Extracts from Warriors Witches Women: Mythology’s Fiercest Females; words by Kate Hodges, illustrations by Harriet Lee Merrion, published by White Lion Publishing, RRP £18.99. Warriors Witches Women is available in hardback at all good bookshops, and online - http://bit.ly/2TkKSA0
JEZEBEL
HEBREW/CHRISTIAN: QUEEN
Also known as Jezabel
Jezebel’s name has become a cipher for wanton, wicked women, but the evidence is that she was a lot more complex, powerful and strong-willed than her cartoonish reduction. This ninth-century and Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) queen was at the epicentre of the war between followers of the old gods and those of Yahweh (God). However, despite a malicious campaign waged against Jezebel, her profound influence and incredible character couldn’t be concealed.
As the privileged daughter of priest and king, Ethbaal, Jezebel was an educated, politically aware woman. She was brought up in modern-day Lebanon as a worshipper of, among other gods, Ba’al. Ba’al was later depicted by Christian scribes as the devil, represented by the horns of a bull, but at this time he was a bounteous god of rain and fertility. Jezebel married King Ahab of the northern kingdom of Israel, moving to his country along with 850 of her priests. This union would have been political, a strategic alliance of families, but there was a major hurdle to overcome: the people of Israel worshipped Yahweh, the Jewish god, an incarnation of the modern Christian God.
Ahab was reasonable, however. He not only tolerated Jezebel’s worship, but built her an altar to Ba’al. This wasn’t well received by the country’s prophets and religious bigwigs. They were inflamed further when Jezebel started killing followers of Yahweh. The prophet Elijah was furious and challenged Jezebel’s priests to a duel. They met on Mount Carmel, their task to slaughter a bull, then set it on fire, with no torch or match. The Ba’al priests started to dance and cut themselves. They prayed for hours, but the pyre remained unlit. Elijah then took to the oche. He sprinkled what looked like water on his bull, called on God and, near-instantly, the beast burst into flames. The battle was over. In shockingly cold retribution, Elijah slaughtered all of Jezebel’s men.
The queen was furious and, in a dramatic, bold move, established herself as her enemy’s equal, by saying: ‘If you are Elijah, so I am Jezebel.’ She threatened Elijah: ‘Thus and more may the gods do if by this time tomorrow I have not made you like one of them.’ Unlike many women in the Bible, Jezebel had a voice, a powerful, agile, sarcastic one at that. Elijah fled in terror at her vicious promise, hiding out at Mount Sinai.
THE ADVENTURES OF JEZEBEL
Next, Jezebel annexed a vineyard for her husband. Ahab had been sulking; a man named Naboth refused to give him his land to make into a vegetable garden. Jezebel sprang into action, writing inflammatory letters to the elders of Jezreel, Naboth’s city, that told of his blasphemy of his God and king. Furious and riled enough to become a boulder-toting mob, the townspeople stoned Naboth to death. Elijah saw this as a chance to reappear and threatened Ahab, telling him that his family would die in Jezreel, their bones eaten by dogs and picked clean by birds
A few years later, Ahab died in battle with the Syrians. Accounts vary, but the 2 Kings book of the Bible tells how, after the death of Jezebel’s son Ahaziah, his younger brother – Joram – became king. During this time, Elijah’s successor, Elisha, had continued his predecessor’s crusade. He declared his military wingman, Jehu, to be the true king of Israel, thus sparking a civil war. Jehu and Joram met on the battlefield, where Jehu heaped insults upon Jezebel, calling her a whore and a witch; he then slaughtered the king. However, he had to kill the queen, too, in order to assume the throne, a testament to Jezebel’s true power.
The drama intensified. Jezebel got word that Jehu was on the warpath, and driving his chariot to her palace. Astute enough to realise that he must slaughter her in order to achieve his ambitions, Jezebel calmly sat at her dressing table. She put on make-up, combed and styled her hair, waiting for the inevitable. This was perhaps the queen’s finest hour: she knew she was about to be killed, but she chose to face her fate with dignity, in a way worthy of her position. As she sat high in her tower, she was ultimately in control. Leaning out of her window, in a last display of defiance she insulted Jehu who, in turn, ordered Jezebel’s servant eunuchs to throw her out of the window. They complied. Her bloodied body lay on the pavement below, picked over by dogs.
As a result of Jehu’s taunting of Joram, and Jezebel’s determination to wear lipstick to the last, ‘Jezebel’ became a byword for wantonness. This insult reverberated through history; at a particularly low point in the nineteenth century, African women slaves were labelled by white society as ‘Jezebels’ or temptresses, a repellent and weak excuse for their rape by their slave owners. Her reputation soaked through to popular culture, too: ‘Jezebel’ by musician Frankie Laine tells the story of a girl ‘made to torment man’ by the devil, and the iconic Bette Davis starred in a film of the same name as a strong-willed Southern belle. Even writer Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has a brothel called Jezebel’s, with prostitutes similarly named. However, latterly our Jezebel’s reputation has started to be reclaimed, most notably by online feminist magazine Jezebel, and also by writers such as Lesley Hazleton, author of a revisionist biography of the biblical queen.
Jezebel is an extraordinary character. Transposed into an alien culture at a young age, she remains outspoken, politically savvy and determined to maintain her cultural and religious identity. Despite her husband’s weaknesses, she is dedicated to him and to his position; there are clear clues that she is the true power behind the throne. Although she has since been cast as a harlot, there is no evidence for her adultery in the Bible. Many scholars claim that her reputed ‘whoredom’ refers to her worshipping multiple gods; others that priestesses were often recast, misogynistically, as prostitutes. For Christian revisionist writers, Jezebel not only represented women having power, a voice, an opinion, but she embodied the old religion. To secure the worship of the newer god, Yahweh, Jezebel not only had to be killed, but her reputation besmirched, her name dragged through the dust just as her body had been by the pack of dogs. That her determined, articulate character still shines through is testament to what an incredible, strong woman Jezebel must have been.
BABA YAGA
SLAVIC: WITCH
Also known as Baba Jaga
The halfway point between Mother Earth and a cannabalistic crone, Baba Yaga is a mercurial character. Will she take you on a voyage of self-discovery and equip you with practical skills? Or throw you in her oven and gobble you up for tea?
You’ll hear Baba Yaga before you spot her, a wild wind’s whoosh, strong enough to make the trees creak and groan and tossing leaves into the air.
She is a fearful sight. Wisps of her long grey hair stream in the wind, her face dominated by a huge, pointy nose. Her skin is as deeply cracked as the steppe in summer, her mouth crammed with rusting iron teeth. She dresses in rags, is hunchbacked and flies around in an over-sized mortar, using a huge pestle to steer, while brushing away her trail with a reed-thin birch broom. Her home is no less attention-grabbing: behind a high wall made of bones and crenellated with fire-filled skulls lies a slope-roofed house on chicken legs that enable it to run wonkily through the woods. The hut can spin, it screeches and moans, it has eye-like windows and its lock is dense with teeth. At first glance, Baba Yaga appears to conform to the fairy-tale witch archetype. She can smell humans, has a predilection for the tender flesh of children and wields magic power. She commands three horsemen who represent ‘bright dawn, red sun and dark midnight’, and servants who are disembodied hands. However, the witch is a little more complex than she first appears. Visitors to her house may find themselves thrown onto a giant paddle and roasted in her oven, but they may also find that, in her own twisted, tortuous fashion, Baba Yaga can help them.
TALK TO THE HAND
Take the best-known tale starring Baba Yaga, ‘Vasilisa the Beautiful’, a folk story first anthologised by Russian Alexander Afanasyev in 1855. Here we find Vasilisa, losing her mother at a young age, and all she has left of her is a little magic doll who vows to protect the girl. In the way of these stories, into her life comes an evil stepmother and stepsisters who are jealous of Vasilisa’s good looks. They all live in a little hut on the edge of a forbidding forest. One day, their fire sputters out, so they send Vasilisa into the trees to bring back one of Baba Yaga’s flaming skulls. She arrives at the fowl-mounted hut where Baba Yaga hisses at her, ‘Listen girl! If I give you a light you must work to pay for it. If not, I will eat you for my supper!’
Over two days, she sets the girl a series of repetitive, boring domestic tasks, which, to the crone’s surprise – and with a little help from her magic doll – she completes. When the tasks are finished, Vasilisa asks Baba Yaga who each of the witch’s horsemen are. Baba Yaga answers gladly. Vasilisa is itching to ask about the hand-shaped servants, but has a feeling that might be a terrible idea, so stays silent. Baba Yaga informs her that her intuition was right – that had she enquired about them, Vasilisa would have ended up on the paddle being pushed into the oven.
Then Baba asks the girl a question, ‘How is it that you have been able to finish all the work I gave you so quickly?’ The girl replies, ‘My mother’s blessing helped me!’ At this, Baba Yaga flies into a spitting rage and pushes her out of the hut. However, simultaneously she thrusts one of her flaming skulls onto a stick and pushes it into Vasilisa’s hands. The girl eventually finds her way home and gives the skull to her scheming family. Her mother and sisters burst into flames and dissolve into ashes. Vasilisa is free.
This story illustrates Baba Yaga’s duality and subverts the fairy-tale archetype. Baba Yaga helps Vasilisa, but in a roundabout way. Yaga rewards Vasilisa for listening to her intuition as represented by the doll. It’s not a convenient, neat result for the girl though: she has to find her own path. Author Clarissa Pinkola Estes argues that, in doing this, Vasilisa is initiated into finding her own ‘wild feminine power’. The hut serves almost as a women’s retreat, where she finds her core through ‘inner purifications’ – or ‘grindingly dull tasks’ as they are otherwise known – and by asking questions about the horsemen, or rather puzzling over the nature of life and death.
Baba Yaga often reaches out to young women on the cusp of adulthood whom she deems worthy of her attention, steering them into the next stage of life. In the tales gathered in Sibelan Forrester’s 2013 Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales, she repeatedly challenges girls to step up to the duties needed for them to become wives and mothers – important lessons in a society that values those traits highly.
Baba Yaga is thought to have haunted the folk tales of Russia and beyond for centuries, but she was first referred to in print in 1855, in Mikhail V. Lomonosov’s Rossiiskaia Grammatika. One of the composer Mussorgsky’s pieces from Pictures at an Exhibition, ‘The Hut on Hen’s Legs’, references her and she has been the subject of many films, including the seminal fantasy movie Vasilissa The Beautiful (1939). She also inspired the Yubaba character in Spirited Away (2001).
Baba Yaga’s feral qualities and liminal status are also her powers. She doesn’t conform to accepted norms; her hair is unbraided and stands on end, her fingernails long, her breasts drooping and unfettered. She dresses in tatters, while her unconventional accommodation arrangements are almost like a piece of outsider art. She lives not only on the fringes of habitation, but also outside of society’s mores. Baba Yaga exists how she chooses and has no need for others in her life, bar her hand-shaped servants and horsemen. She refuses to conform, even to conventional evil witch stereotypes. A wild woman yet wise teacher, she lives life unbound, only giving an inch to those she deems worthy of her knowledge. Who could fail to admire such a gleefully wild spirit?