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“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

baba-yaga.jpg?w=656&width=236Just in time for Halloween, I wanted to write about my most favorite fairy tale character for whom this blog is named, Baba Yaga. If you do not know her, you should. She makes several important appearances in Russian folklore, most notably inVasilissa the Beautiful.

Baba Yaga is a fearsome, bloodthirsty hag. She rides through the Russian forest in a mortar, pushing herself along with a pestle. Her hut stands on chicken legs, and can turn around at will. A fence surrounds her house made out of human bones, and on every fence post stands a skull with glowing eyes. She is “eats people as one eats chickens.” She is an embodiment of archetypal evil.

And yet, she is also ambiguous. In Vasilissa the Beautiful, we learn that Baba Yaga controls the coming and the waning of the day. She has access to powerful, elemental magic which she can choose to bestow on ordinary mortals if they prove their worth. It is she who holds the secret to overcoming the terrible situation faced by the heroine in the tale, and it is she who possesses the colt that Ivan will need to defeat Koshchei the Deathless.

kali.jpg?w=656&width=190She is more than a witch. She is a great nature goddess, possessing the power of both life and death like nature herself. She is an image of the Divine Feminine, that which is capable of ruthless destruction and loving nurturing. She is the folklore equivalent of other bivalent goddesses such as Kali. In this sense, it isn’t correct to categorize Baba Yaga as evil, any more than it would be to describe nature itself with this word. Nature is amoral, sometimes fantastically destructive and cruel, and other times just as life-giving and nurturing. Jung explores this theme in his famous essay “Answer to Job.” In it, he makes the case that Yahweh is unconscious, and therefore amoral. “This is I, the creator of all the ungovernable, ruthless forces of Nature, which are not subject to any ethical laws. I, too, am an amoral force of Nature, a purely phenomenal personality that cannot see its own back.” Evil can only exist where there is consciousness.

Baba Yaga’s grotesqueness and power are illustrative of the problem of dealing with these dark, primordial psychic contents. All of us contain this kernel of darkness. We manage to hide it away from ourselves for the most part, remaining naïve to our own capacity for evil and destruction. What happens when we do confront it? Sometimes, it can destroy us, overwhelming us and turning us into the very monster we sought to overcome. This is a story of the ego’s hubris, the imperial belief that it can colonize and rule over the contents of the unconscious. When consciousness does not approach the archetypal energies within the collective unconscious with sufficient humility, it will be vulnerable to being devoured or corrupted by the darkness therein.

Here, I invite you to watch this delicious award winning short film by my very talented friend Dr. Jamieson Ridenhour called The House of the Yaga. It illustrates what can happen when the ego confronts the heart of darkness. It contains the wonderful artwork of Ali LaRock.

kurtz.jpg?w=656&width=284Ridenhour’s take on what happens when we stare into the abyss is similar to Franics Ford Coppola’s. In Apocolypse Now, Captain Willard is assigned the mission to infiltrate the compound of Col. Kurtz who has gone “insane” and set himself up deep in the jungle as a self-styled demi-god. Willard is to confront this evil and terminate it. Of course, whether Kurtz is actually insane or making rational choices in the midst of an insane war is an open question. He has stared into the abyss and seen the truth about our capacity for evil that the rest of us would be happy not to know about. His ability to confront this darkness is what has given him power over his tribal followers, what leads Dennis Hopper’s character to praise him as a “genius.” Kurtz has left aside the trappings of human morality that is valued by consciousness, and lives a life of archetypal evil. Now Willard confronts the same horror. Like Natasha in Ridenhour’s short, the risk is that he will become the successor to the evil he set out to conquer.

larock-yaga.jpg?w=382&h=208&width=382Baba Yaga is in image of nature herself, capable of great destruction and great creativity. Kurtz and Natasha, however, are human. When a mortal psyche encounters an archetypal force too intimately, it is destroyed. Semele is immolated immediately upon Zeus revealing his true form to her. The ego cannot survive a direct confrontation with the Divine. Such a direct experience is de-humanizing in all senses of the word. Kurtz and Natasha both are robbed of their humanity as a result of their contact with darkness. What they share in common that makes them susceptible to total corruption is hubris. Kurtz has declared himself emancipated from the rules of society. Natasha’s decision to stop and enjoy the soup is naively over-confident.

Vasilissa’s journey into the depths and her confrontation with archetypal evil go very differently, however. She has a correct attitude toward the unconscious – she is humble before it. She is able to use her wits and her mother’s blessing to serve Baba Yaga well, and she does not presume too much upon her. (This is revealed in her being careful not to ask too many questions of the witch.) In the end, Baba Yaga grants her the light she had come to seek. The witch gives Vasilissa a glowing skull and bids her to take it home to her cruel step mother. Baba Yaga is helpful to the heroine. This ambiguous psychic energy is serving the ego here in the interest of individuation. The secret boon that Baba Yaga has to offer Vasilissa is a knowledge of dark things – anger, aggression, and even violence. These are shadowy contents that we must come to terms with and even integrate if we are to grow beyond our innocence complex and claim our own authority.

Baba Yaga is hideously ugly. She has a prodigious appetite. She does not care if she is liked or admired. She is fully authentic in her witchiness. Many older women feel liberated as they age from having to be “nice” or “pretty.” They can be cantankerous and ugly if it pleases them, and this brings with it a kind of freedom and authority. Baba Yaga is able to give the young woman in her care the gift of fiery rage that can protect. When Vasilissa is almost back home to her cruel step-mother, she thinks to herself that they must have found some light already, and throws the skull into the hedge, but it speaks to her, and tells her very directly to bring it inside. When she does so, the eyes of the skull burn up the evil step mother and step sisters who treated Vasilissa so cruelly earlier in the story. Returning home, Vasilissa was about to slip back into her former “nice girl” role, forgetting the dark secrets she learned during her apprenticeship to the goddess. She was going to throw away the aggression Baba Yaga had encouraged her to own. Fortunately for her, she did not do so. As a result, she was able to continue on her individuation journey.

Whether our own encounter with shadow contents leads us to being devoured, burned up, or dehumanized will depend on many factors. In little ways, each may happen to us at different times. To grow fully into whom we were meant to be, we will have to confront these contents.

yaga-stew.jpg?w=450&h=338&width=300The dark corners in the soul will forever hold great fascination for us. They inspire fear, horror, but also curiosity and even delight as we enjoy being scared or violating taboos. Titrating our exposure to darkness can help us take in healing doses of it. Allow me to offer another way to enjoy the darkness this Halloween, a special recipe for Yaga Stew created especially for Ridenhour’s short by chef Jenni Field. Be warned! Ingest with caution — and an attitude of appropriate humility toward the dark places in the psyche.

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9142451691?profile=originalI love lesser known tales that vary from the more predictable narratives. The Czech fairy tale The Wooden Baby is a fantastically macabre tale that does not have many common variants. Better yet, it deals with the dark side of parenthood.

A poor couple lived at the edge of a forest. Even though they barely had enough to feed themselves, they longed for a baby. One day, the man was in the forest cutting wood, and he found a stump that was shaped vaguely like a baby. He roughly carved it to look more like a child, and then he took it home to his wife and presented to her as a gift. When she wrapped the stump child in a blanket and sang to it, he opened his mouth and cried, “Mother, I am so hungry!”

So far, this is a familiar tale. There are many stories of longed-for children made from inanimate objects who come to life; girls crafted from snow, and of course a famous literary boy carved from a piece of wood.

In our Czech story, however, things go a little differently. The mother rushes to feed the hungry baby, but he cannot be sated. He eats, and eats, and finally eats her. Then, dad comes home, and the wooden baby eats him. He goes out into the world and eats other people and flocks of animals. Finally, an old woman tending her cabbage patch slices him wide open with her hoe. Of course, everyone who had been swallowed earlier in the story emerges from his giant belly unharmed. The poor couple go home together arm in arm, and we are told that they never again wish for a baby!

There are several different ways to understand this story. For one, it is a snapshot picture of a commonplace experience in parenthood. What mother hasn’t felt devoured by her child? When she is up every ninety minutes nursing a colicky baby who can seemingly never be made to feel happy, she can feel devoured. When her teenage daughter rails against everything the mother does, no matter how well-intentioned and loving the action, the mother can feel eaten up. We have all had our moments when the needs of our child overwhelmed or even frightened us.

On a larger level, the tale explores the psychology of attachment between a parent and a child, and how that process can be damaged by emotional or actual poverty. At the start of the story, the parents have barely enough for themselves, and are told by neighbors that they are lucky they don’t have another mouth to feed. The parents reply that they have managed to feed themselves. Surely, they could also manage to feed a tiny baby. This shows a kind of arrogance. They do not have a sober assessment of the tremendous resources required to raise a child – and we can understand these resources to be both material and psychological. We have all likely known someone who blithely moved forward with having a child even though they seemed in no way able to handle the challenge. Many times, parents who look unprepared for child rearing rise to the occasion, often quite stunningly. But there are times when parents, like those in the tale, naively bring a child into the world amidst poverty, mental illness, addiction, or other factors, and are predictably overwhelmed.

The experience of parental competence is the factor that sets in motion the maternal attachment system. Feelings of panic, fear, dread, and overwhelm are common among new mothers (and not so new mothers at times as well). When she is able to calm her child, to confidently read his cues and provide the needed balm, is when connection starts to solidify. A mother’s experience of her own competence is the foundation of love and attachment for her baby. Without this, the baby only means frustration, fear, and inadequacy.

Psychologists and neuroscientists Jonathan Baylin and Daniel Hughes have written about the neurobiological basis of attachment in parenting. When things are going well between a mother and child, both experience being capable of eliciting joy in the other. This is a powerful experience that helps our brain connect with our heart, lungs, voice, facial muscles, and even hearing so that we may stay exquisitely attuned to our child. The positive reaction that we are likely to get from our child as a result of these attuned interactions helps sustain and strengthen this loving experience of each other.

Neuroscientists are getting a clearer picture of what happens when things aren’t going so well. When a mother has inadequate mothering herself or when she is under stress, her brain’s “threat detection” system is likely to be activated by her child’s distress or perceived anger. This shuts down the brain systems required for connection and attunement, resulting in what Baylin and Hughes call “blocked care.”

When we are struggling with “blocked care” as a parent, our child may indeed appear to us as “wooden.” His suffering fails to mobilize our empathy, and we feel only anger, revulsion, or resentment. The Wooden Baby in this tale is how a child might appear to us when we are in a state of “blocked care.” It is notable that he begins life by complaining of how hungry he is, and even after being fed, is not satisfied. When a parent is unable to soothe a child, and a negative interaction ensues, the mother’s dopamine system may crash, leading to feelings of rejection, anger and frustration. If the mother cannot regulate these emotions in herself, a state of blocked care can occur.

One of my favorite filmic fairy tales addresses itself to this psychological territory. The mother in Steven Spielberg’s AI cannot access her care system toward David, her adopted AI son, once her biological child has been returned to her. Though David is all innocence and love, she cannot see him that way. Like any parent with blocked care, she incorrectly perceives maliciousness, anger, and danger in David’s actions. These perceptions in turn cause her to shut down further toward David, until she abandons him in the wood. Importantly, David is not actually a threat, he just appears to be. When our threat-detection system is activated by a negative interaction with our child, he or she may appear to us momentarily as monstrous. AI, of course, is Spielberg’s retelling of the most famous wooden baby story – that of Pinocchio.

The end of the fairy tale provides us with some clues about how to resolve this difficult parental impasse. It is an old woman tending her cabbage patch who dispatches the overgrown baby with her hoe. Some seasoned bit of feminine wisdom, receptive and connected to the earth, uses her powers of discernment and separation to split open this psychic content that is carrying too much power. She reveals him to be merely an overstuffed tree stump, really no threat at all, restoring psychic equilibrium.

This tale echoes a key scene in the Miyazaki film Spirited Away. No Face begins devouring everyone, terrifying the bath house. It is Sen who knows how to restore him to his rightful size, who can see through the monstrosity he has become and reconnect with his true nature. When our child appears monstrous and devouring to us – devouring of our time, our identity, our energy – it takes a certain earthy, humble wisdom to face our frightening feelings, cut them down to size, and restore our sense of connection.

There is a recent film adaptation of The Wooden Baby by Czech film director Jan Svankmajer. It looks delightfully creepy, and is currently in my Netflix cue.

 

 

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