Who Is Baba Yaga? The Slavic Witch Has a Complicated Origin Story - Atlas Obscura
Excerpted and adapted with permission from Becoming Baba Yaga: Trickster, Feminist, and Witch of the Woods, by Kris Spisak, published September 2024 by Hampton Roads Publishing. All rights reserved.
When my grandmother was a little girl and took a shortcut through the woods, she kept her head down. The pine needle path before her feet held her full attention. Birdsong tittered and warbled in the branches overhead. The shadows of horse chestnut and silver birch leaves fell in patches, then blankets, then shrouds. But nothing tempted her attention away from her path until she returned to the sunshine. Baba Yaga, the witch of the Eastern European forests, was real to my grandmother. As a child, she knew without a doubt in her mind that Baba Yaga preyed upon the young, especially those who didn’t listen, those who broke the rules, those who lived by their own internal compass. What was an imperfect girl to do?
My mother was born across the ocean from Baba Yaga’s woods but not her influence. The old witch’s presence lingered in threats about straying into the darkness, in sharp words about manners and obedience.
