BABA YAGA & "ALTAR EGOS"

And why does she bake children in her oven?

“In essence, the grandmother represents collective spirit of female ancestors. It is said that she was the first woman who died and went to underworld. That is why people think that she resides in all major caves and pits. She is dangerous, but she is also a wise old woman the guardian of ancient knowledge; lucky is the one she chooses as a pupil.”
― Radomir Ristic in his book: Balkan Traditional Witchcraft

The author standing in front of an “Ájtte” in Jokkmokk ( a full explanation follows in the main text!)

This essay follows on from my first essay dedicated to Baba Yaga (from June 2024) so you may want to read piece that first:

BABA YAGA: Stone Age Broth for the Human Soul

When the Hag Years are upon us, the Hag meets us at every crossroads in our lives, as a Teacher, Taskmaster and reminder of Death. Baba Yaga is never far off, when we gain untold spiritual riches along with our silver (or white) hair. I also work with some of her “sisters” such as Norse goddess Hel, the Germanic Mother (or Vrouw) Holle and the Swedish Huldra or the Skogsrå.

ART VIDEO: THE WILD HUNT OF FRAU HOLLE AND HER HEIMCHEN

Baba Yaga has many more “sisters”, such as:

• The Bulgarian Gorska Maika (Горска майка: Forest Mother)

• The Hungarian Vasorrú Bába (the Iron-nose Midwife)

• The Serbian Baba Korizma or Gvozdenzuba (Iron-tooth)

• Baba Roga (Forest Mother, used to scare children in Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia)

• The Slovenian aga baba or ježibaba, Pehta or Pehtra baba and kvatrna baba or kvatrnica.

• The Muma Pădurii (Forest Mother) or Baba Cloanța of Romanian folklore. Her name refers to her nose as a bird's beak. SOURCE

After I graduated from Art School in Amsterdam (meaning that I was in my early to mid twenties), I went through a period of painting mysterious beings. They had human bodies but bird’s heads with large beaks. They were carrying infants around (or to safety) in otherworld or dream-like landscapes. At the time I called them “the bird gods”, for lack of a more “mythologically fluent vocabulary”. Today I think that they were “sisters” or manifestation of The Fierce First Grandmother (but they also have a connection to, and I think they descend from, the Neolithic Bird Goddess).

I have a free range and rather forensic mind (as my previous essays about organ donation may have demonstrated). For decades I have been intrigued by the fact that Baba Yaga’s notorious forest hut (which famously walks around by itself on chicken legs!) has a fence made from poles, with human skulls perched on top. This summer I found myself wondering how I could move closer to Baba Yaga and her world, without doing something offensive or impossible (such erecting poles displaying human skulls). I am not a medical student (so I am not entitled to possess a human skeleton) and I have deep respect for the sanctity of graves. Not to mention the fact that my husband, who is remarkably “chilled” about living with a Forest Witch, would definitely draw the line at such a feature - and I value our long marriage!

On our first visit to Sápmi, we (that is Husband, Son #3 and I) visited Ájtte, the main museum for Sámi culture in Jokkmokk, here in Sweden. The word ájtte refers to a kind of storage shed in the Lulesámi language (see the picture at the top of this essay). This museum has an ájtte (as well as other Sámi structures) in their garden.

Driving around the countryside surrounding Kiruna in Arctic Sweden, in March this year, I saw a lot of these structures in the grounds of larger houses and farms. To me they look like “the closest thing to Baba Yaga’s hut”. Scholars also link her “hut on chicken legs” to these Finno-Ugric and Sámi structures. These “huts” (storage units) stand on one or several (depending on size) wooden stilts, with the tree roots still attached for stability.

These structures are generally quite small (far too cramped for even one person to live in). They are often found in forests rather than villages. (Surprisingly) they do not walk around and there is no stove, oven or cooker in them.

So what is a Witch to do?

Every once in a while a tree dies of old age, or is felled by a storm. My husband took a chainsaw to one dead tree (blocking our forest track) and turned the stumps into a circular structure that we (jokingly) call Wood Henge (word play on Stonehenge). After the moose skull I called Hiisi joined my “Skull Family” (THE REBIRTH OF THE MOOSE SPIRIT) I decided that, as part of his death and resurrection ceremony, I would turn this structure into the closest possible thing to Baba Yaga’s set-up. I placed my animal skulls on the tree stumps and did utiseta (sitting out) there.

And with me in it (in broad daylight):

Baba Yaga’s fence became, almost inadvertently, an altar! More likely, her house was always an altar but also a temple of healing. The skulls mark the sacred boundary between the Land of the Living and the Land of the Dead. A liminal space or threshold space that living human beings should cross only at their peril, ready for initiation by the First Ever Mother Who Died.

Like most (or all) powerful pre-Christian figures, Baba Yaga has been demonised. This “filter from Christianity” still clouds our perception of her. She is formidable, for sure, but also deeply compassionate, especially about young lives (in my experience, as is Vrouw Holle).

There are many tales about Baba Yaga “baking children in her oven”. I looked into this and discovered that there is an ancient Slavic healing practice where very sick children were covered in dough and re-baked (rebirthed) in a carefully heated oven. When a woman is pregnant, people still say (in English): “she has a bun in the oven”. The bun clearly refers to the growing baby (think of yeast and rising dough) and the oven represents her womb, the “Oven of Life” where new live is shielded, nourished and “baked”, until it is ready life outside the womb. I believe that this figure of speech contains ancient ancestral knowledge of ancient European myths and powerful figures. READ MORE

Baba Yaga is represented as old and ugly most of the time (really mirroring our own deep-seated fear of old age and death, unkindly projected onto older people) but, in my personal experience, she is all ages at the same time because she knows the Secrets of Rebirth. She is can also appear as a young maiden, an expecting mother or a middle-aged woman. She is both Mother and Baby, Maiden and Hag. She is the Cosmic Oven inside the Sacred Circle of Death.

Her hut is said to walk around - mothers run after toddlers and keep extremely busy. It is also said to rotate. When my own three children were under school age, I often felt like a “small solar system”, with three small human planets circling me for every step I took! And now, as a mother of grown children, I have to get used to “not being the gravitational centre of their universe any longer”. That too is a job! So now think of our proper (astronomical) solar system: our Earth is spinning around the Sun and the Moon in turn is circling the Earth. To me Baba’s Yaga’s house is far more than a fairy-tale, it is a cosmological map that helps us make sense of the universe we inhabit.

My skulls are still out there, closely observing the ever-changing weather and ever-changing lighting of Scandinavian summer nights.

Working with a huge outdoor altar like this, also means inviting our Alter Egos (I often see the term mis-spelled as Altar Egos!) to visit. In recent dreams I have been every possible age: baby, toddler, teenager, young mother etc. And even in my dreams the Hag taps me on the shoulder with her bony fingers and says: “Life is just a dream - a small circle. It is an island surround by an ocean called Death - a much larger Circle”.

I am currently working on a series of paintings where I am either “swimming with the ancestors” or I am an ancient whale in the sea, observing the ships that took our ancestors across a body of water to the Land of the Dead. After those dreams a common theme at Scandinavian petroglyph sites suddenly made a lot more sense. (I will do a sacred art post about that and about psychic archaeology, another day! With a nod to the wonderful Laura Perry, who taught me this term! She is the Founder and Temple Mom of Ariadne's Tribe, a worldwide inclusive Minoan spiritual tradition. Please check out Laura’s Substack and her new book about The Minoans!)

Petroglyphs in Tanumshede, on the West Coast of Sweden

I have also had dreams about the First Mother Who Died and became the grandmother who represents collective spirit of all female ancestors, as described by Radomir Ristic in the powerful quote I placed at very top of this essay.

I try (but sometimes fail) to get out at least one essay a week (sometimes more), due to travel, international teaching commitments and family care responsibilities (our family lives with Alzheimer’s and I have written several posts about that). If you would like to see regular posts about about Nordic spirituality and my life as a Forest Witch (and of course short videos of all the wildlife here!), please follow me on Instagram or Facebook, thank you!

Imelda Almqvist, Forest House and Forest School, Sweden

BIO FOR IMELDA ALMQVIST

Imelda Almqvist is an international teacher of Sacred Art and Seiðr/Old Norse Traditions (the ancestral wisdom teachings of Northern Europe). So far she has written four non-fiction books and two picture books for children. Natural Born Shamans: A Spiritual Toolkit for Life (Using shamanism creatively with young people of all ages) in 2016, Sacred Art: A Hollow Bone for Spirit (Where Art Meets Shamanism) in 2019, Medicine of the Imagination - Dwelling in Possibility (an impassioned plea for fearless imagination) in 2020 and North Sea Water In My Veins (The Pre-Christian spirituality of the Low Countries) was published in June 2022.

The Green Bear is a series of picture book for children, aged 3 – 8 years. The stories and vibrant artwork, set in Scandinavia, invite children to explore enchanting parallel worlds and to keep their sense of magic alive as they grow up.

Imelda appears in a TV program, titled Ice Age Shaman, made for the Smithsonian Museum, in the series Mystic Britain, talking about Mesolithic arctic deer shamanism.

Imelda’s eagerly awaited book about the runes (the title is Portals, Patterns and Pathways, a Handbook for Rune Magicians, Star Gazers and Myth Makers) will be published by Collective Ink on 26 May 2026). She is currently working on a book about Inuit deities and mythology.

Imelda prefers being contacted by email. She only rarely checks (or responds) to DM’s on social media platforms.

Please note that Imelda’s on-line school called Pregnant Hag Teachings, where all classes she teaches remained available as recordings, will go off-line on 3 September 2025! PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT AND FULL EXPLANATION

Website:

http://www.shaman-healer-painter.co.uk/

YouTube Channel: youtube.com/user/imeldaalmqvist

Online School: https://pregnant-hag-teachings.teachable.com/courses/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/imelda.almqvist/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/almqvistimelda/