BABA YAGA

Stone Age Bone Broth for the Human Soul

One of our sons loves saying to people: “my Mum prefers living in a forest house on chicken legs to life in a big city like London!”

I myself often joke that I live in a gingerbread house in a Nordic forest and that Hansel and Gretel visit sometimes. Oh and Red Riding Hood of course, she drops in all the time. She is an amazing teacher. Her red cloak is lined with esoteric knowledge and the wolf (from the fairy-tale) is really her familiar or “power animal”, to use a phrase from core shamanism, which does not really exist in Old Norse Traditions. This was explained in an earlier essay here on Substack: POWER ANIMAL OR ASPECT OF OUR OWN SOUL.

A few days ago I shared a photograph on social media and typed in the following caption: “I had long hoped to meet Baba Yaga in the Forest and last night, at the exact moment of sunset, I did”. (Sunset happened at 10.20 pm).

Most people take selfies (and put filters on them) to prove how young and beautiful they look but I have moved the other way. I have been taking (black and white) photographs of my (ageing) self in the hope of catching a glimpse of Baba Yaga. I am a 57 year old woman. The Big Six Oh is started to appear on the horizon.

Who is Baba Yaga? Her name is pronounced Baba Yuh-GA in Russian and spelled Баба-Яга. (When the vowel “a” is not emphasized in Russian its pronounced more like UH. I still remember a stern lecture from my Russian teacher about how Westerners pronounce the names of most Russian politicians incorrectly!)

She is a Grandmother Witch from Slavic folklore. She stands accused of “eating children” and I will get to that. She lives in a hut in the forest. Her house walks around on chicken legs, as my son knows very well. She also flies over the treetops in a huge mortar and pestle. In some versions of the story the fence around her hut is made of human bones (often shown with human skulls perched on top, in popular illustrations). One of her (many) epithets is “The Bony One”. In Western culture she is sometimes called a Crone Goddess. Source

We have to remember that all Slavic languages are related but also different and unique, just like Scandinavian languages (or indeed the larger family of Germanic languages). Baba means “old woman” or “grandmother”, not unlike Edda in Old Norse. The difference is that Baba is also used in a pejorative way, meaning old, dirty or foolish (but the word Edda was not). Also think of the related word бабушка (babushka), a fond word for grandmother.

Yaga translates across various Slavic languages as “horror”, “serpent or snake”, “witch”, “wood nymph” or “wicked woman”. Perhaps a more accurate translation is “evil woman” as that clearly shows a Christian filter and gives us a powerful clue how she has been demonized for many centuries. Source

The first references to Baba Yaga appear (in written sources) in 1755 but we have legends about her from a much earlier time. Most pre-Christian belief systems have a female figure who is a Protector of All Wild Things and also a trickster, a shapeshifter and a Mistress of Initiation. She invites all of us (but girls and women especially, because we are socially conditioned from birth to be nice, available in emergencies and to unfailingly put other people first at the expense of themselves!) to step away from civilisation, outside social norms and expectations. She represents the freedom that fearless shadow work and wild places offer. She helps us rewild ourselves and retrieve our FERAL SELVES.

(I added the birds using Canva)

Time to get up close and personal! To me Baba Yaga is the Mother of All Witches, The Forest Mother and the ultimate Mistress of Initiation. She has a connection to (and kinship with) many other figures I work with: The Bone Mother, Frau Holle, the Dutch goddess Tanfana, Norse goddess Hel (but also Huldra) and even the Skogsrå (about whom I recorded a 30-second video introduction last week).

As some of you will know, I named my online school for the Pregnant Hag and Baba Yaga is one of the global manifestations of this archetype. She does not really eat children but she does teach that children need to pass through initiations in order to grow up. No helicopter or tiger parenting (German) on her turf! (Japanese people call this phenomenon giraffe parenting!) Serious initiations are always encounters with death in some way or form, ranging from the death of a pet, a major loss, a serious accident or illness, to the death of a (grand) parent. “Time eats children”: they must grow up, childhood does not last forever. Time slowly eats all of us (the ageing process shows that erosion in our faces and bodies): our timespan on Earth is limited, we must enjoy it fully while we have it, and get our priorities right.

Baba Yaga is one of my mentors on the road to becoming an Elder. (Recently a dear colleague told me that I am already an Elder and to leave the word “aspiring” out of things, but I feel it remains a work in progress!) In 2021 - 2022 I made a series of paintings dedicated to the Bone Mother (available as a book). Several of my students had died in one intense period, which is a powerful initiation for a teacher (because they spell my own death, remind me that death is never far off, that they now know more than I do about the Land of the Dead). Then my mother died in 2022. The death of a parent is a HUGE initiation. (Our youngest son asked, the day after the funeral: but Mum, how are you going to be a mother if you do not have a mother any more?)

I love Baba Yaga’s connection to bones. I collect bones and animal skulls. I have a Circle of Animal Skulls arranged on the piano - they look at me while I play. Most recently I have had a several dreams about a wild boar skull waiting for me in the Forest - but I have not located it yet! Only weeks after my mother’s death I found a dead swan on an uninhabited island here in the archipelago and a very talented artist friend made me two swan bone flutes from the humurus bones. You find the full (mindboggling) story in an essay titled SWAN MAIDENS AND SWAN BONE FLUTES.

Returning after a month spent overseas (teaching in the US) I found a dead fox in our London garden in April this year. I allowed it to decompose in peace and then transported the skeleton to Sweden to work with its bones in a ceremonial way. (Thankfully the border guards only had a very perfunctory look through the trunk of our car!)

Over the summer solstice period I have had intense dreams about my own bones marinating in local waters infused with birdsong. I am immersed in deep reflections on how I nourish others and allow others to nourish me. I am changing my diet. Bone broth is made from the bones and connective tissues of animals. It dates to prehistoric times, when hunter gatherers turned the inedible parts of animals (bones, hooves, knuckles, fins, gizzards etc.) into a broth to extract all nutrition possible and not waste one molecule. I am not on the Paleo Diet but (as a lifelong vegetarian) I am coming around to Stone Age Bone Broth…

The Secret Garden of the Bone Mother - painting by Imelda Almqvist

(From a recent poem titled “The Greening”)

… My bladder waxes and wanes like the moon

My blood sings, becomes a red river

Where ancestors peddle their kayaks, on safari

Watching the bears on the shore

The greening has started - I am greening too.

My Raven Mother, pen-and-ink drawing by Imelda Almqvist

Another thing Baba Yaga does is feeding me words she wants me to reclaim, along with her Stone Age bone broth. One such example (but there are others, in many different languages) is the Swedish word “kärring”, pronounced CHERRING). The most neutral translation is “crone”, but in contemporary Swedish it is often used in a pejorative way (not unlike “Baba” in Russian): Nån borde läxa upp kärringen! - Someone's got to teach that old bag a lesson! (And often a curse word is added in as well, which I decided to leave out).

As I grow older (and hopefully do become an Elder worth my salt) I try to question and challenge ageism where and when I can. Some women (active in goddess spirituality) are now reclaiming this word: the Kärring is the Crone Goddess, the Ancient One, one with the Earth and animals. She treads the fine line between poison and medicine. She rescues and heals wounded animals (here she overlaps with the Skogsrå!) She is outraged when large-scale logging occurs and her rage unleashes winter storms and hail, even in the middle of summer. (As the Hag she is the indwelling spirit of the Hagal Rune).

She loathes people who try to opt out of initiations by having a too comfort-focussed life, by being commitment-phobes, or hiding in dank basements playing violent computer games. Sooner and later she will come and tap them on the shoulder. She will personally set ordeals and (apparent, to human eyes) disasters in motion, to make them grow up and pull out of their apathy. Life is too precious a gift. Life is short! We need to have a wild and untrammelled love affair with Life: dance naked on or starlit beaches, walk through fire, scatter kindness like stardust wherever we go.

The Old One does not only work with women, though her wisdom is dark (as in esoteric, related to dark nights of the soul) and deeply feminine. Her ultimate lesson is that Death is our Ally. She helps me and my students perform Norse psycho pomp work, The Wild Hunt.

This morning I found a dead dragonfly in our sauna. No creature is too small for Baba Yaga to care about. I had already glimpsed the tiny shape while I had my shower and she tapped me on the shoulder: return it outside, give it a funeral!

And if my essays about the treatment and fate of many children in our world turn a little…. strident… or over-emotional… it is because Baba Yaga sits right next to me, dictating the words. She does NOT eat children, she guards them with her own life!

I try (but sometimes fail) to get out one essay a week, 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 sacred art, 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, Forest House and Forest School, Sweden

Where My Bones Become Birches And My Hair Becomes Lichen - painting by Imelda Almqvist

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 has presented her work on both The Shift Network and Sounds True. She 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 is currently working on a handbook for rune magicians (about the runes of the Elder Futhark) and on more books in the Green Bear Series. Imelda runs an on-line school called Pregnant Hag Teachings, where all classes she teaches remain available as recordings, which can be watched any time.

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/

Twitter: @ImeldaAlmqvist