Baba Yaga’s Mortar and Pestle

Also Known As: Russian stupa, the mortar, and pest or tolkach, the pestle; nearly always ridden together with the pomelo, her broom
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Slavic Mythology, Russian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: An ordinary household mortar that carries Baba Yaga through the forest and, in later tellings, through the sky, driven by its pestle while her broom wipes away every trace of her passing.
Role in Mythos: It is the witch’s fixed means of travel in the East Slavic wonder tale, the thing that marks her arrivals and departures and lets her come and go without being followed.
Relation to Humans: The heroines and heroes of the tales see it only from outside, usually as the signal that Baba Yaga is coming home or has just left them alone in her hut. Mortals in the tales watch it rather than ride it, and nobody is ever told how it flies.

A girl stands at a fence made of human bones, with skulls on the stakes and a little doll in her pocket, and waits for the dark. Three riders have already passed her. The first was white from cloak to bridle, and the sky grew light. The second was red, and the sun came up. The third was black on a jet-black horse, and night followed him. Then something else came out of the trees, and it was not a horse at all. It was a mortar, the heavy pounding vessel every peasant kitchen knew, and an old woman sat inside it, shoving it along with the pestle while a broom swept the ground behind her clean of every mark.

That is how Baba Yaga comes home in “Vasilisa the Fair”, one of the tales in Aleksandr Afanasyev’s nineteenth-century collection of Russian folktales. In Leonard Magnus’s English version she “drove in inside the mortar with the pestle, and with the broom swept away every trace of her steps.” Next morning she leaves the same way. She sits in the mortar, thrusts it forward with the pestle, and brushes out her track with the besom, and the girl is left alone in the hut with a list of impossible chores. The storyteller does not bother to describe the trip twice. The words come back almost unchanged, because they were never really description. They were formula.

Russian tellers had a fixed line for it, and the lexicographers wrote it down. Vladimir Dal’s dictionary of the living Russian language defines the stupa plainly as a vessel in which things are crushed and ground by striking them with a pestle, notes that the big mill mortars were hollowed blocks of timber, and then, by way of example, quotes the saying “Baba Yaga, bone leg: she rides in the mortar, she pushes with the broom.” Another version, recorded in a modern Russian ethnographic encyclopedia, gives the more familiar division of labour: she rides in the mortar, urges it on with the pestle, and sweeps her trail away with the broom. The jobs shift between the tools from one telling to the next. The trio stays together.

There is something deliberately absurd about it. A mortar is kitchen equipment. It sits on the floor, it is heavy and squat, and its whole purpose is to be struck, over and over, until whatever is inside gives up. The pestle is a pole of wood that thuds down into it. The broom is the thing a household uses last, to sweep up the husks and dust. Baba Yaga takes these three humble objects and turns the kitchen corner into a vehicle. Ralston credits her with fire-breathing horses elsewhere, yet the vehicle everyone remembers is not a horse. She rides the pot.

The tales never say much about its looks, and the gap gets filled differently depending on who is telling. The English folklorist W. R. S. Ralston, writing in 1872 from the Russian collections, gave her an iron mortar, propelled with the pestle, “a sort of club”, while the broom swept away the traces of her passage. He also reported a White Russian, that is Belarusian, version in which she flies through the sky in a fiery mortar, urging it on with a burning broom, and as she goes the winds howl, the earth groans, and the trees writhe and crack. That is the noisiest the object ever gets. Most of the time it is simply there, already moving.

No tale explains where the mortar came from. Nobody forges it, wins it or steals it, and no story tells of the first time it rose off the ground. It belongs to Baba Yaga the way her hut on chicken legs does, as part of the furniture of her world rather than as a prize in it.

The nineteenth century had a theory. Ralston summarised it in the same book: to the mythologists of his day, the Baba Yaga looked like a personification of the storm, seen as a whirlwind when she rushed through the forest and as the black thunder-cloud when she chased the hero across the sky. A flying mortar trailing howling wind fit that reading neatly, and it was popular for exactly that reason. It is a period interpretation, built on the comparative mythology fashionable at the time, and no tale states it.

What the tales do agree on is the picture. Andreas Johns, whose 2004 study is the standard English book on the figure, sums her up in the same three strokes the storytellers used: she lives in a forest hut that stands and moves on chicken legs, travels in a mortar with a pestle, and sweeps away her tracks with a broom. Magnus, introducing his translations, called her the witch who “rides the winds in a mortar”. The illustrator Ivan Bilibin painted her for “Vasilisa the Beautiful” in 1900, and his picture of her riding the mortar is the one most readers now carry in their heads.

The mortar’s power is mobility, and the broom’s is concealment. Together they let Baba Yaga cross the forest faster than any walker and leave nothing behind that a pursuer could follow. In Ralston’s account the pestle doubles as a club, so the same object that drives the vessel can be swung at whatever stands in the way. Its limits are written into the tales by what they leave out. None of these tellings puts anyone else in it or says what becomes of it when Baba Yaga is gone, and every time it carries her off, it leaves her hut, her chores and her secrets in the hands of the girl she left behind.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does Baba Yaga fly in a mortar and pestle?

The tales never explain it. In the Russian folktales collected by Aleksandr Afanasyev, Baba Yaga simply rides in a mortar, drives it with the pestle and sweeps away her tracks with a broom, and the line is repeated as a fixed storytelling formula. Nineteenth-century mythologists read her as a storm figure, but that is a later interpretation rather than anything the tales say.

What is the broom for in Baba Yaga’s mortar?

In most tellings Baba Yaga uses the broom to sweep away the traces of her passing so that nobody can follow her. In the version of the saying recorded in Vladimir Dal’s Russian dictionary, the broom is what pushes the mortar along instead.

Which fairy tale features Baba Yaga’s mortar?

The best-known example is “Vasilisa the Fair”, also called “Vasilisa the Beautiful”, where Baba Yaga arrives home in the mortar at nightfall and leaves in it the next morning. Ivan Bilibin’s 1900 illustrations for that tale did much to fix the image of Baba Yaga flying in her mortar.

Is Baba Yaga’s mortar made of wood or iron?

The Russian word stupa means an ordinary pounding vessel, and Vladimir Dal describes the large ones as hollowed blocks of wood. The English folklorist W. R. S. Ralston described Baba Yaga’s mortar as iron in 1872, and he also reported a Belarusian telling in which it is fiery and driven with a burning broom.