Creating The Webbd Wheel: An Antidote to Niceness
In which women reclaim their power ...
In post #34 of The Hanged Man we meet my favorite character. Well, one of my favorites …
No, absolutely my favorite.
Baba Yaga comes to us from Slavic folklore, and I’ve been fascinated with her ever since I met her, years ago. All my life, until the last few years, I’ve struggled inside a prison of niceness. Too nice to tell the truth. Too nice to have boundaries. Too nice to make anyone uncomfortable, ever, for any reason, no matter how uncomfortable they make me. Too nice to say no or have any needs of my own.
This culture teaches women to be good, to be sweet, tolerant, forgiving, nurturing, do endless emotional labor without complaint or resentment, and have minimal needs because, you know, everyone else!
Not only does this disempower the wild creature a woman is meant to be, it enables toxic patriarchy to go on … and on … and on.
Baba Yaga is an antidote to all that. She’s a hideous aged hag. She’s sexual. She’s rude. She’s loud and outspoken. She’s intimidating on purpose. She carries no guilt or shame. And she eats too-sweet maidens for lunch with vinegar to cut the sweetness. Young women are her specialty. She devours them, or she births them into authentic, powerful womanhood.
Baba Yaga is a hard mentor, but if she doesn’t chew you up and swallow you, she makes you into a real woman, a strong woman, a powerful and magical creature, wild and untamed, wise, unafraid, confident, independent, and harsh as lye when the need arises.
The Baba will never tell you to sit with your knees together, act like a lady, or comb your hair. She will never teach you to feel shame about your sexuality or your body. She will drag you far, far, out of your comfort zone by an ear and a handful of hair. She teaches women the sacred acts of cleansing and separating one thing from another. She cheats, she lies, she mocks, she has a lover (you’ll meet him later), she dances, she shrieks and cackles, and she throws magnificent tantrums. She’s unpredictable and very dangerous. She’s elemental female power, and we need to resurrect her now more than ever before.
So I did. In these first pages about her, she interacts with Rapunzel, teaches her a lasting lesson, and gives her a lasting gift. Many traditional elements from Baba Yaga lore (her house, for example) accompany her as I’ve written about her. I have also made her my own, as I have so many of these familiar characters from folk and fairy tales. I gave her marbles to keep in a very special marble bag. More about the bag later. Naturally, she would cheat at such a game.
The thing about Baba Yaga is she loves theater. It’s hard to tell what’s manipulation and what’s real, and one doesn’t dare ask. She sees in the dark. She sees far ahead and far behind. She pokes and pries and stirs up trouble wherever she can. She knows everything and is impossible to fool. Her favorite thing is to make people uncomfortable.
I wrote about Baba Yaga in my blog, Harvesting Stones, and it remains my most-read post, so I’m quite certain many other women long for the Mother of Witches, the Storm Raiser, the hag who embodies female power that does not arise from being nice or pretty. Women are more than a vessel for life, more than a lover, more than a mother and caregiver. We are primal creators, creatures of passion and fire, and we were not made to be muzzled, caged, and tamed. A woman fully in her power is a force of nature, and it doesn’t surprise me that the overculture does everything it can to keep us under control.
Good luck with that.
(This essay was published with post #34 of The Hanged Man.)