Baba Jaga & Vasilisa the Wise
January 8th is Babin Dan (Grandmothers Day) in the Slavic Balkans. It is a holiday that originates from pagan rites that date back to the Paleo-Lithic era. Paradoxically, this day falls just a few short weeks after the winter solstice and the rebirth of the Sun child. This babe is called Badjak, from old Slavic badar, meaning “to be awake”, and he is symbolized by the yule log that is ceremonially lit on solstice eve. But now that it Badjak is awake, he must be nurtured through the remainder of the cold winter. This winter is personified as an elder crone, the culmination of the dark goddess Morena’s long journey to the underworld. She is appears in Germany as Houlda, in Switzerland as Perchta, and most notably in Russia as Baba Jaga (Grandmother Apple). Here she became a caricature of her old self, a silkscreen for the projection of christian fear and hostility towards learned women. She is portrayed as a demonic old hag who lives in a hamlet in the woods made of skulls and other assorted animal parts. In the Balkans however, she maintains much of her ancient dimension and complexity.
Baba Jaga: modern depiction
Here she is known variously as Babica, Babajic, Babatino, or Baba Selo depending on where you are, and the customs that characterize her cultus today are more in keeping with the ancient tradition. In the Balkans, Baba is not just feared, but respected, if not loved. She is the wisdom keeper of the forest and knows the medicinal secrets of all it’s inhabitants. Today we call this “alternative medicine”. On her day of reverence peasant mothers with children under a year old visit their midwives with offerings of food, kerchiefs, towels and other domestic goods. In return, these “midwives”, mostly elder wise woman called vještice (witches), perform a ritual for the health of the child that involves a stiff dose of hemp oil and the placing of grey wool atop the lad’s head, a piece sympathetic magic designed to assure the youth long life (until the hair turns grey). This custom lives on in many rural regions. The relationship of the child to Baba is important to note here. If we recall that Rodnovers view the solstice as the birth of the new Sun (Son) and couple this with Baba’s association with midwifery, the timing of this occasion suggests she has a soft spot for the children, and not because she’s eyeing the quality of the baby fat for her next brew.
According to Radomir Ristic, Serbian lore says that Baba was the first female ancestor to die and go to the underworld. He views her as the primordial manifestation of one’s collective female ancestry. He says she can be found in all “major caves and pits”. That said, he is careful to warn of the dangers inherent to seeking her counsel. She may have a soft spot for children, but around adults she can prove deadly, and not only in the folkish sense. She is the library of congress when it comes to the occult knowledge of the hedgerow, but one can’t just stroll on in and swipe their card to gain access. She is more like the Akashic Records… of Tartaris. Per Ristic:
“In many fairy tales the main character goes to see her [Baba] to obtain some magical object or animal that will help them to accomplish their mission. She then asks him a question or a riddle; if he answers correctly, he will get everything he needs, but if not, she kills him or turns him into something, or even enslaves him and keeps him to be her servant.”
Serbia: the sacred rock gate
This sounds frightening enough, but Ristic adds the caveat that Baba only punishes those who seek her magical knowledge for their own selfish ends. I’m a believer that failing Baba’s initiation can in fact be deadly. It can bring about the death of one’s personality, which can in turn lead to a psychotic break that could ultimately lead to very real, physical death. Baba can turn people into such things as a pigs (gluttony and hoarding), toads (nymphomania and sexual dysfunction), chickens (anxiety disorder and irrational phobias); all of which seem to afflict magical practitioners at a disproportionate rate. Lastly, I needn’t recite some of the more sordid accounts of die-hard devotees and careless dabblers to demonstrate the risks and perils of becoming a “god-slave”. Suffice it to say Baba is dangerous! That said, Ristic notes “She is still the ancestor who helps her generations, and if she picks someone to be her pupil, they are not in danger because that person has passed all manner of tests they are not even aware of.”
This brings me to a piece of clairaudient UPG I had three weeks ago while in a catatonic state prior to falling asleep. There I received a riddle that was spoken as follows: “I am in the vault, inside the volcano. They say I am a mother”. The first intuitive response that came to mind was Magna Mater (Latin: Great Mother). The vault inside the volcano may refer to the magnetic core of the earth. The volcano, in which flows magma (mag+ma), can refer to any number of seismically active mountains that ancient cultures held sacred. Magna Mater, before being a Roman import, was first Cybele, known more affectionately as “Mountain Mother” in Phrygia. Ristic sees Baba as the third regenerative aspect of Šumska Majka (Forest Mother), the beautiful, bright maiden who initiates most Balkan witches. It should be noted here though that she is also called Gorska Majka (Mountain Mother), depending on the type of terrain the Rodnover inhabits. My Balkan ancestors are from the Dinaric Alps, where there are more barren hills than there are forests. There are more details to this download that involve phenomena of electro-magnetism and Cybeles’s cult in the city of Magnesia ad Sipylum. But I will leave it there and simply say Baba’s mysteries, like Hella’s and Ereshkigal’s, are decidedly infernal, as opposed the terrestrial mysteries of Forest Mother (Dejana/Morena), the domestic mysteries of Mokoša, or the celestial mysteries of Zoria (Danica).
Cybele: Roman Era
A year ago, I had a series of vivid dreams that I was never able to make sense of. The first, was rather erotic and involved a liaison with an late middle-aged female witch who was an adept at binding magic… I’ll leave that there. The next involved me remotely viewing myself in two separate scenes, from two separate frames. In the right frame I was studying hermetic magic in a classical Hellenic library as the sunset pierced through the west facing foyer. In the left frame I was in the woods under the full moonlight, harvesting herbs in the forest not far from a modest stone cottage that I presumed was my residence. In the right frame I fell ill with cancer, while surrounded by two members of my family who stood by helpless and dissociated. In the left frame I grew older, but healthier. The last dream in the series (I say “series” now only because I feel in hindsight they were all connected) I found myself in a wheel chair, in a hospital room surrounded by perplexed physicians laboring over me. As a cancer kid with six operations under my belt, this scene was actually familiar to me. At the time of the dream I was only a few months removed from my second kidney transplant, but what happened next was strange. Another late middle-age woman arrives, this time in a lab coat and she pushes her way through the crowd to reach me. Once there she performs a pass around my heart with her fingers, using a specific mudra, tracing a specific geometric shape that I still recall. I felt assaulted as it was happening though. It was painful. Overcome with fear, I frantically attempted to wheel myself out of the facility. I thought she was a witch who had just cursed me. But as I reached the sliding double doors I suddenly began to feel lighter. I arose from the wheelchair, curious to know who that dreadful women was that just… cured me?
Right: Baba Jaga by Vania Zouravliov
With these dreams in hindsight, plus the added context of Ristic’s book, I see the initiation unfolding before me more clear: The act of consecration in the first dream plugged me into the ancestral mainframe of the divine feminine. The second dream was my personal prophesy; the crossroads that lay before me and the struggles and pitfalls of each route. In the last dream I meet her again. She shows up as a frightening woman that pries open my damaged heart so I can (spiritually) walk again. But was this Baba? I remained skeptical because my dreams of her did not always mirror the decrepit old hag image I had become accustomed to. But when I recount Ristic’s point that Baba is the source-code that operates the divine feminine’s entire probability matrix of manifestation, the need to pars her divinity into the any “proper aspect” becomes both futile and inapplicable.
Back to Baba’s riddle… So during the course of my obligatory Google search of Magna Mater (my answer to the riddle), I stumbled across the statue of the 1st century matron of Perga. Her bust bore a startling resemblance to me. I mean an UNCANNY resemblance. Not only was she a prolific builder, she was the High Priestesses of Artemis and Cybele. Ristic syncs these two with Forest Mother and Baba respectively. There are other channeled messages that construct an even wider labyrinth of synchronicity here, but I’ll sum it up by saying I have no doubt this ‘matron of Perga’ is an ancestral spirit, what Norse heathens call kinfylgja, sent to get my ass into gear on the career and community front, and surely Baba is the one who sent her.
Veleisc: medicinal herbs
So now we have all the intangibles that Ristic outlines; a fearsome elder woman, an act of initiation, prophesy, transfer of magical knowledge, ancestral guidance, and a riddle that one can only hope is correctly solved lest I be turned in to chicken! This brings me to how I ultimately observed Babin Dan. I planed on constructing an alter and the like but time got away from me. However that week I had the impulse to give away my dried herbs via Facebook on various heathen/pagan interest groups. I had a responsibility to my plant familiars and feared the materia might spoil before it all went to good use. I sent out about six care packages across the country and delivered a few others in person to local folk. In fact, I ran out of most everything. In hindsight, this was the perfect way to honor the wisest of all herbal wise women! So I smile now after pulling Ristic’s Balkan Traditional Witchcraft off my shelf to write this. He says of Baba…
“The one who becomes her pupil is obligated to repay by helping their community or by performing charitable acts that she directed her pupil to perform. A person who obtains her knowledge not only gets the ability to use it, but choice in the manner in which it is used.”
modrodnovery.com/2014/01/15/beauty-and-the-baba-unmasking-the-slavic-ancestress/
