by Kim Pederson…….

One of the characters in Egg & Spoon by Gregory Maguire (of Wicked fame) is Baba Yaga, the supernatural being (a.k.a. witch) from eastern Slavic folklore. (She’s in Russia in the novel.) Baba flies around in a mortar carrying the attendant pestle and lives in a house (called “Dumb Doma” in Maguire’s book) that stands on chicken legs (sometimes a chicken leg). In Egg & Spoon, Baba invites, or rather has a large cat chase, a young girl named Cat into her doma and tries to feed her a bowl of poisoned soup with the intention of devouring her afterward. The cat, now shrunk down to tabby size, warns Cat not to eat and the story of Cat (and others) goes on from there.

One of the fairy tales Baba Yaga appears in, also mentioned in the novel, is “Vasilisa the Beautiful.” It’s a little like Cinderella, with a young daughter tormented by her stepmother and stepsisters. Vasilisa has a magical doll, like Cinderella’s fairy godmother, that helps her complete all the onerous tasks assigned to her. Finally, in an effort to get rid of her, the stepmom and stepsibs put out all the fires and candles in their house and send Vasilisa to ask Baba Yaga “for a light” to replace those they have extinguished.

Baba Yaga, showing the kindness typical of evil witches, says V must do work to earn the fire or be killed. V does the work, aided again by her doll. Baba Yaga can’t figure out how V has managed to do everything she commanded and asks. The girl simply says she is blessed, at which point BY, having no truck with blessed persons, throws her out of the house. V does get a skull filled with burning coals to take home for her efforts. As soon a she gets there, though, the skull burns her stepmom and the stepmom’s daughters to ashes. Nonplussed (or perhaps positively plussed), V goes on to meet and marry the Tsar and, we presume, live happily ever after.

As Leigh Bardugo writes in “Where the Wicked Things Are,” her New York Times review of Egg & Spoon, the novel is a “tale of a Russia beset by floods and witnessing the possible death of magic.” There’s some consternation over this and it’s easy to understand why. In fairy tales like Vasilisa, magic, even if it comes from an evil source, ends up being the righter of wrongs and the punisher of those who need punishing. To put it really simply, magic is the practice of commanding supernatural forces to accomplish things we can’t accomplish ourselves–think Mickey seeking a little aid in water hauling in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” There’s always a catch, however, as Mickey and many others have found out.

Even so, our fascination with magic, or perhaps more correctly, our wish for it to exist, continues. This wish goes back at least to Ancient Egypt and persists today. Even though it’s the preeminent example of “wishful thinking,” the desire for magic is completely comprehensible. Sometimes the world around us seems like a perpetual, all-encompassing catch-22, or as the dictionary puts it, a difficult situation for which there is no easy or possible solution. It would be so nice, wouldn’t it, to be able to say “Abracadabra,” turn the global beast into the handsome prince or the beautiful princess, and join Vasilisa in her state of never-ending elation. No doubt, some think this would get boring and maybe it would. Still, I’d be up for trying it as an alternative to present circumstances. If you feel that way, too, say “I believe in magic” and keep saying it and maybe everything will get better. Just don’t forget the clap your hands part.

*Baba Yaga as depicted by Ivan Bilibin (1902). Public Domain.

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Visit Kim Pederson’s blog RatBlurt: Mostly Random Short-Attention-Span Musings.