Every tale has a forest, and every forest has a hut at its very edge, where the world of the living ends.
Sooner or later, everyone who sets out in search of something finds its door. The hut stands with its back to the world and its face to the dark. Inside, the air is thick with smoke and herbs. Cobwebs hang from every beam. On the shelves stand jars of things that have no name in any language spoken outside this forest, and from the highest shelf the skull of a bear watches the door.
She is always waiting. Old as the forest itself, wrapped in a patterned shawl, she lifts an iron pot out of the heat of the oven with a long fork, and green steam rises from it. She never asks travellers who they are. She already knows, and she knows what they came for.
Every land has known her under some name: the witch with the oven in the German forest, the old woman of the Celtic winter, the keeper at the bottom of the well. In the Slavic tales she is Baba Yaga, and she was never simply a villain. She was the keeper of the border. Those who came to her had to give up who they had been before she would let them through: fed, bathed, put to sleep, sometimes put into the oven itself, and taken out again as someone new.
What cooks in her pot tonight is not soup. It is the person the traveller was when he knocked.
"The hero's road into the forest and to the hut is a road into death; the meeting with the old woman is the passage through it, and he returns reborn."
— after Vladimir Propp, The Historical Roots of the Wondertale
(Fine Art Photography. Created in July 2023.)
