Baba Yaga

A character of Slavic mythology. It is called: rus. Baba-yaga, Yaga, yaga-baba, egi-baba, yagaya, Yagishna, Yagabova, Egiboba; belor. Baba Yaga, Baba Yuga, Yaginya; bolg. Baba Yaga; Ukrainian Baba-Yazia, Yazia, Yazi-baba, Gadra; Polish. jędza, babojędza; czech. jezinka, Ježibaba "witch", "forest woman"; v.-Serb. baba jega; slovene. jaga baba, ježi baba.

Historian Petrukhin V.Ya. brings the Proto-Slavic yaga (*yga) closer to the designation of snakes, reptiles, which, in his opinion, indicates the chthonic origins of the image.

In Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga has several stable attributes: she can conjure, fly in a mortar, lives on the border of the forest in a hut on chicken legs (or propped up with pancakes), surrounded by a fence of human bones with skulls. She lures people to her. She pursues her victims in a mortar, driving her with a pestle and covering the trail with a broom (broom).

In the former Slavic lands Carinthia in Austria "Baba Yaga Pehtra" (German. Pechtrababajagen) is a ceremonial ritual character.

In fairy tales , she acts in three incarnations:

• Yaga-bogatyrsha has a kladentsom sword and fights on equal terms with the bogatyrs.
• Yaga the kidnapper steals children.
• Yaga, the giver, greets the hero or heroine affably, treats her deliciously, soars in the bathhouse, gives useful advice, presents rich and wonderful gifts.

The appearance (bone leg, iron teeth, long gray hair, sagging breasts, the ability to smell someone else's, etc.) indicates a connection with demonic characters of another world, the dead (a hut as a domovina-coffin); attributes, occupations and supernatural abilities — a mortar and a pest, an oven (where she roasts the abducted) spinning, flying through the air in a mortar, on a broomstick — also refer to female mythological characters, witches. The image of Baba Yaga is associated with legends about the hero's transition to the other world.