to two worlds at the same time: one of her legs is ordinary, and the other is bone, dead. Baba Yaga does not always personify evil, in fairy tales she has several faces. Yaga the warrior, Yaga the kidnapper and Yaga the giver are three hypostases in which she, respectively, threatens the hero, takes something from him and gives something to him. You can fall into the clutches of Baba Yaga in two ways: by your own carelessness or just like that. Once upon a time there was a man and did not know dashing. It became interesting to him, what kind of dashing is that everyone is talking about? He went to look for dashing, met the same onlooker and together they got to Baba Yaga. She immediately fried and ate the onlooker, and the hero, as a result, was able to escape, only having lost his finger. Then he walks around and shows his mutilated hand to fellow villagers: here, they say, he took a dashing sip. Fools Baba Yaga teaches what they ask. Nature kills impudent ones who do not know what they want, but are looking for a meeting with her forces. Often Baba Yaga appears in the life of the characters as an evil fate. It seems as if the characters are completely innocent of anything: here is a boy catching a fish on the lake, everything is quiet and smooth, and then angry birds fly in, as in the Hitchcock film of the same name, and take him straight to the hut to the old patroness of mysteries, who is going to them tightly have lunch. The boy did not have time to do anything for which he should have been punished, it was just his time to become an adult and undergo initiation.

Third conclusion. Experience shows that you should not look for crazy women: those who come to them with common sense will die from it, and internal chaos will grow so that mermaids will start in it - and you will be fit only for spring plowing and sleeping on the stove for nine months a year . Both young and mature Baba Yaga will find you herself: without putting any effort into this hurricane in your life, you can, with a clear conscience, try to carry your innocence through the madness of this situation. If you stay steadfast - get the princess when the villain surrenders.

4. Initiation

The rite of initiation always involves the symbolic death of the old personality of the initiate, followed by rebirth in a new capacity, most often with a new name. In our time, a kind of initiation is the receipt by a teenager of a passport and an identification code: a person acquires a mystical name, in our case, a serial number, and becomes a full member of the tribe. In ancient times, initiations were treated more severely: in order to get a passport-tattoo, a young man had to pass a serious exam - both physical and psychological. Often during this examination, the young man was injured, and in some tribes, in order to achieve the right to be a husband, the young man had to be circumcised. To get something, you must first give.

Baba Yaga is traditionally considered a priestess who initiates youth into adulthood. That is why she threatens children, single young men and unmarried girls: those who have not yet turned into a full-fledged person. The hero, going on a journey to the other world, must allow Baba Yaga to soar himself in a bathhouse not at all for pleasure: the ritual washing of the dead is an indispensable attribute of moving to the next world. And the request to feed is not an idle hunger, but an imitation of a commemoration with ritual dishes: pancakes, peas and kutya. The very image of Yaga and her dwelling - lies in a hut without windows and without doors on the stove, and her nose has grown into the ceiling - resembles a dead man in a coffin.

In ancient times, a special hut was built in the forest, in which the rite of initiation of boys took place. The father took his son to the forest and left him alone so that he would independently find this very hut of initiation. In it, the boy faced severe trials, after which he received the status of an initiate. “The visible symbol of such an initiation is the cutting of the skin of the back from the neck down. Sometimes belts were passed under the skin of the back and chest, by which the boys were hung up. Initiation is always associated with the experience of death, and therefore its indispensable attribute is mortal fear. They explain to a teenager at initiatory rites that life is serious, at every opportunity she strives to skin you or burn you in a furnace, so remember this hut in the forest and that Baba Yaga can appear from under a stone at any time.

If Yaga does not rip off the skin “on a belt” from the backs of the subjects, then he is engaged in putting the children in a ladle to fry them in the oven. Her figure is related to folk grandmothers-midwives, who could smear a premature baby with dough and put it on a bread shovel into a warm oven, symbolizing the female womb, so that the baby “reached” like a pie.

Fourth conclusion. If you are thirty, and you are still not a pie, it's time to go on an oven adventure. Go to the nature reserve, work as a watchman, forester or caretaker of the reservoir. Let your beard grow, walk at night and study Manly Palmer Hall's encyclopedia of symbols. When something happens, after which you crap yourself with devils, it will be possible to return home: from now on, everyone will obey you without hitting the table with your fist.

5. Hut

The hut is not just hidden in a magical forest - until the hero utters the magic words, it does not appear before him in its true form. Initially, the hut stands with its back to the hero, and in front of the forest, and he must correctly ask her to turn around. Perhaps this is the key to the sexual context of initiation? A wooden house, windows and doorways are traditional symbols of the female womb. To get inside the hut, you need to “know the magic of opening doors”, know a special spell, gesture magic (the hero sprinkles the doors of the hut with water), and also appease the animals guarding Yaga’s house. A modern young man, even in the age of information technology, should not neglect the ancient tales of monsters waiting for him on the threshold of sweet love. Male initiation was a symbol of entering the age of puberty - after it, a man could kill and love. The art of killing was taught by men, and the wisdom of love by women. There is an opinion that the “witness”, who was engaged in initiations, just lived alone, far from the villages, like a temple priestess. The hut full of dangers with a stove in which you can burn to the ground is the personification of the fears of the so-called vagina dentata - a toothy womb that needs to be tamed in different tales in different ways, either by force, or by cunning, or by kindness.

The hut, like the mystical land of Shambhala or the White Lodge in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, opens only to the right person at the right time. It is impossible to just search the forest and find a hut - you have to be a fool, a hero, at worst - a child in order to get an interview with Baba Yaga: all three are united by spontaneity and determination, lack of cowardice and doubt. Or you can end up in this cursed place at the behest of evil fate. The same "Twin Peaks" mentions "a house in the forest where music is always playing", and in Baba Yaga's house the hero often hears the playing of the magic harp. In this case, the boy is likened to Odysseus, Baba Yaga and her magical jazz band turn into sirens, and the forest becomes the sea along which the hero returns home.

Fifth conclusion. There are many doors in the world. Not all of them open with keys, and even strength and assertiveness will not always help. With a pure heart and a sharp mind, you will discover everything you need and get to where you need to go.

6. Trial and reward of Yagi

A hero who has fallen to Baba Yaga can defeat her only by appealing to the grandmother's natural instinct. When the evil Yaga comes out to meet the young man and is about to eat him, he is not at a loss and in response he asks him to feed him - they say, what kind of conversation on an empty stomach? “Here I am a fool, I began to ask the hungry and the cold,” - Baba Yaga herself is glad to feed the daring guest. As soon as the hero appeals to matriarchal values and reminds Yaga of her feminine nature, she immediately changes in attitude. The hero was not repelled by Yagi's appearance, her withered leg and old unpleasant face. He did not disdain her otherworldly food - only in a few fairy tales does the hero pretend to eat and throw food on the floor, mostly he is really happy with the treat. After the meal, the satisfied mistress of the hut asks the young man about this and that, additionally checking him on the topic “friend or foe”, and then rewards him with a gift. Basically, the mystical old woman gives the young man a magical horse, a strong stallion. The horse in Slavic culture was both a symbol of fertility and a link between the worlds, therefore it played an important role in the wedding ceremony (which was in many ways similar to the funeral). So the horse foreshadowed a quick marriage to the young man, and in one of the tales, Yaga gives the hero a horse to defeat Koshchei the Immortal. As an option, he may get one of Yaga's daughters as a reward, but history is silent about how the relationship with the bone-footed mother-in-law develops. In any case, the old woman personifies the feminine maternal principle in its pagan form: the power of mother nature, which nourishes and destroys, rewarding only those who have their own power.

Sixth conclusion. When you meet a witch, remember that her toothy, screaming face hides a motherly nature. There is nothing more cunning and easier than to reason with the old hag with his own vulnerability. Do not twist your nose, do not bypass what seems scary, but appeals to you. Life, like nature, can be scary, but since it does not kill you, it means that it most likely loves you - so work on reciprocity.

7. Baba Yaga and red girls

If Baba Yaga is in a bad mood, she steals children and rapes men. But basically, she lives an ordinary old woman's life - during the day she flies into the forest, in the evening she has a hearty dinner and goes to bed on the stove, sometimes she fights with harmful neighbors. But, in general, he does not touch anyone and peacefully manages the forest. Usually she has several daughters, whom she keeps in a kind of slavery. How else can you explain that as soon as the young man gets into the hut with the intention of killing Yaga, her daughters are right there with instructions on how to properly cut off their mother's head. As a rule, after the murder of the old villain, the wedding of all her daughters follows, and the main character invariably gets the youngest and most beautiful daughter. With a dead mother-in-law, the young man lives more calmly, but it is not clear what to do with Babin's genes? Apparently, the presence of a daring husband, who often has a semi-animal nature, somehow balances the problem of the heritage of the bone leg. Women's initiation is less adventurous than men's, and has more to do with needlework, housework, and humility. Vasilisa the Beautiful manages to escape from Yaga's captivity, only by proving that she is a skilled housewife: “When I leave tomorrow, you, look, clean the yard, sweep the hut, cook dinner, prepare linen, go to the bin, take a quarter of the wheat and clean it from blackies." In many fairy tales, in order to receive a blessing as a wife from Baba Yaga, a girl needs to unquestioningly fulfill all her requirements for several days, for example, wear an old woman on her hump. Or crush water in a mortar until exhaustion: this action is a symbol of the interaction of male and female principles and the birth of a new life.

Seventh conclusion. If you intend to get married, remember that there is no better friend for you before the wedding and the worst rival after - than the mother-in-law. If, in the status of a young man, the mother-in-law-Yaga, with the correct polite and humble treatment, reveals all the buttons for controlling the future wife, then after the wedding she will become the button for the destruction of your marriage. Therefore, the mother-in-law must be metaphorically destroyed: for this, the hero has a treasure-sword, a symbol of male strength and a powerful mind.

She ran to a deep abyss, picked up a cast-iron board and disappeared underground.

Baba Yaga - an image familiar to everyone since childhood is represented by an evil old woman living in a dense forest. However, in the mythology of the Slavs, Yagin is seen as completely different.

Who is Yaginya

Yaginya is the daughter of Viy, the ruler of the Navi world and the named daughter.

Yaginya among the Slavs was a wise sorceress with a kind and bright soul, who kept the boundaries of the worlds.

She possessed female wisdom and was strong in witchcraft. She lived on the border between the worlds and had power over the spaces. Yaginya from the world of Navi to Yav could travel calmly, but meet the souls of the dead and transfer them to the afterlife.

Baba Yaga is considered the guardian of the boundaries between the manifest world (reveal) and Navi (the world of the dead).

As represented by the Slavs

In different sources, the image of Yagini varies. In some, she is depicted as a young beauty, fast and strong. On the feet are golden boots. Long braids are decorated with various ornaments, clothes are clean and bright.

In other sources this adult woman, mother.

In later sources, an old woman living alone in an impenetrable forest and stealing children to eat, but these are fairy tales of the Soviet era.

They turned to the Yogi for advice, but she did not help everyone. At first, she arranged various tests, because great knowledge can harm people when misuse. She taught wisdom only to the worthy.

From all over the world came to learn wisdom from her. And in difficult times, when there were strife and wars, Yaga gathered orphans and taught worldly wisdom. Many of those orphans became sorcerers and priests, and women became good wives, gave birth to children, continued the family.

The modern Baba Yaga differs from its primary prototype. Depicted as a lonely old woman living in a dense forest. However, fairy tales have retained the power of wisdom to this day.

Therefore, the Slavs called her Mother Yaginya.

Yaginya is also associated with the rite of initiation. When young men were tested before giving a name.

Attributes and symbols of Yagi

The modern Baba Yaga is the ancient Yaginya (Yogini). Therefore, their attributes are the same.

Eagle owl bird of wisdom;
d long hair as a symbol of strength and femininity;
glomerulus indicate the way,
a plate with an apple to see the future,
stupa for flight;
yes broom to sweep away evil.

B aba yaga as a talisman at home

In the modern world, the Baba Yaga in the form of a doll is often used to protect the home and family from all negativity. Considering that Yaginya lived on the border of the worlds and did not let Navi essence into the world of Navi, the amulet is hung over the entrance to the houseand does not let evil into the family. Baba Yaga also serves as a talisman of love and family relationships.

Yagini family

Yagini's father is Viy: the lord of the underworld, his mother named Makosh. She took wisdom and skills from both parents.

During my childhood, when every self-respecting school held New Year's Eve parties (for elementary grades) and "discotheques" (for seniors), an indispensable detail of these actions were the performances of invited artists - sometimes professional ones, from the local drama theater, sometimes amateurs - moms, dads, teachers.

And the composition of the participants was just as indispensable - Ded Moroz, Snegurochka, forest animals (squirrels, hares, etc.), sometimes - pirates, Bremen town musicians and devils with kikimors. But the main villain was Baba Yaga. In which interpretations she did not appear before the astonished audience - both a hunchbacked old woman, and a middle-aged woman with bright makeup - something between a gypsy fortune-teller and a witch, and a sexy young creature in a dress made of patches and charming shag hair on her head. Only its essence was unchanged - to harm the "good characters" as much as possible - not to let them go to the Christmas tree, to take away gifts, to turn them into an old stump - the list is not limited.

And who is this Baba Yaga really? Folk element? A product of popular imagination? Real character? An invention of children's writers? Let's try to find out the origin of the most insidious fairy-tale character of our childhood.

Slavic mythology

Baba Yaga (Yaga-Yaginishna, Yagibikha, Yagishna) is the oldest character in Slavic mythology. Initially, it was the deity of death: a woman with a snake tail, who guarded the entrance to the underworld and escorted the souls of the deceased to the kingdom of the dead. By this, she somewhat resembles the ancient Greek snake maiden Echidna. According to ancient myths, Echidna gave birth to the Scythians from her marriage to Hercules, and the Scythians are considered the most ancient ancestors of the Slavs. It is not for nothing that Baba Yaga plays a very important role in all fairy tales, heroes sometimes resort to it as their last hope, the last helper - these are indisputable traces of matriarchy.

Was the bone leg a snake's tail?

Particular attention is drawn to the bone-footedness, one-leggedness of the Baba Yaga, associated with her once animal-like or snake-like appearance: “The cult of snakes as creatures involved in the land of the dead begins, apparently, already in the Paleolithic. In the Paleolithic, images of snakes personifying the underworld are known. The emergence of an image of a mixed nature belongs to this era: the upper part of the figure is from a man, the lower from a snake or, perhaps, a worm.

According to K. D. Laushkin, who considers Baba Yaga the goddess of death, one-legged creatures in the mythologies of many peoples are somehow connected with the image of a snake (a possible development of ideas about such creatures: a snake - a man with a snake tail - a one-legged man - lame, etc.). P.).

V. Ya. Propp notes that "Yaga, as a rule, does not walk, but flies, like a mythical snake, a dragon." “As you know, the all-Russian “snake” is not the original name of this reptile, but arose as a taboo in connection with the word “earth” - “creeping on the ground,” writes O. A. Cherepanova, suggesting that the original, not established while the name of the snake could be yaga.

One of the possible echoes of long-standing ideas about such a snake-like deity is the image of a huge forest (white) or field snake that can be traced in the beliefs of the peasants of a number of provinces of Russia, which has power over cattle, can endow with omniscience, etc.

Bone leg - connection with death?

According to another belief, Death gives the dead to Baba Yaga, with whom she travels around the world. At the same time, Baba Yaga and the witches subject to her feed on the souls of the dead and therefore become light, like the souls themselves.

Previously, they believed that Baba Yaga could live in any village, disguised as an ordinary woman: take care of livestock, cook, raise children. In this, ideas about her are close to ideas about ordinary witches.

But still, Baba Yaga is a more dangerous creature, possessing much more power than some kind of witch. Most often, she lives in a dense forest, which has long inspired fear in people, since it was perceived as the border between the world of the dead and the living. It is not for nothing that her hut is surrounded by a palisade of human bones and skulls, and in many fairy tales Baba Yaga eats human flesh, and she herself is called “bone leg”.

Just like Koschey the Immortal (koshchey - bone), it belongs to two worlds at once: the world of the living and the world of the dead. Hence its almost limitless possibilities.

Fairy tales

In fairy tales, she acts in three incarnations.

Yaga-bogatyrsha possesses a sword-treasurer and fights on equal terms with heroes.

Yaga the kidnapper steals children, sometimes throwing them, already dead, on the roof of her native house, but most often taking them to her hut on chicken legs, or into an open field, or underground. From this outlandish hut, children, and adults, are saved by outwitting Yagibishna.

And, finally, the Yaga-giver greets the hero or heroine affably, treats him deliciously, soars in the bathhouse, gives useful advice, gives a horse or rich gifts, for example, a magic ball leading to a wonderful goal, etc.

This old sorceress does not walk, but travels around the wide world in an iron mortar (that is, a scooter chariot), and when she walks, she forces the mortar to run faster, striking with an iron club or pestle. And so that, for reasons known to her, no traces could be seen, they are swept up after her by special ones, attached to the mortar with a broom and a broom. She is served by frogs, black cats, including Cat Bayun, crows and snakes: all creatures in which threat and wisdom coexist.

Even when Baba Yaga appears in the most unsightly form and is distinguished by her fierce nature, she knows the future, has countless treasures, and secret knowledge.

The veneration of all its properties was reflected not only in fairy tales, but also in riddles. One of them says this: "Baba Yaga, a pitchfork leg, the whole world feeds, starves itself." We are talking about the plow-nurse, the most important tool in peasant everyday life.

The mysterious, wise, terrible Baba Yaga plays the same huge role in the life of a fairy-tale hero.

Version by Vladimir Dahl

"Yaga or yaga-baba, baba-yaga, yagaya and yagavaya or yagishna and yaginichna, the family of a witch, an evil spirit, under the guise of an ugly old woman. Is there a yaga, in the forehead of a horn (stove pillar with crows)? Baba-yaga, a bone leg, she rides in a mortar, rests with a pestle, sweeps up her trail with a broomstick, her bones come out from under her body in places, her nipples hang below the waist, she rides for human meat, kidnaps children, her mortar is iron, the devils are carrying her, under this train there is a terrible storm, everything groans, the cattle roar, there is pestilence and death; whoever sees a yaga becomes mute. An evil, quarrelsome woman is called a yagishna.

"Baba Yaga or Yaga Baba, a fabulous monster, a bolypuha over witches, Satan's handmaiden. Baba Yaga is a bone leg: she rides in a mortar, drives with a pestle (rests), sweeps a trail with a broomstick. She is simple-haired and in one shirt without a belt: then the other is the height of outrage."

Baba Yaga among other peoples

Babu Yaga (Polish Endza, Czech Ezhibaba) is considered to be a monster, in which only small children should believe. But even a century and a half ago in Belarus, adults also believed in her - the terrible goddess of death, destroying the bodies and souls of people. And this goddess is one of the oldest.

Ethnographers have established its connection with the primitive rite of initiation, celebrated even in the Paleolithic and known among the most backward peoples of the world (Australians).

For initiation into full members of the tribe, teenagers had to go through special, sometimes difficult, rites - trials. They were performed in a cave or in a dense forest, near a lonely hut, and an old woman, a priestess, disposed of them. The most terrible test consisted in staging the "devouring" of the subjects by the monster and their subsequent "resurrection". In any case, they had to “die”, visit the other world and “resurrect”.

Everything around her breathes death and horror. The bolt in her hut is a human leg, the locks are her hands, the lock is a toothy mouth. Her tyn is made of bones, and on them are skulls with flaming eye sockets. She fries and eats people, especially children, while licking the stove with her tongue and shoveling coals with her feet. Her hut is covered with a pancake, propped up with a pie, but these are symbols not of abundance, but of death (funeral food).

According to Belarusian beliefs, Yaga flies in an iron mortar with a fiery broom. Where it rushes, the wind rages, the earth groans, animals howl, cattle hide. Yaga is a powerful witch. They serve her, like witches, devils, crows, black cats, snakes, toads. She turns into a snake, a mare, a tree, a whirlwind, etc.; only one thing is impossible - to take on a somewhat normal human form.

Yaga lives in the dense forest or the underworld. She is the mistress of the underground hell: “Do you want to go to hell? I am Jerzy-ba-ba,” says Yaga in a Slovak fairy tale. The forest for the farmer (unlike the hunter) is an unkind place, full of all evil spirits, the same other world, and the famous hut on chicken legs is like a passage to this world, and therefore you cannot enter it until he turns his back to the forest .

Yaga the janitor is hard to deal with. She beats the heroes of the fairy tale, ties them up, cuts the belts out of their backs, and only the strongest and bravest hero overcomes her and descends into the underworld. At the same time, Yaga has the features of the mistress of the Universe to everyone and looks like some kind of terrible parody of the Mother of the World.

Yaga is also a mother goddess: she has three sons (serpents or giants) and 3 or 12 daughters. Perhaps she is the cursed damn mother or grandmother. She is a housewife, her attributes (mortar, broom, pestle) are tools of female labor. Yaga is served by three horsemen - black (night), white (day) and red (sun), who pass through her "gateway" every day. With the help of a dead head, she commands the rain.

Yaga is a common Indo-European goddess.

Among the Greeks, it corresponds to Hekate - the terrible three-faced goddess of the night, witchcraft, death and hunting.
The Germans have Perkhta, Holda (Hel, Frau Hallu).
The Indians have no less terrible Kali.

Perkhta-Holda lives underground (in wells), commands rain, snow and the weather in general, and rushes, like Yaga or Hekate, at the head of a crowd of ghosts and witches. Perhta was borrowed from the Germans by their Slavic neighbors - the Czechs and Slovenes.

Alternative origins of the image

The dead were buried with their feet towards the exit, and if you looked into the domino, you could see only their feet - hence the expression "Baba Yaga bone leg." People treated their dead ancestors with reverence and fear, never disturbed them over trifles, fearing to bring trouble on themselves, but in difficult situations they still came to ask for help. So, Baba Yaga is a deceased ancestor, a dead man, and children were often scared by her.

According to other sources, Baba Yaga among some Slavic tribes (among the Rus in particular) is a priestess who led the rite of cremation of the dead. She slaughtered sacrificial cattle and concubines, who were then thrown into the fire.

In Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga has several stable attributes: she knows how to conjure, fly in a mortar, lives in the forest, in a hut on chicken legssurrounded by a fence of human bones with skulls. She beckons good fellows and small children and roasts them in the oven (Baba Yaga is a cannibal). She pursues her victims in a mortar, driving her with a pestle and sweeping the trail with a broom (broom). According to the largest specialist in the field of theory and history of folklore V. Ya. Propp, there are three types of Baba Yaga: a donor (she gives the hero a fairy-tale horse or a magical object); kidnapper of children; Baba Yaga is a warrior, fighting with whom "not for life, but for death", the hero of the fairy tale moves to a different level of maturity. At the same time, the wickedness and aggressiveness of Baba Yaga are not her dominant features, but only manifestations of her irrational, indeterminate nature. There is a similar hero in German folklore: Frau Holle or Bertha.

The dual nature of Baba Yaga in folklore is associated, firstly, with the image of the mistress of the forest, who must be appeased, and secondly, with the image of an evil creature that puts children on a shovel to fry. This image of Baba Yaga is associated with the function of a priestess leading teenagers through an initiation rite. So, in many fairy tales, Baba Yaga wants to eat the hero, but either after feeding, giving him drink, he lets him go, giving him a ball or some secret knowledge, or the hero runs away himself.

Russian writers and poets A. S. Pushkin, V. A. Zhukovsky (“The Tale of Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf”), Alexei Tolstoy, Vladimir Narbut and others repeatedly addressed the image of Baba Yaga in their work. widespread among Silver Age artists: Ivan Bilibin, Viktor Vasnetsov, Alexander Benois, Elena Polenova, Ivan Malyutin and others

Etymology

According to Max Vasmer, Yaga has correspondences in many Indo-European languages with the meanings of “illness, annoyance, wither, get angry, annoy, mourn,” etc., from which the original meaning of the name Baba Yaga is quite clear. In the Komi language, the word "yag" means forest, pine forest. Baba is a woman (Nyvbaba is a young woman). "Baba Yaga" can be read as a woman from a forest forest or a forest woman. There is another character in Komi fairy tales Yagmort (forest man). "Yaga" is a diminutive form of the female name "Jadwiga", common among the Western Slavs, borrowed from the Germans.

Origin of the image

Baba Yaga as a goddess

M. Zabylin writes:

Under this name, the Slavs revered the infernal goddess, depicted as a monster in an iron mortar, having an iron staff. They brought her a bloody sacrifice, thinking that she feeds her two granddaughters, whom they attributed to her, and enjoys the shedding of blood. Under the influence of Christianity, the people forgot their main gods, remembering only secondary ones, and especially those myths that have personified phenomena and forces of nature, or symbols of worldly needs. Thus, the Baba Yaga from an evil hellish goddess turned into an evil old sorceress, sometimes a cannibal, who always lives, somewhere in the forest, solitude, in a hut on chicken legs. ... In general, there are traces of Baba Yaga only in folk tales, and her myth merges with the myth of witches.

There is also a version that the goddess Makosh is hiding under Baba Yaga. At the time of the adoption of the Christian religion by the Slavs, the old pagan deities were persecuted. In the people's memory, only the deities of the lower order, the so-called. chthonic creatures (see demonology, folk demonology), to which Baba Yaga also belongs.

According to another version, the image of Baba Yaga goes back to the archetype of a totem animal, which ensures successful hunting for representatives of the totem in prehistoric times. Subsequently, the role of a totem animal is occupied by a creature that controls the entire forest with its inhabitants. The female image of Baba Yaga is associated with matriarchal ideas about the structure of the social world. The mistress of the forest, Baba Yaga, is the result of anthropomorphism. A hint at the once animal appearance of Baba Yaga, according to V. Ya. Propp, is the description of the house as a hut on chicken legs.

Siberian version of the origin of Baba Yaga

There is also another interpretation. According to her, Baba Yaga is not a native Slavic character, but an alien one, brought into Russian culture by soldiers from Siberia. The first written source about her is the notes of Giles Fletcher (1588) “On the Russian State”, in the chapter “On Permians, Samoyeds and Lapps”:

According to this position, the name of Baba Yaga is associated with the name of a certain object. In N. Abramov's "Essays on the Birch Territory" (St. Petersburg, 1857) there is a detailed description of the "yaga", which is clothing "like a dressing gown with a turn-down, a quarter, collar. It is sewn from dark non-spewers, with wool outside ... The same yags are collected from loon necks, with feathers out ... Yagushka is the same yaga, but with a narrow collar, worn by women on the road ”(V. I. Dal’s dictionary gives a similar interpretation in Tobolsk origin) .

Appearance

Baba Yaga is usually depicted as a large (nose to the ceiling) hunchbacked old woman with a large, long, hooked and hooked nose. In popular prints, she is dressed in a green dress, lilac kichka, bast shoes and trousers. In another ancient painting, Baba Yaga is dressed in a red skirt and boots. In fairy tales there is no emphasis on the clothes of Baba Yaga.

Attributes

A hut on chicken legs

In ancient times, the dead were buried in dominoes - houses located above the ground on very high stumps with roots looking out from under the ground, similar to chicken legs. Domovins were placed in such a way that the hole in them was turned in the opposite direction from the settlement, towards the forest. People believed that the dead were flying on coffins. People treated their dead ancestors with reverence and fear, never disturbed them over trifles, fearing to bring trouble on themselves, but in difficult situations they still came to ask for help. So, Baba Yaga is a deceased ancestor, a dead man, and children were often scared by her. According to other sources, Baba Yaga among some Slavic tribes is a priestess who led the rite of cremation of the dead. She slaughtered sacrificial cattle and concubines, who were then thrown into the fire.

From the point of view of supporters of the Slavic (classical) origin of Baba Yaga, an important aspect of this image is that she belongs to two worlds at once - the world of the dead and the world of the living. A well-known specialist in the field of mythology A. L. Barkova interprets in connection with this the origin of the name of the chicken legs on which the hut of the famous mythical character stands: edge, but then the entrance to it is from the side of the forest, that is, from the world of death.

The name “chicken legs”, most likely, came from “smoky”, that is, fumigated with smoke, pillars on which the Slavs put a “death hut” a small log house with the ashes of the deceased inside (such a funeral rite existed among the ancient Slavs back in centuries). Baba Yaga inside such a hut seemed to be like a living dead - she lay motionless and did not see a person who came from the world of the living (the living do not see the dead, the dead do not see the living). She learned about his arrival by smell - “it smells of the Russian spirit” (the smell of the living is unpleasant for the dead). “A person who meets the hut of Baba Yaga on the border of the world of life and death, the author continues, as a rule, goes to another world in order to free the captive princess. To do this, he must join the world of the dead. He usually asks Yaga to feed him, and she gives him the food of the dead. There is another option - to be eaten by Yaga and thus end up in the world of the dead. Having passed the tests in the hut of Baba Yaga, a person turns out to belong to both worlds at the same time, is endowed with many magical qualities, subjugates various inhabitants of the world of the dead, overcomes the terrible monsters inhabiting it, wins back the magical beauty from them and becomes the king.

The localization of the hut on chicken legs is associated with two magical rivers, either fiery (cf. jahannam, over which a bridge is also stretched), or milk (with jelly banks - cf. characteristic of the Promised Land: milk rivers Chis. or Muslim Jannat).

Glowing skulls

An essential attribute of Baba Yaga's dwelling is the tyn, on the stakes of which horse skulls are planted, used as lamps. In the fairy tale about Vasilisa, the skulls are already human, but they are the source of fire for the main character and her weapon, with which she burned down her stepmother's house.

Magic Helpers

Baba Yaga's magical assistants are swan geese, "three pairs of hands" and three riders (white, red and black).

Characteristic phrases

Steppe Baba Yaga

In addition to the "classic" forest version of Baba Yaga, there is also a "steppe" version of Baba Yaga, who lives beyond the Fiery River and owns a herd of glorious mares. In another tale, Baba Yaga has a golden leg at the head of an innumerable army fighting against Bely Polyanin. Hence, some researchers associate Babu Yaga with the "female-ruled" Sarmatians - a pastoral horse-breeding steppe people. In this case, the stupa of Baba Yaga is a Slavic rethinking of the Scythian-Sarmatian camping cauldron, and the name Yaga itself is elevated to the Sarmatian ethnonym Yazygi.

Mythological archetype of Baba Yaga

The image of Baba Yaga is associated with legends about the hero's transition to the other world (Far Far Away). In these legends, Baba Yaga, standing on the border of the worlds (a bone leg), serves as a guide that allows the hero to penetrate into the world of the dead, thanks to the performance of certain rituals. Another version of the prototype of the fabulous old woman can be considered the ittarma dolls dressed in fur clothes, which are still installed today in cult huts on supports.

Thanks to the texts of fairy tales, it is possible to reconstruct the ritual, sacred meaning of the actions of the hero who comes to Baba Yaga. In particular, V. Ya. Propp, who studied the image of Baba Yaga on the basis of a mass of ethnographic and mythological material, draws attention to a very important detail, in his opinion. After recognizing the hero by smell (Yaga is blind) and finding out his needs, she always heats the bathhouse and evaporates the hero, thus performing a ritual bath. Then he feeds the visitor, which is also a ritual, "mortuary", treat, which is not permissible for the living, so that they do not accidentally enter the world of the dead. And, “by demanding food, the hero thereby shows that he is not afraid of this food, that he has the right to it, that he is“ real ”. That is, the stranger, through a test with food, proves to Yaga the sincerity of his motives and shows that he is the real hero, in contrast to the false hero, the impostor antagonist.

This food “opens the mouth of the deceased,” says Propp, who is convinced that a myth always precedes a fairy tale. And, although the hero does not seem to have died, he will be forced to temporarily “die for the living” in order to get into the “thirtieth kingdom” (another world). There, in the “thirtieth kingdom” (the afterlife), where the hero is on his way, many dangers always await him, which he has to foresee and overcome. “Food, treats are certainly mentioned not only when meeting with Yaga, but also with many characters equivalent to her. ... Even the hut itself is fitted by the storyteller for this function: it is “supported with a pie”, “covered with a pancake”, which in children's fairy tales of the West corresponds to a “gingerbread house”. This house, by its appearance, sometimes pretends to be a food house.

Witches and sorceresses who lived far from the settlements in the depths of the forest could serve as another prototype of Baba Yaga. There they collected various roots and herbs, dried them and made various tinctures, if necessary, they helped the villagers. But the attitude towards them was ambiguous: many considered them to be associates of evil spirits, since living in the forest they could not help but communicate with evil spirits. Since they were mostly unsociable women, but there was no clear idea about them.

The image of Baba Yaga in music

The image of Baba Yaga is dedicated to the ninth play "The Hut on Chicken Legs (Baba Yaga)" by Modest Mussorgsky's famous suite "Pictures at an Exhibition - a memory of Viktor Hartmann", 1874, created in memory of his friend, artist and architect. The modern interpretation of this suite is also widely known - “Pictures at an Exhibition”, created by the English progressive rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer in 1971, where Mussorgsky’s musical pieces alternate with original compositions by English rock musicians: “The Hut of Baba Yaga "(Mussorgsky); "The Curse of Baba Yaga" (Emerson, Lake, Palmer); "The Hut of Baba Yaga" (Mussorgsky). Baba Yaga is dedicated to the symphonic poem of the same name by the composer Anatoly Lyadov, Op. 56, 1891-1904 In the collection of musical pieces for piano by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky "Children's Album" of 1878, there is also a piece "Baba Yaga".

Baba Yaga is mentioned in the songs of the Gas Sector group My Grandmother from the album Walk, Man! (1992) and "Ilya Muromets" from the album "The Night Before Christmas" (1991). Baba Yaga also appears as a character in the musicals: "Koschey the Immortal" by the Gaza Strip group, Ilya Muromets by the Gas Attack Sector duo , and in one of the episodes of the musical Sleeping Beauty by the Red Mold group. In 1989 in Sicily, the city of Agrigento, the international folk group Baba Yaga was founded.

The Na-Na group has a song "Grandmother Yaga", written by composer Vitaly Okorokov to the words of Alexander Shishinin. Performed in both Russian and English.

The Soviet and Russian composer Teodor Efimov wrote the music for the song cycle about Baba Yaga. The cycle includes three songs: "Baba Yaga" (lyrics by Y. Mazharov), "Baba Yaga-2 (Forest Duet)" (lyrics by O. Zhukov) and "Baba Yaga-3 (About Babu Yaga)" ( Sl. E. Uspensky). The cycle was performed by VIA Ariel. In addition, the third song of the mentioned cycle was performed by the theater of musical parody "Bim-Bom". There is also a song by David Tukhmanov based on poems by Yuri Entin "The Kind Grandmother Yaga" performed by Alexander Gradsky, which was included in the "Horror Park" cycle.

The image of Baba Yaga is played out in the album "The Hut of the Zombie Grandmother" by the Russian folk-black group Izmoroz.

The development of the image in modern literature

The image of Baba Yaga was widely used by the authors of modern literary fairy tales - for example, Eduard Uspensky in the story "Down the Magic River".
Baba Yaga became one of the main sources of the image of Naina Kievna Gorynych, a character in the story by the Strugatsky brothers "Monday starts on Saturday".
The novel "Return to Baba Yaga" by Natalia Malakhovskaya, where three heroines and three styles of writing go through tests and transformations (going to Baba Yaga), modify the plots of their biographies.
In the Hellboy comic book series by Mike Mignola, Baba Yaga is one of the negative characters. She lives in the afterlife at the roots of the World Tree Yggdrasil. In the first volume of the series ("The Devil's Awakening"), the defeated Rasputin takes refuge with her. In the novel "Baba Yaga" Hellboy, during a fight with Yaga, knocks out her left eye. Unlike most modern literary interpretations, the image of Baba Yaga in Mignola does not carry a satirical load.
The image of Baba Yaga also appears in Alexei Kindyashev's graphic story "Mosquito", where he plays the role of one of the main negative characters. The fight between the mythical insect, designed to protect our world from the forces of evil and the witch, takes place in the very first mini-issue, where the positive character defeats the negative one, thereby protecting the little girl. But not everything is as simple as it seems, and at the end of the issue it is found out that it was only a copy created to test the powers of the mythical protector.
Also, the image of Baba Yaga is found in the modern author of Russian literature - Andrey Belyanin in the cycle of works "The Secret Investigation of Tsar Peas", where, in turn, she occupies one of the central places in the role of a positive hero, namely, an expert-criminalist of a secret investigation under court of King Peas.
The childhood and youth of Baba Yaga in modern literature are first found in the story "Lukomorye" by A. Aliverdiev (the first chapter of the story, written in 1996, was published in the magazine "Star Road" in 2000). Later, Alexei Gravitsky's story "Berry", V. Kachan's novel "Youth of Baba Yaga", M. Vishnevetskaya's novel "Kashchei and Yagda, or Heavenly Apples", etc. were written.
Baba Yaga also appears in the Army of Darkness comic series, where she is represented as an ugly old woman who wants to get the book of the dead - the Necronomicon, in order to regain her youth. She was beheaded by one of the deadly sins - Wrath.
The novel "Baba Yaga Laid a Testicle" by the modern Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic uses the motifs of Slavic folklore, first of all, fairy tales about Baba Yaga.
The novel "Black Blood" by Nick Perumov and Svyatoslav Loginov Baba Yogi - they call the sorcerer of the clan - expelled in ancient times by a shaman, to Baba Yoga Neshanka, who lives in a charmed place, in a hut on two stumps - resembling bird paws, they turn for help to Unik, Tashi, and Romar, then Unica herself will become Baba Yoga.
In the cycle of Dmitry Emets "Tanya Groter" Baba Yaga is depicted in the image of the ancient goddess, healer Tibidox - Yagge, the former goddess of the ancient destroyed pantheon.
Baba Yaga is also one of the main characters in Leonid Filatov's fairy tale "" and in the animated film of the same name.
Baba Yaga is one of the characters in the 38th issue of The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, which takes place in the forests of an unnamed country. Of the other attributes of Baba Yaga, the issue contains a hut on chicken legs and a flying stupa, on which Baba Yaga and the main character overcome part of the way from the forest to the city.
Elena Nikitina's Baba Yaga acts as the main character, in the form of a young girl.
Baba Yaga appears in the book "Three in the Sands" of the cycle "Three from the Forest" by Yuri Alexandrovich Nikitin. She is one of the last keepers of ancient female magic and helps the heroes.

Baba Yaga on screen

Movies

More often than others, he played the role of Baba Yaga Georgy Millyar, including in films:

"Adventures in the Thirtieth Kingdom" (2010) - Anna Yakunina.

The name of the Slavic woman sorceress became popular in Western Europe. In 1973, the Franco-Italian film "Baba Yaga" was released (ital. Baba Yaga) directed by Corrado Farina (ital. Corrado Farina) with Carroll Baker in the title role. The film was created based on one of the erotic-mystical comics by Guido Crepax (ital. Guido Crepax) from the series "Valentina" (ital. Valentina (fumetto)).

cartoons

The Frog Princess (1954) (dir. Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, voiced by Georgy Millyar)
"Ivashko and Baba Yaga" (1938, voiced by Osip Abdulov)
The Frog Princess (1971) (dir. Yu. Eliseev, voiced by Zinaida Naryshkina)
"The End of the Black Swamp" (1960, voiced by Irina Mazing)
"About the evil stepmother" (1966, voiced by Elena Ponsova)
"The fairy tale affects" (1970, voiced by Clara Rumyanova)
"Flying Ship" (1979, women's group of the Moscow Chamber Choir)
"Vasilisa the Beautiful" (1977, voiced by Anastasia Georgievskaya)
"The Adventures of a Brownie" (1985) / "A Tale for Natasha" (1986) / "The Return of a Brownie" (1987) (voiced by Tatyana Peltzer)
Baba Yaga is against! "(1980, voiced by Olga Aroseva)
"Ivashka from the Palace of Pioneers" (1981, voiced by Efim Katsirov)
"Wait for it! "(16th issue) (1986)
"Dear Goblin" (1988, voiced by Viktor Proskurin)
“And in this fairy tale it was like this ...” (1984)
"Two heroes" (1989, voiced by Maria Vinogradova)
"Dreamers from the village of Ugory" (1994, voiced by Kazimira Smirnova)
"Grandma Ezhka and others" (2006, voiced by Tatyana Bondarenko)
"About Fedot the archer, a daring fellow" (2008, voiced by Alexander Revva)
" Dobrynya Nikitich and Serpent Gorynych" (2006, voiced by Natalya Danilova)
"Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf" (2011, voiced by Liya Akhedzhakova)
"Bartok the Magnificent" (1999, voiced by Andrea Martin)

Fairy tales

"Motherland" and Baba Yaga's birthday

Research

Potebnya A. A., On the mythical meaning of some rituals and beliefs. [ch.] 2 - Baba Yaga, “Readings in the Imperial Society of Russian History and Antiquities”, M., 1865, book. 3;
Veselovsky N.I., The current state of the issue of "Stone women" or "Balbals". // Notes of the Imperial Odessa Society of History and Antiquities, vol. XXXII. Odessa: 1915. Det. impression: 40 s. + 14 tab.
Toporov V. N., Hittite salŠU.GI and Slavic baba-yaga, "Brief reports of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR", 1963, c. 38.
Malakhovskaya A. N., Heritage of Baba Yaga: Religious ideas reflected in a fairy tale, and their traces in Russian literature of the 19th-20th centuries. - St. Petersburg: Aleteyya, 2007. - 344 p.

Games character

In the game Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Baba Yaga is one of the famous witches. It is said about her that she likes to eat for breakfast (possibly both for lunch and dinner) of small children. She can be seen on a collectible card in the famous witch group, she is featured on card #1.
Baba Yaga is one of the characters in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.
In the first part of the game Quest for Glory, Baba Yaga is one of the main enemies of the hero. Later, the old woman reappears in one of the subsequent games in this series.
Baba Yaga is mentioned in one of the plot conversations between the Anderson brothers in the game "Alan Wake". In addition, the house on Lake Cauldron has a sign with the inscription "Birds leg cabin", which can be interpreted as a hut on chicken legs.
In the game "Non-Children's Tales", the character of Baba Yaga assigns quests to the player.
In the game The Witcher, there is a monster Yaga - an old deceased woman.
In the games “Go there, I don’t know where”, “Baba Yaga is far away”, “Baba Yaga learns to read”, Baba Yaga is studying a subject with a child, getting into various troubles with him.

Notes

enchanted castle
Yan Deda and the Red Baba Yaga
Encyclopedia of Supernatural Beings. Lokid-MIF, Moscow, 2000
Propp V. Ya. The historical roots of fairy tales. L. : Publishing House of Leningrad State University, 1986.
Yurgan TV channel
Komi mythology
Zabylin M. Russian people, their customs, rituals, legends, superstitions and poetry. 1880.
"Baba Yaga - a goddess?"
Mikhail Sitnikov, Innocently tortured Yaga. "Spiritual avant-garde", like the Taliban, scolding Christians as "crusaders", smears the mythological Baba Yaga with tar, Portal-Credo.Ru, 13.07.2005.
Veselovsky N.I. Imaginary stone women // Bulletin of Archeology and History, published by the Imperial Archaeological Institute. Issue. XVII. SPb. 1906.
Some observations on the evolution of the image of Baba Yagiv in Russian folklore
Dancing in front of Yagi
Petrukhin V. Ya. The beginning of the ethnocultural history of Rus' in the 9th-11th centuries
Barkova A. L., Alekseev S., "Beliefs of the ancient Slavs" / Encyclopedia for children. [V.6.]: Religions of the world. part 1. - M .: Avanta Plus. ISBN 5-94623-100-6
Marya Morevna
Swan geese
Finist - Clear Falcon
Vasilisa the Beautiful
Ivan Tsarevich and Bely Polyanin
About Slavic fairy tales
Decline as a result of the Sarmatian invasion
In the collection of A. N. Afanasyev, there is the first version of the fairy tale “The Finist’s Feather is Clear of the Falcon”, where the triple Baba Yaga is replaced by three nameless “old women”. This variant was later developed

Baba Yaga lives in the forest, she flies in a mortar. Engaged in witchcraft. She is assisted by swan geese, red, white and black riders, as well as "three pairs of hands." Researchers distinguish three subspecies of Baba Yaga: a warrior (in a battle with her, the hero moves to a new level of personal maturity), a giver (she gives magic items to her guests), and a kidnapper of children. It is worth noting that at the same time she is not an unambiguously negative character.

She is described as a terrible old woman with a hump. At the same time, she is also blind and only senses a person who has entered her hut. This dwelling, which has chicken legs, gave rise to a hypothesis among scientists about who Baba Yaga is. The fact is that the ancient Slavs had a custom to build special houses for the dead, which were installed on piles, towering above the ground. Such huts were built on the border of the forest and the settlement, and they were placed in such a way that the exit was from the side of the forest.

It is believed that Baba Yaga is a kind of guide to the world of the dead, which in fairy tales is called the Far Far Away Kingdom. Certain rituals help the old woman in this task: ritual bathing (bath), "mortuary" treats (feeding the hero at his request). Having visited the house of Baba Yaga, a person temporarily turns out to belong to two worlds at once, and also receives some specific abilities.

According to another hypothesis, Baba Yaga is a woman healer. In ancient times, unsociable women who settled in the forest became healers. There they collected plants, fruits and roots, then dried them and prepared a variety of drugs from this raw material. People, although they used their services, were at the same time afraid, because they considered them to be witches associated with unclean forces and evil spirits.

Not so long ago, some Russian researchers put forward another very interesting theory. According to her, Baba Yaga was none other than an alien who arrived on our planet for research purposes.

The legends say that the mysterious old woman flew in a mortar, while covering her mark with a fiery broom. All this description is very reminiscent of a jet engine. The ancient Slavs, of course, could not know about the wonders of technology, and therefore, in their own way, interpreted the fire and loud sounds that an alien ship could make.

This interpretation is also supported by the fact that the arrival of the mysterious Baba Yaga, according to the descriptions of ancient peoples, was accompanied by the fall of trees at the landing site and a storm with a very strong wind. All this can be explained by the impact of a ballistic wave or the direct action of a jet stream. The Slavs who lived in those distant times could not know about the existence of such things, and therefore explained it as witchcraft.

The hut, standing on a chicken leg, apparently was a spaceship. In this case, its small dimensions are quite understandable. And chicken legs are the stand on which the ship stands.

The appearance of Baba Yaga, which seemed so ugly to people, could be quite ordinary for alien creatures. Humanoids, judging by the descriptions of ufologists, do not look prettier.

Legends also state that the mysterious Baba Yaga was allegedly a cannibal, that is, she ate human flesh. From the point of view of the new theory, various experiments on people were carried out on the ship. Later, all this was overgrown with legends and fairy tales that were told to children. In this form, this story has come down to us. It is difficult to prove something when so many years have passed, but still the mysterious Baba Yaga left her mark on history, not only fabulous, but also, perhaps, quite material. It just hasn't been found yet.

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