October is a vitally mystical and folklore-rich time of year in the northern hemisphere. It is that magical, liminal in-between—when the land exhales, the leaves fall, and the world shifts from the fullness of summer into the quiet decay of winter. In this season of thinning veils, the stories that rise to the surface often speak of transformation, mortality, and the fierce wisdom of nature herself. Among them is Baba Yaga—witch of the woods, bone-keeper, truth-teller. Feared and misunderstood, she walks the line between life and death, chaos and clarity. What if the wisdom we fear the most—dark, wild, and unpredictable—is exactly what we need to find our way through the ruins? As the world changes around us—politically, ecologically, and spiritually—mirroring the season’s slow descent into shadow, Baba Yaga reminds us that survival doesn’t always come from the light Sometimes, it lives in the shadowy places, where transformation begins—not with comfort, but with deep, unsettling knowing. This is the season to honor those stories. To meet the wild within and ask it what it knows.
The carved and inked linoleum block right before printing. This piece includes scenes from the folktale “Katrina and the Bright Falcon” including: Katrina discovering the Falcon at her window; Baba Yaga’s cabin in the woods on chicken legs; the castle Katrina journeys to in order to find her love; and Baba Yaga herself!
Baba Yaga moves at the edge of our knowing, the wild crone of Slavic forest lore who guards the threshold between life and death, between decay and renewal. Her figure—twisted, powerful, elemental—resists domestication and invites us to lean into the forest’s dark heart, where endings breathe open. In this way, she stands as the keeper of the Wild Feminine’s shadowed wisdom—neither villain nor savior, but midwife to that which must die for deeper truths to be born.
In many stories, those who seek her—often young women in search of direction or belonging—discover that Baba Yaga does not grant easy answers. She gifts clarity only to those who dare to face the wild core of themselves. These truths are not offered, but earned.
A beloved example is the tale of Katrina and the Bright Falcon, where the heroine ventures into the wood in pursuit of a falcon, her lover, and meets three Baba Yagas, each offering impossible tasks. Yet, through her perseverance—and the magic of her Falcon—Katrina is gifted with tools that guide her toward her own becoming. The Baba Yagas are not villains in disguise, but sacred threshold guardians who teach us that transformation often arises from facing what we most fear.
Pulling the print off of the carved linoleum block
Across folklore, Baba Yaga consistently embodies this paradox: she is both death and rebirth, a fierce force refusing easy lines between light and dark, human and spirit. Natalia Clarke, similarly, beautifully describes and redefines the Baba Yaga in her book Baba Yaga: Slavic Earth Goddess, which she writes from her own Siberian heritage. She talks about how the Baba Yaga embodies both light and dark, all the more reason to associate the Baba Yaga with the fall season of in-betweens. She says: “Deep in the birch forest she dwells between the human and non-human worlds. With every rising sun she witnesses the darkness and light in nature and their world”, and “She holds the balance between the good and bad, dark and light, wet and dry, rich and barren. Maintaining it is feeding herself as they are one and whole”. I love this vision of the Baba Yaga, it offers a more deeper understanding of her role, more specifically, how she may be perceived to be evil or dark, when actually the “death” that she is often associated with may be a reference to the necessary dying away of whatever gets in the way of us maturing or actualizing ourselves. Baba Yaga is a symbol, like the dying leaves we witness every autumn, of what dies in order to make way for Spring, a rebirth of something new.
In Katrina and the Bright Falcon, the journey begins not with a map, but with a wild bird. The Falcon, a creature of sky and instinct, arrives in Katrina’s life like a whisper from the wild—offering her not just love, but an invitation to remember something deeper: her own untamed nature. In Slavic folklore, the falcon is often a talisman of strength and vision, a guide for warriors. In this tale, he becomes Katrina’s spiritual companion, calling her away from a life of convention and into the forest of transformation. Katrina’s love for the Falcon leads her beyond the suffocating safety of her family home—where her sisters urge her to conform, to be small, to trade magic for mirrors. But the Falcon, with his fierce beauty and cursed flight, awakens in her a courage that cannot live in captivity. And so she follows him—not only as a lover, but as a symbol of her own wild soul.
It is this pursuit that draws her into the forest, into the realm of Baba Yaga. There, among the birch trees and bone fences, Katrina meets a reflection of the very wildness she is beginning to claim. Baba Yaga—unruly, unrefined, unconcerned with approval—offers her no comfort, only truth. Like the Falcon, Baba Yaga is a creature of instinct and edge, and through their tests and guidance, Katrina begins to shed what is false and remember who she really is. In this way, the story becomes more than a tale of romance—it is a myth of returning to the wild self, of letting the forest and its creatures awaken what has been silenced. Both the Falcon and Baba Yaga carry pieces of that wilderness: one in feather, one in bone. And Katrina, in choosing to follow them, chooses to belong to the untamed world again.
Baba Yaga herself is also an embodiment of the wild. She not only lives deep in the heart of a birch forest but frequently in stories she is described sweeping with a silver Birch broom in her hands. I find it intriguing the many feminine names given to Birches including: The White Goddess, The Lady of the Woods, and The Silver Maiden to name a few. In Slavic mythology, Birches are one of the sacred trees, they have been worshiped, and they are associated with feminine power, magic and mythology. Birches are one of the first kinds of trees that sprout up when a forest has been clear cut or burned down, they symbolize rebirth, renewal, and resilience.
Birch trees at Habitat Wildlife Sanctuary, Belmont, MA.
Handcrafted linocut print of the Baba Yaga and characters in the Slavic folktale that inspired this piece including a Falcon.
In this moment of planetary fracture, her presence is a whisper we must hear: that true survival may depend on embracing endings as gateways, not tragedies. That unmake, unlearn, descent—they are all radical acts of becoming. Not in spite of what falls away, but because of it.
To encounter Baba Yaga is to enter a mythic rite of passage worthy of our deepest attention—not as a fairy tale, but as Old Story Medicine, held in shadow, carried in bone, waiting to reawaken our wild remembering.
This handcrafted print (photo left) includes the following details from the folktale: Katrina and the falcon at her window; Baba Yaga's little cabin on chicken legs in the forest including a grove of birch trees; the castle where the Falcon lives and where Katrina's journey takes her; the Baba Yaga herself! I purposefully put Katrina and the Falcon inside Baba Yaga to show how the story suggests the innocent, the wise, and the wild are all inside each of us. I took full advantage of how the medium of printmaking can offer clear contrasts between negative and positive space in my choice of design and simple coloring, which I feel allow for the contrasting themes of innocence and experience, loss and renewal, to be expressed. I also emphasized the texture from the hand carving, and variations in ink density from printing by hand, and purposeful choice of traditional handmade Hosho paper with the intention of giving the resulting image a rustic charm and age-old feel which would best capture a timeless heartwarming folktale.
Here I am carving a small birch tree grove onto a work-in-progress linoleum print inspired by the ancient Russian folktale Katrina and the Bright Falcon, featuring the Slavic folk heroine: the Baba Yaga. You can see my new birch table in this photo!
Right before I began carving this linocut inspired by this folktale of the Baba Yaga, I bought myself a new desk. It turns out (without my conscious intention!) that the table is actually made of Birch! I love this synchronicity between this table and the theme of my artwork. Although I felt a sadness to think that a birch tree (or a few) had to be sacrificed to make my table, I know the act of creating this piece, and many forthcoming, I will honor Her, this White Goddess, this Lady of the Woods on whose shoulders I do my creative work. She, the Birch Goddess, the Baba Yaga, will live through my art which I consider to be sacred work. I think this is the truth of the Baba Yaga: that when something dies, it gives way for something new to be born. She reminds us gently, like the falling of an autumn leaf, of what it takes to become Whole.
Photo Credits:
Blog Post Cover birch trees: Niklas Hamann on Unsplash.
Header photo of birch trees: Sungmu Heo on Pexels
Birch tree photo insert: this is my own photo.
References:
Clarke, Natalia (2021). Baba Yaga: Slavic Earth Goddess. Moon Books.
Etses, Clarissa Pinkola (1992). Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books., and SoundsTrue audio recording The Power of the Crone.
Zigenis, Deborah Gee (January 2021). “Katrina and the Bright Falcon”. Cricket Magazine, p. 12-16. (This story is offered in parts, and the 2nd and 3rd parts are in the subsequent issues of the magazine).
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