In a hut on chicken legs, deep in the forest, Baba Yaga bony leg lays on her stove, her beak-like nose scraping at the ceiling. Disturbed by my naïve chanting at her door, she clucks her thick tongue, “Are you doing a deed, or fleeing a deed?”

Baba Yaga is a monstrous old woman In Eastern European Folklore, she is the witch. Ambiguous and deliciously dark, in common tropes involving this character, she commands her transfigured herd of 41 daughter-horses to foil the hero-prince (a task which proves as treacherous as it is impossible). Accordingly, she beats them, accusing them of disloyalty and self-interest.

The lessons derived from this fairy tale are far from inconsequential for women. Ideas about women which centre on repression, aggression, duty and fear, find their roots in patriarchal symbolisms that serve to monsterise the matriarch. The spells cast by societal conditioning underpin an epic and tiresome competition between women which manifests as internalised envy, covertly pitting mother against daughter, and the sisterhood beyond.

Red deflects the evil eye according to Polish superstition. Casting red thread as a powerful reinforcing material enacts a protective bind, while performing functions of repair, control and manipulation.

 When we ask ourselves if we doing a deed, or fleeing a deed, perhaps it is likely both, and the spells of social conditioning that drive envy could be broken if we cast ourselves in.

Cultivated and developed through aural and literary traditions, with an elaborate mix of fact and faith, Baba Yaga especially relates to and reflects the mother-child relationship. According to author Andreas Johns, categorisations and characterisations of Baba Yaga serve as an outlet for hostile perspectives towards Mother’s control during childhood in traditional Slavic culture. This, in turn, speaks to author and psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s Best Breast theories of envy. Yet, in line with her ambiguous nature, Baba Yaga is also a symbol of hope based on the character’s subversive resistance to patriarchal, religious and societal control. She is the dark and the light – chaos and benevolence all at once and thus radiates the complexity of woman.