Remarks
It is hard to say if the author’s mother’s manic obsession with cleaning has anything to do with the heritage of Slavic folklore. Yet, it won’t do any harm if I bring this aspect to your attention. The description of the author’s mother asleep in her armchair, with a duster in her hand, could be connected to the Italian legend of La Befana, that devoted housewife, whose sense of domestic duty leads her to neglect what matters so much more in a ‘historic’ perspective: the quest for Jesus. Cleaning is, it would seem, the mother’s strategy for forgetting. She cleans the house of ‘the ancestors’ souls’, and the whole text is a sort of anamnesis of amnesia.
* * *
The most inspiring interpretation of the clean–dirty antithesis is Mary Douglas’s classic study Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. The coordinate system of ‘clean– dirty’ structures practically every primitive social community, where thinking about the world, behaviour and customs has been organised via an elaborate system of taboos. Purity, however, which is not a symbol but rather a part of our emotional make-up, can be a way to petrification. Purity is the pledge of our security, it is the enemy of change, ambiguity and compromise.
Interestingly, then, our de-tabooed age, an age of ‘leaving home’ for a space of chaos, is obsessed with cleanliness. Most television adverts, for example, advertise cleaning materials (for our homes, bodies or clothes) and are forever warning us with the formula ‘clean: positive, dirty: negative’. Even the ‘dirty’ has become the ‘cleansed’. Thanks to the media (the Internet and television), in fact, we can indirectly take part in ‘dirty’ things (pornography, sex, war, misery, natural disasters, murders, collective misery, poverty and so forth) while staying clean!
EGG
According to the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Slavic Mythology, the egg is the beginning of all beginnings, the symbol of fertility, vitality, the renewal of life and resurrection. In the cosmogonic myths of the South Slavs, the egg is a protoimage of the cosmos. In South Slavic children’s riddles, ‘God’s egg’ is the sun and ‘a sieve full of eggs’ is a starry sky. Slavs believed that the whole world was a gigantic egg: the heavens were the shell, the water was the white, the clouds were the membrane and the earth was the yolk. There is a riddle: ‘The living gives birth to the dead, and the dead gives birth to the living’, which contains the old scholastic inquiry: ‘Which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ – and the answer that Silesius gave: ‘The egg is in the chicken, and the chicken is in the egg.’37
Symbolising as it did the renewal of life and resurrection, the egg played an important part in funeral rites. An egg would be placed in the dead person’s hands, or in the coffin, or it would be dropped into the grave and buried with the coffin, so that the deceased could come back to life one day. Earthenware eggs have been discovered in Russian and Swedish crypts; statues of Dionysus with eggs in his hand have been found in Beotian graves. The same semantics of the renewal of life define Slavic and other rituals at Easter: painting eggs, decorating trees with eggs, hunting for Easter eggs and so forth. Slavs would place an egg in the first furrow ploughed in a field, and scatter bits of eggshell around the field to make the harvest a good one. Because of their multiple symbolic value, eggs could be used in many situations. People believed that eggs could stop a fire from spreading. If a fire broke out at home, the members of the household would surround the house with eggs in their hands. According to some folklore beliefs, if a man carries a rooster’s egg in his armpit for forty days, a guardian spirit will emerge from the egg and bring the man great wealth.
The egg is a universal symbol. The mythopoetic image of the world emerging from a cosmic egg is common to many peoples: the Celts, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Tibetans, the Indians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Finns, and others besides. The world was born from an egg, and in some traditions the first human being likewise (Prajapati, Pan Gu). Heroes, too, came out of eggs (if the mother ate the egg). Castor and Pollux, the sons of Leda and Zeus, were born from eggs.
The notion of the world being born from an egg, and of splitting the egg in half, has many variants. The Egyptians imagined that the egg appeared on top of a hill that emerged from the waters of the primordial ocean, Nuna. The god Khnum came out of the egg and created the variety of beings. According to the traditions of Canaan, in the beginning was the ether from which Ulomos (Boundlessness) was born. Ulomos gives birth to the cosmic egg and to Shansora, the creator. The creator breaks the cosmic egg in two and makes heaven out of one half and earth out of the other. According to Indian cosmogonic beliefs, Being springs out of non-Being, and Being gives rise to the egg that cracked in two: a silver half and a golden half. The silver shell became the earth and the gold, the heavens. The outer membrane gave rise to the mountains, and the inner, to the clouds. The tiny veins in the egg became rivers, and the bubble of water in the egg became the ocean. In Peruvian myths, the Creator begs the Sun to make people and populate the world with them. The Sun throws three eggs down to the earth: the higher estates are born from the golden egg, their wives come out of the silver one and the ordinary folk emerge from the copper egg. For some African tribes, the egg is absolute perfection, for the yolk represents the ovum and the white, the sperm. Everyone should aim for perfection – in other words, to become an egg.
Simply lying on eggs has a symbolic significance. Certain Buddhist sects revere hens, for a hen sitting on a clutch of eggs symbolises spiritual centredness and fertilisation of the spirit.
Remarks
The egg symbolism in your author’s text is plain to see. Apart from the title, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, and the spectacular egg- coffin, let me remind you of the obscure episode where the author spits out a tiny breathing body, all wet from tears and saliva, into the palm of her hand, which is already damp with tears and snot. In this ooze (or egg), she makes out a deformed miniature likeness of her mother, just as Beba dreams of an egg in which she can see her own son, in miniature, curled in the foetal position. An egg is simultaneously tomb and womb. In the Russian tale, the emperor’s daughter’s love is hidden in an egg, the very same that Mevludin offers Rosie as his ‘heart on a silver platter’.
THE HEN’S GOD
In Russian folk traditions, the hen’s god is a ritual object, or amulet, that watches over hens. A stone with a hole in the middle, a clay pot, a dish with no bottom, old worn-out slippers: anything like this can serve as the hen’s god. Usually it would be hung up in the henhouse or the yard in front of the henhouse. The hen’s god guaranteed that the hens could lay eggs continually and it drove away spirits, mostly nasty brownies (domovye, doma i) and Kikimora. An old cracked pot stuck on top of a pole or tree could catch the eye of a passer-by and so avert his bewitching gaze from the household. A hole in the pot, a dish without a bottom, a cracked jug: these were all symbols of mature female sexuality and fertility. A pebble with a hole in the middle had an additional purpose: to protect its owner from toothache.
Remarks
I would draw your attention to one detail: Beba, representing mature female sexuality, carries an unusual amulet or charm around her neck – a flat stone with a hole in the middle.
BIRDS
Birds appear in all mythopoetic systems and traditions as demiurges, deities and demons; a means of transport for the gods, demigods and heroes; celestial messengers, wizards, immortals, prophets and totemic symbols. Although the symbolism associated with birds is rich and multilayered, birds are above all symbolic postmen, intermediaries between heaven and earth.
The bird plays a key part in all cosmogonic myths, including Slavic myths. The creator sends a bird (a grebe, a dove or suchlike) to bring clay, sand or sea-foam from the bed of the primordial ocean. The creator makes the earth out of this sand or sea-foam, and in the centre of this earth he plants the tree of the world. It has its roots in the earth, its crown in the heavens and its trunk connects heaven and hearth. The crown, or upper world, is an abode for bi
rds (two birds for every side of the treetop, symbols of the sun and moon, day and night).
There is a hierarchy of birds. The eagle usually has the highest, most powerful position. In Bulgarian folklore, the eagle has access to the end of the world, where heaven and earth meet. Fairies, dragons and other mythical beings live at the end of the world. A magpie drops in. The fairies call the magpie every year to harvest the immortelle, which is why they let her bathe in the fairy lake. There she changes her feathers and returns to earth. This is why the magpie is believed to possess healing powers. When a Bulgarian child loses a milk tooth, it throws the tooth onto the roof of the house and says: ‘A bony tooth for you, magpie, so you can bring me an iron one instead!’ The Czechs and Slovaks have an identical custom, except that the children appeal to Baba Yaga instead of a magpie (Ježibaba, stara baba, ty maš zub kosteny, daj mi zub železny!).
In Bulgarian folklore, God came down to earth before the great Flood. Seeing a poor widow-woman with many children and a single hen with chicks, he decided to save her. He told the woman to gather up her children, hen and chicks, and flee from the house, but – he warned her – she should not look back. The inquisitive woman, even so, turned around and she and her children were turned to stone. God succeeded in saving the hen and chicks, and turned them into a con stellation that people call Kvochka (the brooding hen) – meaning the Pleiades.
Bulgarian – and other – cosmogonic beliefs include the notion that the earth is a flat board supported on a cockerel. Earthquakes happen if the cockerel moves or flaps its wings.
Avian typology in myths encompasses not only actual birds, but also feathered mythical creatures such as Anzuda (Mesopotamia), Garuda (India), Simurg, Varagani (Persia), Tanifi (Maori), Ruha (Arab), Straha-Raha, the Stratim Bird, the Nogot Bird, Voron Voronvich, Siren and the Firebird (Russia). There are also hybrid beings with birds’ wings that are able to fly (sphinxes, chimeras, gryphons, sirens, gorgons, etc.). Many gods and divinities turn into birds (e.g. Zeus into a swan), they have bird-like features or birds are included in their attributes (Apollo with a swan and crow, Aphrodite with swans and sparrows, Athena with an owl, Juno with a goose, Brahma with a goose, Saraswati with a swan or peacock, Krishna with a peacock’s feather headgear and so on).
A bird is a symbol of the spirit and the soul. Birds recur most often as the souls of the departed, but according to the beliefs of some Siberian tribes a bird can also be the symbol of someone’s other ‘sleepy soul’, the one that only appears in dreams. The ‘dream-bird’ takes the form of a female grouse, and its likeness can be seen carved on Siberian cradles as a talisman.
The Australian tribe of the Kurnai cherishes gender totemism linked to birds, hence one kind of bird embodies the male sex organ and another, the female. A bird is a metaphor for the sex organ among many peoples. Here are two examples from Croatian folk poetry:
Oh precious soul, my maiden true
Your nightgown is so precious too;
Beneath that gown the quail sits,
It wants no wheaten bread to eat
Nor wine to drink from purple vines
Its one desire – meat, no bones!
The quail in this instance is a substitute for the vagina, while in the next example the rooster is a substitute for the penis:
The Turk rolls the old woman
Across the flat field
Pushing her as far as the fence
Then he puts in his rooster
In the folklore mythology of many peoples, birds are messengers. They presage death (cuckoos, owls, crows), misfortune, unhappiness, as well as big disasters such as epidemics and wars, but they also herald the birth of a child or a future wedding. As well as portending weather conditions, the life of a bird also serves as a natural calendar (announcing spring and winter).
In popular creeds, birds possess healing powers. Hens are used as a ‘medicine’ against fever, epilepsy, night-blindness and insomnia: ‘Let the hens take away insomnia and bring back sleep’ (Pust kury zaberut besonnicu i dadut son). It is believed that birds can beat illness away with their wings, dig sickness out of the body with their beaks and sew up wounds. Birds can break spells, as many folklore enchantments and oaths testify.38
The link between woman and bird brings us to the Palaeo lithic era. Unusual combinations of female and avian traits appear in Palaeolithic cave drawings (Lascaux, Pech Merle, El Pindal): a beak instead of a mouth, a wing instead of a hand, a bird’s expression on a human face. In the well-known ‘narrative’ drawing of the dying man and a wounded bison, and the bird with a woman’s face watching it all, some see the bird as a symbol of the soul leaving the man. The statuettes of the woman-bird, a woman with a bird’s head, date from the same era. The notion of a half-woman, half-bird (Siren) and a bird-soul belong to humankind’s primal imagery, more ancient than the cosmogonic mythologeme of binary birds and bird-demiurges. In the Neolithic era, according to renowned archaeologist Maria Gimbutas, a figurine of a woman-bird with breasts and bulging rump turns up among different representations of the Great Goddess (statuettes of a naked woman, pregnant or giving birth, symbolising fertility).
Birds – ravens, black hens, crows, magpies, swans, geese, etc. – are linked to witches, female demons and ancient goddesses, Baba Yaga among them. Mythical female creatures often have birds’ features (claws, legs, wings or head), the ability to turn into birds or to fly like them. According to one legend, Ivan the Terrible gathers all Russia’s witches together in Moscow so he can burn them, but they turn into magpies and escape. According to another, Metropolitan Aleksey was so convinced that magpies were witches that he banned them from flying over Moscow (!). Peasants often hang dead magpies from the roof to frighten off witches.
In Bulgarian folklore, an ordinary woman can become a witch if she carries a black hen’s egg in her armpit until a black chick hatches. If she slits its little throat and smears the blood on her joints, that ordinary woman will gain a witch’s power – including the ability to turn herself into a black hen.
Peasant farmers in southern Bulgaria believe that freakish creatures called mamnici can steal their crops. Mamnici have no feathers, but they have two heads, and as they hatch from witches’ eggs, they are witches’ offspring. The souls of un christened children turn into small, chicken-like, evil, demonic beings that are called navi. Croats and Serbs believe the souls of unchristened children have birds’ bodies and human heads. In Ukraine and Poland, such a creature is called potrečuk or latawiec.
In Bulgarian folklore, chickens are ‘unclean’, ‘dark’ animals, related to demons. A chicken is a bird that cannot fly. It pecks the ground with its beak, hence it connects people with chthonic powers. Thus the chicken encompasses contradictions: as a kind of livestock, it belongs to people, but equally it belongs to the heavens (being a bird), and at the same time to the underworld (being unable to fly). Notions of Baba (Yaga) sitting on eggs in a nest made in a treetop, of her hut on hen’s legs, of her ability to give birth to forty-one daughters (a quantity that could only have hatched from eggs!):39 these all build up a picture of a black-feathered demon that is linked with all three spheres of the world.
Birds have always fascinated the human imagination, because they are connected with people’s deepest dreams of flight. Mere mortals are chained to the earth, whereas wings were the endowment of demons, angels, fairies and other mythical creatures. Birds are the gods’ transport of choice (Garuda carried the Indian god Vishnu, and Brahma flew on a goose).
In one of the most beautiful Russian fairytales, The Feather of Finist the Grey Falcon, a maiden begs her father to buy her a feather from Finist, a falcon. After three attempts, her father finally gets a feather and gives it to his daughter in a box. When she opens the box, the feather flies out, lands on the ground and turns into a handsome prince before the girl’s very eyes. The maiden and the prince love each other every night, until the maiden’s sisters find out about the unusual sweetheart from the box and wound him badly. The falco
n flies away, and the girl, if she is to find him again, must pass through thirty lands in thirty realms, wearing out three pairs of iron shoes and wearing down three iron staffs. On the way, three good Baba Yagas give her useful gifts: a silver distaff and golden spindle, a silver dish with a golden egg and a golden embroidery frame and needle. In the end, the maiden finds her sweetheart, her feather, and marries him.
The most feathery and aerodynamic Russian fairytale is the tale of Elena the Wise.40 Everyone flies in this tale: the ‘dark forces’, the ordinary soldier (turned into a robin redbreast), the three sisters (turned into doves) and Elena the Wise herself.
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Myths S.) Page 26