Stepping into the Wild Feminine
Encountering the Baba Yaga
Previously published in “ROAR Fierce Feminine Rising” Issue 34 October 2020
My encounter with Baba Yaga, comes through the mistress weaver of tales of old and the priestess of wisdoms beholden but forgotten, Clarissa Pinkola Estés.
My initial meeting with the quintessential Hag was, as is common to all first encounters with the unknown and forgotten Wild Feminine, one of horror, trepidation, and disgust even.
Baba Yaga, the embodiment of the Wild Feminine, lives in a transmutable hut, nested on chicken legs in the deepest cervices of the unknown forest, fenced behind skull and bone.
Baba Yaga is hideous, with a nose and chin so curved they touch, speckled with warts and sprouting a goatee, fingernails gnarled, brown and stained.
In my uninitiated consciousness, Baba Yaga is not only formidable and ugly, but also a tyrant, forcing the sweet, innocent, motherless Vasalisa to experience dread and to toil to her, seemingly, irrational whims.
Cannot the Baba Yaga see Vasalisa’s predicament? Where is her compassion and sympathy? Why not just give the poor girl the fire that her selfish relatives had sent her off into the danger of the unknown to fetch?
But in that reasoning lay my first sin of misconception.
My banal expectations stem from the fundamental misunderstanding of the Wild Feminine.
It also comes from being embodied into the Feminine of the Patriarchy.
The Wild Feminine has nothing in common with the Patriarchal Feminine we have been imbibed with for generations.
The Feminine we have grown to know makes us believe power comes from subjugating ourselves to the Patriarchy, being complacent to it, forcing ourselves to be appeasing to its gaze and ego.
But the Wild Feminine, just like the Baba Yaga, is a power that is raw and undiluted, unpredictable, fierce and fearsome as the earth that it comes from.
The Wild Feminine, as Clarissa Pinkola Estés points out, is the power generated from embracing, riding and living the waves of birth, death and rebirth.
To step into it and carry its fire requires, for us raised in the Patriarchal Feminine, initiation and transformation.
However, the Wild Feminine cannot be encompassed and embodied all at once, but gradually over time and space.
It requires initiation and transformation that must be deep and cyclical. We must come towards and retract from the Wild Feminine, like the tides rise and recede from the moon.
That’s why it’s impervious to the rhythms of the Patriarchy — action-steps and goal-setting is not it’s forte.
Stepping into the Wild Feminine is not about quick-wins and one-off retreats.
It takes more to attain it then steaming our vaginas and painting our faces with menstrual blood.
No, tasks must be performed. The Wild Feminine, the fearsome and the fierce, must be served.
Furthermore, the Wild Feminine yields not it’s power to the fragile and nice, nor to conformity or the trusted and tried.
Given its density and rawness, how could it?
Hideous and grotesque as she may seem, Baba Yaga nurtures and houses power as deep as the roots of the trees her chicken-legged house is nestled in. Her currency is knowledge more ancient than time and she guards secrets that must slowly be dripped into the consciousness and potentially even remain untold and unfathomed.
(As she says to Vasalisa: “too much knowledge can make a person old too soon”).
As said previously, the Wild Feminine is the power of birth, death and rebirth and all the mysteries, joys and sorrows, pain and pleasure, the told and untold these cycles carry with them.
How is this just to be given to another over soft sympathetic words and tea and biscuits?
But how does one start? What is the first step?
Vasilisa, the mother-less innocent, comes to the steppingstone of Yaga’s house as a victim, but she certainly can’t leave it as one, lest risking being devoured by the ancient witch.
And, thus, she must start her entrance already transformed.
When asked by Baba Yaga, why she must yield her fire to Vasilisa, the girl answers simply, “Because I ask”, and behold, this is the right answer.
The entrance into the realm of the Wild Feminine starts not with a plea, but a clear and unambiguous desire.
The Wild Feminine has no need for superficial niceties and contrived convention.
And so, in the realm of the real, when we finally decide to step into the Wild Feminine, we must come into it not because we think we should, we are expected to or because we are told to.
We must step into it because we want to.
We enter not pleading for what we want but declaring it.
We step into it when we’re ready to shed our niceness, our conformity; renounce our trusted and tried.
We step into it when our soul can no longer withstand the shell of expectations, duty, obligations and falsehoods it’s been placed in.
We start when we are ready to do the Baba Yaga’s bidding.
But alas, we, as Vasilisa, do not face the Yaga completely unprotected.
Remember, we must enter the realm of the unknown stripped of all that is known.
Transformation from such a vulnerable state is impossible; we would be reduced to nothing before we even started.
We may come to the Wild Feminine, as Vasilia does, motherless and stripped of all that once served and shackled us.
But, we do not come alone.
There, nested near our blossom or hidden in our pockets is our Doll of Intuition; the parting gift of the mother that had to die in order for the woman to be born from the girl.
The doll is the spark of the Goddess; our deep knowing, and our divine intuition.
It’s what guides us through the dark of the forest; what helps us to do the Yaga’s bidding; what helps us to complete with ease that which seems impossible; it is the wisdom that knows what questions must remain unanswered and when, and, ultimately, the source of the strength we need to keep hold of the destructive power the Yaga has bestowed to us.
Our doll must be loved and nurtured, but above all listened.
For indeed, stepping into the Wild Feminine starts by stepping into ourselves, by embracing the knowing that has been passed on to us from generations going back to the start of time.
Again, for us raised in the shadow of the Patriarchal Feminine, we need to rediscover our Doll of Intuition and relearn to trust it and put our faith into it, recognise it for the gift that it is.
We must, for what alternative od we have?
We cannot remain in the realm of our powerlessness and victimhood.
Like Vasilisa, we can’t keep our house cold and risk our people dying (even though they are to blame for their predicament). We must embrace the Wild Feminine and claim its fire.
We must carry that fire to our house and people and save them.
But, do not deceive yourself, the salvation offered by the Wild Feminine is not that of warmth and safety.
The fire of the Yaga is not meant to redeem the selfish and oppressive.
The fire of the Yaga is not meant to forgive the sins of the past.
The fire of the Yaga is meant to save by reducing all that once was to cinders.
The salvation offered by the Wild Feminine is one of ash and dust.
It’s no wonder Vasilisa falters on her path back home, in fear of the destruction bestowed to her.
But back home she comes, with the fire of destruction in hand.
Fearful of the Wild Feminine she was, but she knew its bidding must be done.
The path has been cut.
The steps could not be taken back.
The journey to the Wild Feminine, as Clarissa Pinkola Estés said, is an initiation into our intuition.
It’s also a journey that ultimately leads to destruction, but also to rebirth.
Dare you, dear sister, take that first step with me?
