by Martin Shaw
YAGA AS HOLY TERROR, THE INITIATE’S GUIDE
Clarissa Pinkola Estes observes that, “Baba Yaga is fearsome, for she is the power of annihilation and the power of the life force at the same time. To gaze into her face is to see vagina dentata, eyes of blood.”8
The presence of Baba Yaga in the story indicates the beginning of an entirely new stage in Ivan’s initiation, one that will require subtlety, courage, and great pain if he is to survive it. Baba has encountered many young giants before; like a black hole she simply absorbs their warrior posturing deep into herself and devours them. Whatever Giant energy has borne you aloft up to now, Baba is the clawed hand that pulls you down. To survive her, listening as well as action is required.
With Baba, her form can contort into the shape of disease, a partner’s adultery, an unexpected sacking, watching something you cherish disintegrate over and over again. There is no glamour in her forms, only a kind of halitosis of the psyche, rotting meat by the radiator. The reaction to these moments is normally horror, as the hum of the muses, ignored for so long, becomes the shriek of the sirens, and the ship hits the rocks. Sometimes Yaga is a surgeon fiddling with his pen, delivering a life-altering prognosis, or maybe the ink in the pen that signs the lawsuit against you. She is endlessly malleable, and will always offer a bespoke experience: whatever is specifically ghastly to you is the form that she will take. Her mode is one of dislocation from previous status, a bringing to the knees. The perspective of her as wise or providing a kind of harsh nurture is small comfort at the moment she flies into view.
The Giant’s refusal to follow her down into the underworld indicates the beginning of Ivan breaking from this old mode of being “the red.” As representatives of that mode, giants are right to suspect if they go down they won’t come up. Ivan has further to go on his path and he knows it. In our world, Ivan could have made his fortune by now, worked up his business and brought home the bacon. He is just painting his picket fence when the letter from the IRS fraud office arrives.
His call to the underworld will take him off the heat of the red’s career track. He will actually disappear from view into the earth, reversing the display of his previous stage. It may be that the life/ death axis of Baba forces him to do this, that only calamity can produce this willingness to enter the profound unknown.
THROWING DOWN THE ANCHOR
This descent is characterized by the “black” stage of the initiation process. When one enters the black, a kind of sobering occurs, an awareness of things lost in the scramble for power and affirmation. The stillness of a hospital bed can allow the space for a particular opening to occur, often into the deep arms of grief. There is a humanity in the black, knowledge of rupture, casualties of greed, lives burnt out by the heat of ascension. Ironically this is often judged in modern life as “going off the rails” and one is regarded as unstable and peripheral, “a shadow of one’s former self.” Rather than a stage of growth, it is a dead end; one is no longer of use to the corporation. Being trapped in the red and refusing to move will result in a kind of Rolling Stones’ posture, looking always backwards to when you had time on your side. In Baba’s terrain, the underworld, initiation, and the black, you feel the scythe pass through your bubble of immortality.
The Black Knight wields his sword reluctantly and only when he has reached the sober realization that it is necessary.9
We find in this often-terrifying place odd shoots of growth coming up through the bogs and the scorched earth. In his practice, Jung emphasized something called “amplification,” a focused exploration of specific images that arose from your life or dreams. By describing the use, look, or atmosphere of the object, one revealed its resonance. This is quite different from “free association” in which you allow your imagination to move outwards, such as cat-pet-home-warmth; instead, amplification narrows and deepens the pursuit.
We could say that the Black is a kind of amplification after the expansive associations of the Red. As Ivan descends, he limits his possibilities, he leaves light behind, he follows one specific road. The endless adventures and the myriad possibilities are over. As Baba enters the Giants’ lodge, she shatters the gilded fortress of their consensual beliefs and pulls them into direct experience of the unpalatable.
This is a point in our lives where we decide (or are forced) to throw the anchor down, to live in one place, have a teacher, dig in. We look around the studio and see many unfinished paintings, different languages attempted and abandoned. Meeting the black involves working by lamplight, understanding the alchemy of oil paint, filling the doorway of your hut with corpses so no happy relatives get in. I’m not saying we live here forever, but we abandon the paths of sun to pay attention to the moonlit trail. This is a gift the descent brings. As the Turkish Sufi Ummi Sinan sings:I was heedless.
It came to me as disgrace and loneliness.
My own Beloved taught me what I know…
The life of Ummi Sinan
Is a living burning testament of Love10
REFUSING THE CALL
The sheer unknown quality of the descent into the underworld involves sitting in a tense, unsettling position for an unquantified amount of time. In a way, terror is the rope on which Ivan descends, knowing that if he doesn’t get closer to the source of this anguish, Baba will return. How many of us, like the giants, feel the wound, the strip across our back, but refuse to examine it because of the inevitable change that this will bring?
Dying to the red is too threatening, so we stay in the paralysis of the between-space, holding the rope but refusing to go down, wounded but refusing the harsh possibilities of the black. The refusal of the call can manifest as depression when the rope looks too awful to grasp, the grief too deep. On a subtler level it can be the voices of our community that attempt to pull us back. To descend means for a time to become less visible, to become a nightwalker, to be the bad tooth in the village’s smile. This hinterland that the giants inhabit beside the hole has a kind of grayness to it, a neither one thing or the other.
As well as lacking the strength to take the downward journey, we may also inhabit this place after a moment of great inspiration. “That play was amazing, but who am I fooling, I could never act, learn carpentry, speak Spanish, fix an engine. Best to sit between possibilities and wonder.” As we see, this moment can be subtle as well as wildly dramatic.
SNOWDONIA
Let’s return to our initiates preparing to fast on the mountain. Just as Ivan hovers in this moment before descent, so they are similarly facing great uncertainty and fear.
Sitting around the dark hole to the Underworld is traditionally experienced the night before beginning your fast. At first light you will be drenched in prayers, sage smoke, and embraces, after which you take up your slender pack and water and head off alone to your place of initiation. We don’t expect to see you alive again—at least, not in the way you left us. But if we move backward through time now, through an uncertain night’s sleep, to that sitting around the dark hole, we can eavesdrop on the preparation. For the days leading up to this, you will have spent longer and longer sensitizing to the lush, informing, and strange world of nature around you. You will have been removed from all contact with civilization, families, phones, job offers. Anyway, who gives a job to someone about to die?
You will have written letters to loved ones, made peace as best you can with enemies, and set your affairs in order. Your meals will have grown smaller and smaller as your body attempts to adjust to the lack of food and your mind may be blurry with withdrawal from nicotine, alcohol, or coffee.
Tears will have been shed, anger felt, and a growing fear have manifested over the coming trial. And by now it will feel like a trial. But, as with the giants, strips will have been pulled from your back in the years leading up to this and, like Ivan, you intend to descend into the darkness to face whatever’s there.
“When I look back on my life I just feel frustration at what I’ve not seized. I’m hemmed in by ghosts.”
William, rite of passage participant11
It is death to the life that has served its purpose, that is now too small, too limiting, too littered with other people’s expectations, not your own. As we sit, peering into the hole that last night, I will raise the fear one last time so it takes a seat in our circle. We discuss our greatest fears for the experience to come and I will start to talk candidly about my own and others’ encounters down there in the darkness12.
I haven’t led a group yet where someone doesn’t attempt to pull out at this point. Encounters with Entities, waking dreams, luminous animals in the middle of the night, are all part of the nebulous web of the Threshold experience. This is Spirit time, not domestic, and the doors to many worlds are open.
To present initiation as a psychological exercise or an attempt to make “good little boys and girls” is to vastly under-prepare the Initiates for the realm they are heading toward. The Underworld has medicine specifically for you, but the degree of its potency is conditional. It is uncertain, it is frightening, it is the edge.
I feel sick at what could be out there. What if I meet a Banshee? Or a person? I’ve never felt so scared in all my life.
Bridget, rite of passage participant13
Let’s return to our story.
When Ivan got to the bottom, he found a world with both a sun and moon, uninhabited except by birds flying in the sky. Having no idea where Baba was, he simply struck out in a particular direction. He walked for four days and nights over hills, by rivers, and through great forests, his only ally a small bird who seemed to always be in the surrounding trees, and to whom he fed small morsels of food when he had them. Eventually he came to a meadow where he glimpsed an unusual sight—a hut suspended on huge chicken legs moving round and round in circles, underneath a beautiful garden being cultivated by the loveliest girl Ivan had ever seen. She had hair like the midnight and eyes like the morning and Ivan was struck forever in love with her. It was very unexpected to find this arresting beauty in such a place.
She wasted no time and said to him, “If you have come to defeat Baba, know this: she has two jars of potion—one gives the drinker great strength, the other drains them of all vigor. She will attempt to drink from the jar on the right, to aid her fight, so swap the jars! Also, know that in her realm Baba is sixty times more powerful than in yours, so you will need all your courage. If you succeed, however, I will marry you and accompany you back to your world of light.” Ivan absorbed this information, swapped the jars, and hid behind the door.
Soon enough he heard Baba’s cackle as she swooped in on her mortar and pestle. “I smell the blood of a Russian boy, but that can’t be, he is another lifetime away from here!”
“Pity for you, old woman !” cried Ivan and leapt out of hiding, clutching his twenty-five pound club, full of the strength potion he had ingested. Even so, she put up a fearsome fight, thrashing and shrieking, the two of them flying over the treetops as he attempted to pull her from her mortar. Finally she made for the potion, ingested the wrong one and became as weak as a newly born kitten. Ivan seized his opportunity and struck her head clean from her shoulders with his sword. At that moment her head shrieked “Strike again! Strike again!”
Ivan replied “A brave man only strikes once,” and sheathed his sword.
From out of her hiding place the woman spoke, “It is a good thing you didn’t strike twice, or Baba would have leapt back up, very much alive with her head back on her shoulders!” The two of them left Baba’s hut, and journeyed for four days until they came to the end of the giant’s rope. Tugging on it, Ivan supported the woman’s weight as they slowly climbed back up. As the giants waited, their first glimpse of the returning pair was of this ravishing beauty heading towards them out of the dark. They realized that Ivan must have rescued and was about to marry her, and a black cloud of desire for this woman overtook them. They had to have this jewel; they’d work out the details later. So they gathered her up, and with one slash of the axe they separated Ivan from his beloved. Back, back he fell into the dark, falling for an age before landing hard on the ground, breaking many bones. And that is where we leave Ivan for now, exhausted, despairing, and in great pain, many miles from home . . .
A CROW FLIES FROM YOUR CHEST
As Ivan descends on his rope, we are aware that something in him is ending. His response to this challenge shows wisdom, as he has voluntarily gone where many of us will do anything to avoid: Baba’s Kingdom. Great swathes of Giant energy won’t help him now; instead, he needs subtlety and listening as his allies.
Ivan is certainly lost at this point, with nothing in the way of direction to Yaga, but still he gets there. To enter the black of Yaga’s kingdom involves opening your chest and a releasing a bird, one that can follow the scent better than your intellect can. Your incubating crow nature will be your guide at this point. The assembled elders we cry for in moments such as these are borne in ourselves, not externally. The response needed now is not English, but a getting down on all fours and eating Lorca’s cemeteries. The primordial freshness of instinct carries us.
We get some hint of an unexpected balance in this process by the image of both the sun and the moon hanging in the sky. The traditional polarities of masculine and feminine, solar and lunar, appear to have equal relevance in this realm. If the element that brought Ivan down the rope was terror, the realm it has opened up to him is surprising. It’s not a fog-laden wasteland, or a cemetery of the undead, but a place that holds rivers, woods, and mountains. After the rupture of Baba and the horror of descending the tunnel, we find a landscape of surprising fecundity. In the words of Nick Cave, “We jump into the abyss and find it only comes up to our knees.”13 This hints at an almost tantric perspective on Yaga, that to resist her is to witness the most terrifying apparition, but to walk toward her is to witness a Dakini, an angelic being. Her kingdom is spacious, holds beauty, living things, even balance. Best not to let your guard down entirely though.
THE MAIDEN OF THE FLOWERS
Ivan’s wanderings sniff out the center of the kingdom, his bird nature leading him to the whirling magic hut, the world turned upside down, the taboo place of Baba’s power. Again, surprises. Baba has a wonderful garden, tended by an extraordinarily beautiful woman. By facing overwhelming challenge, by stepping into complete uncertainty, Ivan encounters rare beauty. We remember that this is taking place underground, i.e. in the psyche.
The Celts have a saying that the soul of a man is female, and the soul of a woman, male. If we follow that lead, we can see it in Ivan’s discovery of the deepest recesses of himself. As the legs of the hut turn, so do the faces of the Underworld, sometimes grotesque, nightmarish, and then, with a spin, staggering in their depth and beauty. Our capacity to even meet the maiden can only come from openness to the descent. If we return to the rope too early, we miss her. If we refuse the call at all, we miss her. If we cannot be led by instinct, we miss her. We are a talking head, bemoaning our lot. Without the encounter in the garden, the transformative element is lost.
Honoring the process of the black weans us from the addiction to youth, the sun at its zenith. Only by entering the Underworld do we peek underneath the skin, get closer to the veins, tissue, and vital organs that give us life. We are forced to dwell among the parts of us that malfunction, get lost in heartbreak, are abandoned in the brightness of external ambition. The eyes we have longed to drown in are never found completely in the slash and conquest of the red; that eternal moment is only encountered at its deepest in this inner journey.
The root origin of this love reorients Ivan to an awareness that he can even detect the maiden’s existence. Many spend their lives looking for such an encounter in the outside world, in another being. The irony is that Ivan locates this depth at a moment of utter vulnerability, far from his achievements in the upper world where he is supported by his friends, the environment he can comprehend.
The initiatory experience, while severing us from the familiar, b
estows a boon. In the space created by strangeness, in the otherness of Ivan’s situation, is the capacity for him to recognize an encounter with soul, the silent guest in all descents. This is not soul as a flimsy, intangible idea but as the vehicle for Ivan to bathe in the depth of the experience, no matter how hot or deep the water. The crisis, the Yaga, has a beauty core in it and this is what Ivan has met. Baba is insistent on this meeting and without its union will keep extending her tendrils, robbing the larder.
THE SWITCHING OF THE GOBLETS
What’s wonderful here is the quality that the maiden instructs Ivan to use: canniness. Using trickery, in other words, is the only way that Ivan can possibly hope to defeat Yaga. Here is more of the black knowledge again. Black has traded innocence for experience, and in this instance canniness is the only way to play the cards. By moving the jars, Ivan commits a magician’s act, secretly altering the dynamic of the situation and throwing the outcome. He tricks the Trickster. In the outside world, we could say this is the moment you are no longer a victim, or a “warrior for the truth,” or a pious but slightly rigid knight. Ivan throws a taste of Yaga’s own medicine back at her to defeat her, the only way it can be done. Simple polarities can’t work here and a kind of intuitive shadow strategy is called for.
A younger Ivan may have scoffed at the jars or relied on brute power, but the older Ivan, deep into the experience, uses the tools the moment brings him. The part of himself that Ivan has marshaled is very old and is the element in us that can smell a bad deal or a disingenuous gesture. He is enough of a seasoned tactician to respond. What’s vital here is the context, this is life and death. To some it would be an easier story if Ivan defeated Baba purely by the strength of his arm, but it is part of Baba’s genius that an encounter with her offers the death of naiveté; any other response will produce annihilation. It is worth mentioning at this point that the word “witch” derives from the word wit, meaning wise. The dark witch is an encounter with archaic wisdom contained in the recesses of our own psyche.