Dreaming the Dark: Baba Yaga, Pombagira, Santa Muerte, and Kali (Part 3)

Art Credit: Baba Yaga by the very wonderful Rima Staines

This is Part Three in a four-part series, Dreaming the Dark, on shadow psychology, feminine consciousness, and the archetypes that carry these energies across cultures. You can read the other parts in the MUSINGS section.

In the deep forest stands a crooked hut turning on chicken legs, smoke curling from its chimney. In India a goddess dances on a battlefield, garlanded with skulls, tongue bright with blood. In Mexico, a cloaked skeleton receives offerings of flowers, tobacco, and candles. In Brazil, a woman with fire in her hair laughs at the crossroads. Baba Yaga. Kali. Santa Muerte. Pombagira.

They seem worlds apart, yet their essence is shared. They are psychopomps – ferry-women of the soul, bone-collectors, midwives of death and rebirth. They destroy, unravel, dissolve, and in so doing they transform. Not figures of good or evil, but of wholeness. Rage, blood, death, sexuality, regeneration – all that society prefers to forget, they carry openly.

As the Bean Sí keens in Ireland, so too does Santa Muerte gather her devotees on the edges of society. As the Morrígan hovers over battlefields, so too does Kali blaze on hers. Across continents, these fierce feminine divinities echo one another – guardians of thresholds, untamed, untameable.

Scholar Malgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba notes how these figures, fierce with anger, sexuality, and blood, have been “judged as evil or demonic” and yet “confront us with the ultimate reality – chaos, impermanence, and death.” They teach what is uncomfortable, and therefore what is most needed. And yet, as she observes, each has been dulcified, ridiculed, or pushed to the margins. Baba Yaga turned into a grotesque witch for children’s tales. Kali softened into a safe, temple-bound mother. Santa Muerte tolerated only as an “unofficial” saint. Pombagira caricatured or dismissed.

Is this not the same spell cast on Lilith? She too has been sweetened, sold back as Disney rebel or glossy vampire bride, emptied of her marrow. The same pattern repeats – the fierce becomes palatable, the dangerous turned into entertainment, the depth stolen away.

And yet, even when censored, dulcified, or mocked, these figures endure. They remain magnetic because they speak the truths society hides – death, impermanence, wildness, the periphery. They are voices for those who live on the margins, the excluded, the voiceless. They frighten because they are free.

To walk with them is to face unpredictability, chaos, and wildness – the hidden dimensions of reality. But it is also to draw strength from them. They teach us that life is not divided into neat halves of light and dark, good and evil. It is both. It is all.

This is the gift of Part Three of Dreaming the Dark – to see Lilith not only as banshee, vampire, or siren, but as one of a global chorus of fierce feminine figures. They terrify, they transform, they endure. And they remind us that only by facing death do we remember how to live.

© 2017 The heART of Ritual. All rights reserved.

Kali. Artist credit: unknown