The Ambiguity of the Witch Motif

by Gauri Raje

If there is one distinguishing moment, and a character in Cinderella stories, it is the figure of the witch. She comes in many forms and shades - from the benign twinkly-eyed fairy godmother of the Disney version to the mighty Baba Yaga of the world of the East. She is in the form of a fish, a serpent, a cow or a hag from whose hair cockroaches must be combed out. One version of the Cinderella (an old gypsy version) has a passing trace of the haunting of witchcraft - the Cinderella is suspected of being a witch to be burnt at stake.

So, powerful women and women coming into their sense of self and power is at the heart of the initiation in Cinderella stories. Vasilisa the Beautiful (the Russian fairy tale) encapsulates the moves of the persecuted feminine to the period of wilderness initiation and her return back to her community and village. An elliptical circularity of maturation of the feminine. The journey to maturation is loaded with symbolic moments, some of which are potent in revealing a specific cultural look at the notion of powerful women.

A theme that also commonly plays out in Cinderella stories is that of the intentionality of Cinderella’s step-mother and step-sisters to destroy the qualities that would enable Cinderella to grow into a beautiful adult. Too much and relentless work to ‘destroy’ her beauty in the sun, roughen up her hands and hide her from the world are some of the many attempts to stunt Cinderella’s growth. As Marie Louis Von Franz puts it:

‘The desire to prevent other people from becoming conscious because one does not want to wake up oneself is real destructiveness.’

She adds:

‘...having the possibility of becoming conscious and not taking it is about the worst thing possible.’

In all the versions of Cinderella, what one finds is the over-worked girl carrying through her tasks patiently and meticulously. It is through this diligence to the tasks being given to her that new possibilities arise.

What is interesting about the Cinderella stories is the presence of both these energies or narratives: the one narrative that coincides with historical and cultural moments of the fear of ‘witches’, and another narrative that begins to ask the question ‘what is a witch?’ Rather than ‘who is a witch?’

In this article though, I will discuss one particular variant of the Cinderella archetype - the Russian story of Vasilisa the Beautiful. In this version, both these archetypes meet through the character of Cinderella and instead of being discrete categories, Vasilisa’s stepmother and Baba Yaga seem to carry different shades of the historical, cultural and archetypal energies of what is a witch.

Artwork during Anima Mundi School’s Fairytale Kitchen
by Laura Krusemark

There is no fairy godmother in this variant. Vasilisa, who is motherless and relentlessly put to work by her step-mother and sisters, finds her refuge in a doll given to her by her dying mother. The doll stays in Vasilisa’s pocket through her years of loneliness and torment by her step-kin. Through the entire story, the doll stays hidden in Vasilisa’s pocket, known only to her and fed by her with whatever morsels Vasilisa has saved up from the sparse meals given to her by her family. 

When Vasilisa continues to blossom into adulthood, instead of withering like her step-sisters, the step-mother contrives to kill her by sending her to Baba Yaga, the epitome of the terrifying crone, who is regarded to eat human flesh, especially the tender morsels of the young ones. Unlike other Cinderellas, there is no saviour/ redemptive prince that arrives and Vasilisa must rely on herself, her sensibilities and her mother’s blessings in the form of the doll to meet this new challenge. 

Baba Yaga, as a cultural archetype and a presence in the story is curious and formidable. I will discuss her significance later in the article. For now, it is sufficient to say that the time spent with her is an intensifying of Vasilisa’s initiation and Baba Yaga’s gift at the end to Vasilisa renders Baba Yaga a stranger fairy godmother than in other Cinderellas. It is also a moment where the ideation of a witch expands further than the connotations associated with witches in European fairy tales and their modern renderings. In other cultures, which may not have experienced the genocidal violence of the Middle Ages against women deemed witches, the notion of the witch indicates to different notions of what constitutes evil that is non-redemptive. 

To carry on with the story, the gift that Vasilisa brings back from Baba Yaga is a skull that emits light and/ or fire, as circumstances require. In this case, the fire from the skull burns the step-mother and step-sisters out of Vasilisa’s life and story. With their destruction through the great power of this skull, Vasilisa buries the skull rather than carry it with her, and returns to her village community closing her step-mother’s house that stood at the edge of the village and the forest.

Back in the village community, she seeks sanctuary in the house of an old woman initially awaiting her absent father. This is a time spent gathering the skills, learnings and memories of her time of initiation and distilling them into a fine and unique expression (of cloth) that is far above any of the other traditional skills present already in the village community. It catches the eye of the prince of the people leading to a marriage with Vasilisa. The marriage is not the end - it is yet another moment of weaving wherein the absent father returns and is invited by the prince to live in the palace with them while Vasilisa invites the old woman in the village to do the same. She lives out the rest of her life with her doll in her pocket.

The Witch

Who is a witch? In English, the word ‘witch’ is said to find its root in the word ‘wit’ or wise/ wisdom indicating the direction of a witch to be a wise woman. There is a gender specificity too in the word and in many of the well-known tales. A witch refers to a woman in many of the narratives.

I would contend that this is a particular cultural understanding, and possibly, time-specific as well. Anthropological studies of bewitching in France in the contemporary period speak about modes of bewitching that seek to ‘address the imagination of evil that sucks away at the vital force...’ (Faavret-Saada, 2009).

There are other cultures and societies wherein a witch is not specifically a woman. A witch is a person of either gender capable of intentionally and deliberately sucking at the generative/ vital force of an individual or a community. Rehabilitation is arrived at through the desire of a person capable of using witchcraft to want to give it up. In my area of fieldwork in western India, a witch was a half-baked shaman - someone who sought to accrue more power than they were capable of handling at the stage of their training into shamanism. To this extent, shamanism and witchcraft were interlinked. The only person who could rehabilitate the witch was a shaman - not through community ritual and spectacle that we associate with the witch-burnings of Europe but through ritual practice between the shaman and the witch - a process of cure, rather than destruction of the practitioner of witchcraft.

Looked at through this lens, in the story of Vasilisa the Beautiful, Baba Yaga refers to Vasilisa’s step-mother as someone she knows, and in other versions as her kinswoman. Baba Yaga, who is said in some versions, to have emerged out of a cauldron which the devil spat in, is not necessarily a woman requiring redemption. She knows dark shades well. Vasilisa’s step-mother in her cruel intentions towards her step-daughter is a much darker presence in this particular story. While Vasilisa’s step-mother lives on the edges of the wild; Baba Yaga knows the deep wild intimately. Its inhabitants including the riders of dawn, night and sun are her own. The mysteries of the ‘other-world’ - the hut with chicken legs, her servants - the body-less hands - are protected within her home. She is the mistress of birds - ravens, owls and crows inhabit her courtyard and are under her protection. She inhabits her full being. In doing so, she provides clarity that comes with deep intimate knowledge. She can mentor in a way the that step-mother can only compare and destroy one for the benefit of the other, in this case, attempt to destroy Vasilisa in favour of her own daughters. 

There is a critical moment in the story where Baba Yaga throws Vasilisa out of her hut on learning that Vasilisa is a ‘blessed’ young woman. At a glance, it seems like a rude and abrupt end to a period of initiation. Baba Yaga, of ancient and primordial mysteries, threatened by a saintly ‘blessing’ of a young girl. Looking at it through a different cultural lens, on the role and work of a teacher, a mentor and initiator, there might be more to this moment than seems apparent.

There is a moment in the traditional practice of Indian classical music, when the teacher recognised that their student had arrived at a form of maturity in their art. The teacher would mark this moment in a ritual which would be a public recognition that the new musician was indeed their student. It was a moment of great honour for the student to be given permission to be publicly accepted into a lineage of music. However, there were instances when the student would have become particularly accomplished in a facet of music - and if the teacher wished they could ask for a donation from the student. It was incumbent on the student to agree, although there might have been rare challenges. At times the teacher would ask the student to not ever include within his/ her repertoire that which they were extremely proficient in. One the one hand, this could be looked at negatively. On the other, it pushed the student not to merely rely on what they had achieved but to push themselves further in the mastery of the facets of the musical tradition as well. To be pushing themselves into the service of music, rather than that particular facet of musical arts that they were proficient in. To begin to learn the art of honouring (in this case Music), rather than become a skilled master of a small facet within a musical tradition.

Could Baba Yaga be that mentor who sees the proficiency that Vasilisa has achieved outside of her training, and recognises that the only way for Vasilisa to grow is to push her outside of Baba Yaga’s training, which she is clearly quite proficient in. Every task that Baba Yaga has set Vasilisa so far has been achieved. It is time for Vasilisa to be challeged not by tasks outside her world, but within her home itself - challenging the source of her stultifying existence - her step-mother and step-sisters.

Baba Yaga is a wise crone. She does not need to be reclaimed from the dangerous qualities associated with being a witch, but because she knows the dark so intimately that she can see with clarity when in her wards the darkness might consume them, and when they are ‘blessed’ or have enough generative resources within to take on the challenges on returning from the encounters with the wild, and to live in the world honouring energies of life rather than energies of annihilation.

The initiate

Artwork by Anca Sira

Vasilisa is the steady point in all the tumult that the fairytale passes through. There is an innocence, rather than a naïveté, that holds her in herself and in each moment she finds herself in. She carries out her unrelenting tasks that her step-family asks of her; she does not run away when she meets Baba Yaga although the fairytale mentions how terrified she is. Indeed, she speaks to her as though she is in the presence of an older woman, and not an ancient primordial being. 

There could be much written about Vasilisa’s doll - the gift from her dying mother and the young girl’s companion through her trials and tribulations. But, I am more interested in the moments where the doll does not impart any advice to Vasilisa, rather she acts on her own intuitive sense that turn out to be generative of her journey into her own individuation. 

A seminal moment here is when she returns from Baba Yaga’s domain with the skull that emits light and fire - the task that had been set to her by her step-sisters. With the skull, Vasilisa finds great power literally in her grasp. It shines light to find her path out of the forest; and it also emits fire to burn her tormentors to their death. The gift of the skull gives her direction and freedom. And yet, after the death of her step-family, Vasilisa does not carry this gift from the other-world into the village. She buries it, where a crimson rose bush grows out of the ground - turning ferocity into blooming life and beauty. Clarissa Pinkola Estes discusses this as the moment of burying revengeful anger by Vasilisa, and realising the feelings of revenge carried along after is more destructive. Again, Vasilisa’s generative instincts are at fore here. For me, it is the moment that Vasilisa tempers her possibility of hoarding power and risk turning into a figure akin to her step-mother. This is where the sense that Baba Yaga has of the uniqueness of Vasilisa comes to the fore. 

The gifts from the wild can have their moment in all their potency; but over time Vasilisa must learn to temper them to find and create a new community, family and love. This is the moment when Vasilisa steps into her name: ‘Vasilisa’ in Russian means princess. 

Baba Yaga
by Sitie Djarkasie